Just What IS An SUV?

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

April 21, 1998 / 6:15 PM EDT / CBS

There has been a lot of talk lately about Sport Utility Vehicles. SUVs for short.

There's some more of it today. The U.S. government, through the people's federal safety officials, now has concluded that making SUVs smaller probably would not result in making driving safer. This is an apparent reversal of an earlier report by government officials, based, apparently, on less research.

There has been a theory put forward that because Sport Utility Vehicles are bigger, have more weight and higher bumpers than passenger cars, they are deadlier, especially when involved with a regular sized passenger car, or something smaller. Similar complaints sometimes are made about pickup trucks.

Your reporter has been thinking about this. Nothing original or profound, I fear, just some thoughts. First of all, your reporter grew up in Texas, where folks, including this one, often first learn drive at about age l4, sometimes earlier, on farm machinery and/or pickup trucks. Your reporter never drove anything BUT a tractor or a pickup for several years. In that time and place, this was not unusual.

Secondly, it may interest some people to know that my mother-in-law, a well-informed wise woman who has lived all of her life in what some people call "the country" ask just a few weeks ago: "Dan, just what is a sport utility vehicle?"

The answer she got was along the lines of: Well, it's sort of a bigger version of a Jeep Cherokee, Ford Explorer or Chevy Blazer, bigger version , you know, of those so-called "off-road" small station wagons, many of them with four wheel drive. Just a bigger version, mama.

She had seen many of them, it turns out. SUVs are especially popular in places like Texas...Western places with lots of wide-open highways. She just didn't know what they were called.

Well, says she, what's this about pick-up trucks? Pick-up trucks she knows. She herded cows in them, and hauled kids and grandkids in them over a lifetime. Why in the world, says she, would the federal government even be considering doing anything about pickup trucks.

The answer was: beats me. But then it was added: Mama, don't worry about the feds and pickups. There's no way they could do much of anything about them, even if they tried.
For one thing, a pickup is about as useful a piece of combined transportation and machinery as ever as been invented.

She nodded in agreement. Well, said she, let em do something about those SUVs, but you tell 'em to leave pickups alone.

Yes ma'am, I said. And just did.