ArcaMax

The media really is composed of know-nothings. People who think a semi-automatic rifle is a dangerous "assault weapon" ... because of how it looks. And: People who use "SUV" to describe vehicles that are just high-riding cars.

An example of this just cropped up in the form of reporting about crash test scores. According to the Associated Press, "four small sport utility vehicles received top scores in crash tests" and this is "a sign of improvement compared with SUVs built earlier in the decade." Only they didn't - and it isn't. Not really, anyhow.

Because the four vehicles in question - Ford's Escape, the Nissan Rogue, Mitsubishi's Outlander and the VW Tiguan - are not really SUVs. They may look like SUVs, but all of them are built on passenger car undercarriages. They are - functionally speaking - high-riding station wagons.

None of them have body-on-frame construction or offer truck-based four-wheel-drive systems with 4WD Low gearing - the attributes that define an SUV. Or used to.

Today it's hard to know what's what - because the term, "SUV" has been applied very sloppily to describe vehicles that really aren't as well as those that still are. None of the four vehicles mentioned in the AP report could go seriously off-roading. Their light-duty, car-type FWD and AWD (and in the case of the Nissan, RWD/AWD) drivetrains aren't set up for it. Their car-type frames would get hurt - quickly. None can tow - or carry - more than a fraction of what a real, truck-based SUV can tow or carry. 

The point being: It's ridiculous to tout the crash test performance of these cars-in-disguise as in any way relevant to the crash test performance of SUVs "built earlier in the decade."

Because "earlier in the decade," SUVs were (mostly) still based on trucks, not cars - and comparing a truck-based SUV (for example, an '80s-era Ford Bronco II) with a current-year SUV look-alike such as the Ford Escape is completely meaningless.

For the comparison to be worth something, we'd need to look at vehicles like the Nissan Xterra, Hummer H3 and Jeep Liberty. Those are small SUVs.

It would, indeed, be interesting to take a look at the crash test performance of modern compact SUVs like those and see whether they do better than the small SUVs of the past. In all probability, they would - as vehicles of every type and class are safer than their predecessors,  often considerably more so.

But it's not informative to compare apples with oranges - which is precisely what the AP story (and other news reports) routinely do.  An illustration of this point is made by the AP story itself. It discusses the not-so-great crash test scores of the Jeep Wranger (which is a small SUV) and contrasts its performance with that of the Jeep Patriot - which did much better. But which is also a car in drag.   

The average consumer could be led to believe the Wrangler is shoddily built and/or dangerous - while the Patriot is much better. But what's missing from the equation is that these are profoundly different types of vehicles built to different standards - and for different purposes. The Wranger is a 4x4 SUV engineered to excel at off-roading. The Patriot is a car built to look like it might excel at off-roading. The Wrangler may be somewhat compromised in terms of both on-road handling dynamics and crashworthiness - but the Patriot is compromised as an off-roader.

People need to know the difference. And it's supposed to be the job of the media to explain it to them. Good luck with that one.

Vehicles like the Escape (and the Rogue/Outlander/Tiguan) ought to be identified as "crossovers." This is a recent neologism (just as "SUV" was circa the late 1980s) used by the industry to describe just what we have been discussing: car-based, wagon-like vehicles that ride higher than passenger cars but which are fundamentally still passenger cars.

But many within the press continue to call them "SUVs" - even though they have as much in common with real SUVs as a semi-automatic hunting rifle has with a full-auto military assault rifle. Bayonet - or "4WD" badging notwithstanding!

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www.ericpetersautos.com or EPeters952@aol.com for comments.