I just went through some old articles and found this. It’s a write-in about an article in City Bike newspaper in September of 2004. This was in response to an article that was written about the special dangers that SUVs pose to motorcyclists, and suggested that this should be grounds to recall SUVs.

Dear City Bike,

I am responding to a letter written in by Jerry Frommer of San Jose who says

…there certainly would be a safety recall if a SUV was found to have a safety defect that threatened the lives of the passengers inside the vehicle…

The scary thing is that there were (are still?) demonstrable threats to the passengers inside SUVs, but they were not recalled.

Remember the recall of the Firestone tires on the Ford Explorer? Sure the Firestone tire was more prone to bursting on the Explorer than other tire brands, but other brands also burst on the Explorer. Just not at as high of a rate. The danger of using a particular brand of tire on a particular vehicle is a relatively minor safety problem concerning the SUVs. The recall was used as a smoke screen to hide other defects in the Explorer (and other SUVs) by deflecting scrutiny to the tire, not the vehicle design.

There were studies that suggested that the higher center of gravity of the SUV made them prone to tip over while rounding turns at relatively slow speeds (as little as 40mph in some instances) but this evidence was covered up. Also covered up was the fact that some are actually prone to combustion upon impact. Spontaneous combustion people! If that is not cause for recall, what it?

SUVs are big, scary, gas guzzling death machines, dangerous to those inside and out. To find out that there is empirical evidence that they are especially lethal to us bikers – and not just the children playing in the driveway – is not surprising.