SM SCHIFFThe world’s most dangerous’ insuranceS publication September 9, 2005 Volume 17 • Number 15 INSURANCE OBSERVER How the S.U.V. Ran Over Auto Safety BigandBad by Malcolm Gladwell Editor’s note: Auto accidents happen for many reasons. These reasons, however, do not include one’s credit score, address, sex, or age. Although those factors are used as predictors of future dri- ving experience, they are lacking, and leave sig- nificant room for improvement in the field of pre- diction. As Daniel Finnegan, president of Quality Planning Corporation, explained at the 2004 Schiff’s Insurance Conference, auto-insur- ance rating, as we currently know it, is weakly predictive. It is, as he put it rather provocatively, about ninety-eight percent astrology: insurance companies have virtually no idea which specific drivers are going to have accidents. Any edge that underwriters can gain that helps them calculate which drivers will have accidents will make a huge difference in results. It’s not difficult to imagine that, eventually, cars will be equipped with monitoring devices that send information back to the insurance company in real time, where it will be analyzed by sophisticated underwriting programs. Examples of useful information would include An agent delivers a policy to a nonstandard risk. where the car is being driven, how fast it’s Detroit suburb of Wayne. The Expedition front. The seats get bolted to the middle. going, how many miles it is driven, what time was essentially the F-150 pickup truck The body gets lowered over the top. The of day the driving occurs, whether the driver is with an extra set of doors and two more result is heavy and rigid and not particu- impaired in any way, how often the steering rows of seats—and the fact that it was a larly safe. But it’s an awfully inexpensive wheel is being turned, and so on. The gathering truck was critical. Cars have to meet strin- way to build an automobile. Ford had of such information will undoubtedly raise se- gent fuel-efficiency regulations. Trucks planned to sell the Expedition for rious concerns about privacy, but it seems like don’t. The handling and suspension and $36,000, and its best estimate was that it an inevitability. If the information is avail- braking of cars have to be built to the de- could build one for $24,000—which, in able, eventually it will be used. manding standards of drivers and passen- the automotive industry, is a terrifically The following article by Malcolm Gladwell gers. Trucks only have to handle like, high profit margin. Sales, the company explores the issue of auto safety and S.U.V.s. well, trucks. Cars are built with what is predicted, weren’t going to be huge. After Contrary to what you might think, big cars are called unit-body construction. To be light all, how many Americans could reasonably not necessarily safer than small cars. They are enough to meet fuel standards and safe be expected to pay a $12,000 premium for often more dangerous—for both their own dri- enough to meet safety standards, they what was essentially a dressed-up truck? vers and for drivers of other cars. Why? Read on. have expensive and elaborately engi- But Ford executives decided that the neered steel skeletons, with built-in Expedition would be a highly profitable n the summer of 1996, the Ford Motor crumple zones to absorb the impact of a niche product. They were half right. The Company began building the crash. Making a truck is a lot more rudi- “highly profitable” part turned out to be IExpedition, its new, full-sized S.U.V., mentary. You build a rectangular steel true. Yet, almost from the moment Ford’s at the Michigan Truck Plant, in the frame. The engine gets bolted to the big new S.U.V.s rolled off the assembly

SCHIFF’S INSURANCE OBSERVER • 300 CENTRAL PARK WEST, NEW YORK, NY 10024 • (212) 724-2000 • DAVID@INSURANCEO BSERVER. COM line in Wayne, there was nothing “niche” breath, and charged $45,000—and soon self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are about the Expedition. Navigators were flying out the door nearly frequently nervous about their marriages, Ford had intended to split the assem- as fast as Expeditions. Before long, the and who lack confidence in their driving bly line at the Michigan Truck Plant be- Michigan Truck Plant was the most prof- skills. Ford’s S.U.V. designers took their tween the Expedition and the Ford F-150 itable of Ford’s fifty-three assembly plants. cues from seeing “fashionably dressed pickup. But, when the first flood of orders By the late 1990’s, it had become the most women wearing hiking boots or even work started coming in for the Expedition, the profitable factory of any industry in the boots while walking through expensive factory was entirely given over to S.U.V.s. world. In 1998, the Michigan Truck Plant malls.” Toyota’s top marketing executive The orders kept mounting. Assembly-line grossed $11 billion; profits were $3.7 bil- in the United States, Bradsher writes, workers were put on sixty- and seventy- lion. Some factory workers, with overtime, loves to tell the story of how at a focus hour weeks. Another night shift was were making $200,000 a year. The de- group in Los Angeles “an elegant woman added. The plant was now running mand for Expeditions and Navigators was in the group said that she needed her full- twenty-four hours a day, six days a week. so insatiable that even when a blizzard hit sized Lexus LX 470 to drive up over the Ford executives decided to build a luxury the Detroit region in January of 1999— curb and onto lawns to park at large parties version of the Expedition, the Lincoln burying the city in snow, paralyzing the air- in Beverly Hills.” One of Ford’s senior Navigator. They bolted a new grille on the port, and stranding hundreds of cars on the marketing executives was even blunter: Expedition, changed a few body panels, freeway—Ford officials got on their radios “The only time those S.U.V.s are going to added some sound insulation, took a deep and commandeered parts bound for other be off-road is when they miss the drive- factories so that the Michigan Truck Plant way at 3 a.m.” The world’s most dangerous insurance publicationSM assembly line wouldn’t slow for a moment. The truth, underneath all the rational- The factory that had begun as just another izations, seemed to be that S.U.V. buyers SCHIFF’S assembly plant had become the company’s thought of big, heavy vehicles as safe: INSURANCE OBSERVER crown jewel. they found comfort in being surrounded Editor and Writer ...... David Schiff In the history of the automotive indus- by so much rubber and steel. To the engi- Production Editor ...... Bill Lauck try, few things have been quite as unex- neers, of course, that didn’t make any Foreign Correspondent . . Isaac Schwartz pected as the rise of the S.U.V. Detroit is sense, either: if consumers really wanted Editorial Associate. . . Yonathan Dessalegn a town of engineers, and engineers like to something that was big and heavy and Copy Editor ...... John Cauman Publisher ...... Alan Zimmerman believe that there is some connection be- comforting, they ought to buy minivans, Subscription Manager ...... Pat LaBua tween the success of a vehicle and its tech- since minivans, with their unit-body con- nical merits. But the S.U.V. boom was like struction, do much better in accidents Editorial Office Schiff’s Insurance Observer Apple’s bringing back the Macintosh, than S.U.V.s. (In a thirty-five-m.p.h. crash 300 Central Park West, Suite 4H dressing it up in colorful plastic, and sud- test, for instance, the driver of a Cadillac New York, NY 10024 denly creating a new market. It made no Escalade—the G.M. counterpart to the Phone: (212) 724-2000 Fax: (434) 244-4615 sense to them. Consumers said they liked Lincoln Navigator—has a sixteen-percent E-mail: [email protected] four-wheel drive. But the overwhelming chance of a life-threatening head injury, a Website: InsuranceObserver.com majority of consumers don’t need four- twenty-percent chance of a life-threaten- Publishing Headquarters wheel drive. S.U.V. buyers said they liked ing chest injury, and a thirty-five-percent Schiff’s Insurance Observer SNL c/o Insurance Communications Co. the elevated driving position. But when, chance of a leg injury. The same numbers One SNL Plaza, P.O. Box 2056 in focus groups, industry marketers probed in a Ford Windstar minivan—a vehicle Charlottesville, VA 22902 Phone: (434) 977-5877 further, they heard things that left them engineered from the ground up, as op- Fax: (434) 984-8020 rolling their eyes. As Keith Bradsher writes posed to simply being bolted onto a E-mail: [email protected] in “High and Mighty”—perhaps the most pickup-truck frame—are, respectively, Annual subscriptions are $189. important book about Detroit since Ralph two percent, four percent, and one per- For questions regarding subscriptions please call (434) 977-5877. Nader’s “Unsafe at Any Speed”—what cent.) But this desire for safety wasn’t a © 2005, Insurance Communications Co., LLC. consumers said was “If the vehicle is up rational calculation. It was a feeling. Over All rights reserved. high, it’s easier to see if something is hid- the past decade, a number of major au- Reprints and additional issues are avail- ing underneath or lurking behind it.” tomakers in America have relied on the able from our publishing headquarters. Bradsher brilliantly captures the mixture services of a French-born cultural anthro- of bafflement and contempt that many pologist, G. Clotaire Rapaille, whose spe- Copyright Notice and Warning It is a violation of federal copyright law to auto executives feel toward the customers cialty is getting beyond the rational— reproduce all or part of this publication. You are who buy their S.U.V.s. Fred J. Schaafsma, what he calls “cortex”—impressions of not allowed to e-mail, photocopy, fax, scan, dis- tribute, or duplicate by any other means the a top engineer for General Motors, says, consumers and tapping into their deeper, contents of this publication. Violations of copy- “Sport-utility owners tend to be more like “reptilian” responses. And what Rapaille right law can lead to damages of up to $150,000 per infringement. ‘I wonder how people view me,’ and are concluded from countless, intensive ses- more willing to trade off flexibility or func- sions with car buyers was that when S.U.V. Insurance Communications Co. (ICC) is controlled by Schiff Publishing. SNL Financial LC is a research and pub- tionality to get that.” According to buyers thought about safety they were lishing company that focuses on banks, thrifts, real estate investment companies, insurance companies, energy and Bradsher, internal industry market re- thinking about something that reached specialized financial-services companies. SNL is a nonvot- search concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be into their deepest unconscious. “The ing stockholder in ICC and provides publishing services to it. bought by people who are insecure, vain, No. 1 feeling is that everything surround-

SCHIFF’S INSURANCE OBSERVER ~ (212) 724-2000 SEPTEMBER 9, 2005 2 ing you should be round and soft, and We started with the TrailBlazer. back to the right. My tape recorder went should give,” Rapaille told me. “There Champion warmed up the Chevrolet with skittering across the cabin. The whole ma- should be air bags everywhere. Then a few quick circuits of the track, and then neuver had taken no more than a few sec- there’s this notion that you need to be up drove it hard through the twists and turns onds, but it felt as if we had been sailing high. That’s a contradiction, because the of the handling course. He sat in the into a squall. Champion brought the car people who buy these S.U.V.s know at the bucket seat with his back straight and his to a stop. We both looked back: the cortex level that if you are high there is arms almost fully extended, and drove with TrailBlazer had hit the cone at the gate. more chance of a rollover. But at the rep- practiced grace: every movement smooth The kid on the bicycle was probably dead. tilian level they think that if I am bigger and relaxed and unhurried. Champion, as Champion shook his head. “It’s very rub- and taller I’m safer. You feel secure be- an engineer, did not much like the bery. It slides a lot. I’m not getting much cause you are higher and dominate and TrailBlazer. “Cheap interior, cheap plas- communication back from the steering look down. That you can look down is tic,” he said, batting the dashboard with his wheel. It feels really ponderous, clumsy. I psychologically a very powerful notion. hand. “It’s a little bit heavy, cumbersome. felt a little bit of tail swing.” And what was the key element of safety Quiet. Bit wallowy, side to side. Doesn’t I drove the obstacle course next. I when you were a child? It was that your feel that secure. Accelerates heavily. Once started at the conservative speed of thirty- mother fed you, and there was warm liq- it gets going, it’s got decent power. Brakes five m.p.h. I got through cleanly. I tried uid. That’s why cup holders are absolutely feel a bit spongy.” He turned onto the again, this time at thirty-eight m.p.h., and crucial for safety. If there is a car that has straightaway and stopped a few hundred that small increment of speed made a dra- no cup holder, it is not safe. If I can put my yards from the obstacle course. matic difference. I made the first left, coffee there, if I can have my food, if avoiding the kid on the bicycle. But, when everything is round, if it’s soft, and if I’m easuring accident avoidance is a it came time to swerve back to avoid the high, then I feel safe. It’s amazing that in- key part of the Consumers hypothetical oncoming eighteen-wheeler, telligent, educated women will look at a MUnion evaluation. It’s a simple I found that I was wrestling with the car. car and the first thing they will look at is setup. The driver has to navigate his ve- The protests of the tires were jarring. I how many cup holders it has.” During the hicle through two rows of cones eight feet stopped, shaken. “It wasn’t going where design of Chrysler’s PT Cruiser, one of wide and sixty feet long. Then he has to you wanted it to go, was it?” Champion the things Rapaille learned was that car steer hard to the left, guiding the vehicle said. “Did you feel the weight pulling you buyers felt unsafe when they thought that through a gate set off to the side, and im- sideways? That’s what the extra weight an outsider could easily see inside their mediately swerve hard back to the right, that S.U.V.s have tends to do. It pulls you vehicles. So Chrysler made the back win- and enter a second sixty-foot corridor of in the wrong direction.” Behind us was a dow of the PT Cruiser smaller. Of course, cones that are parallel to the first set. The string of toppled cones. Getting the making windows smaller—and thereby idea is to see how fast you can drive TrailBlazer to travel in a straight line, after reducing visibility—makes driving more through the course without knocking over that sudden diversion, hadn’t been easy. dangerous, not less so. But that’s the puz- any cones. “It’s like you’re driving down “I think you took out a few pedestrians,” zle of what has happened to the automo- a road in suburbia,” Champion said. Champion said with a faint smile. bile world: feeling safe has become more “Suddenly, a kid on a bicycle veers out in Next up was the Boxster. The top was important than actually being safe. front of you. You have to do whatever it down. The sun was warm on my forehead. takes to avoid the kid. But there’s a trac- The car was low to the ground; I had the n the fall of 2003, I visited the auto- tor-trailer coming toward you in the other sense that if I dangled my arm out the win- mobile-testing center of Consumers lane, so you’ve got to swing back into your dow my knuckles would scrape on the tar- IUnion, the organization that publishes own lane as quickly as possible. That’s the mac. Standing still, the Boxster didn’t feel Consumer Reports. It is tucked away in the scenario.” safe: I could have been sitting in a go-cart. woods, in south-central Connecticut, on Champion and I put on helmets. He But when I ran it through the handling the site of the old Connecticut Speedway. accelerated toward the entrance to the ob- course I felt that I was in perfect control. The facility has two skid pads to measure stacle course. “We do the test without On the straightaway, I steadied the cornering, a long straightaway for braking brakes or throttle, so we can just look at Boxster at forty-five m.p.h., and ran it tests, a meandering “handling” course handling,” Champion said. “I actually through the obstacle course. I could have that winds around the back side of the take my foot right off the pedals.” The car balanced a teacup on my knee. At fifty track, and an accident-avoidance obstacle was now moving at forty m.p.h. At that m.p.h., I navigated the left and right turns course made out of a row of orange cones. speed, on the smooth tarmac of the race- with what seemed like a twitch of the It is headed by a trim, white-haired way, the TrailBlazer was very quiet, and steering wheel. The tires didn’t squeal. Englishman named David Champion, we were seated so high that the road The car stayed level. I pushed the Porsche who previously worked as an engineer seemed somehow remote. Champion en- up into the mid-fifties. Every cone was un- with Land Rover and with Nissan. On the tered the first row of cones. His arms touched. “Walk in the park!” Champion day of my visit, Champion set aside two tensed. He jerked the car to the left. The exclaimed as we pulled to a stop. vehicles: a silver 2003 Chevrolet TrailBlazer’s tires squealed. I was thrown Most of us think that S.U.V.s are much TrailBlazer—an enormous five-thousand- toward the passenger-side door as the safer than sports cars. If you asked the pound S.U.V.—and a shiny blue two- truck’s body rolled, then thrown toward young parents of America whether they seater Porsche Boxster convertible. Champion as he jerked the TrailBlazer would rather strap their infant child in the

SCHIFF’S INSURANCE OBSERVER ~ (212) 724-2000 SEPTEMBER 9, 2005 3 back seat of the TrailBlazer or the passen- Fatalities per Million Cars ger seat of the Boxster, they would choose the TrailBlazer. We feel that way because in Driver Other the TrailBlazer our chances of surviving a Make/Model Type Deaths Deaths Total collision with a hypothetical tractor-trailer in the other lane are greater than they are in Toyota Avalon large 40 20 60 the Porsche. What we forget, though, is that Chrysler Town & Country minivan 31 36 67 in the TrailBlazer you’re also much more Toyota Camry mid-size 41 29 70 likely to hit the tractor-trailer because you Volkswagen Jetta subcompact 47 23 70 can’t get out of the way in time. In the par- Ford Windstar minivan 37 35 72 lance of the automobile world, the TrailBlazer is better at “passive safety.” The Nissan Maxima mid-size 53 26 79 Boxster is better when it comes to “active Honda Accord mid-size 54 27 82 safety,” which is every bit as important. Chevrolet Venture minivan 51 34 85 Consider the set of safety statistics Buick Century mid-size 70 23 93 (see the table to the right) compiled by Subaru Legacy/Outback compact 74 24 98 Tom Wenzel, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in Mazda 626 compact 70 29 99 California, and Marc Ross, a physicist at Chevrolet Malibu mid-size 71 34 105 the University of Michigan. The numbers Chevrolet Suburban S.U.V. 46 59 105 are expressed in fatalities per million cars, Jeep Grand Cherokee S.U.V. 61 44 106 both for drivers of particular models and Honda Civic subcompact 84 25 109 for the drivers of the cars they hit. (For ex- ample, in the first case, for every million Toyota Corolla subcompact 81 29 110 Toyota Avalons on the road, forty Avalon Ford Expedition S.U.V. 55 57 112 drivers die in car accidents every year, and GMC Jimmy S.U.V. 76 39 114 twenty people die in accidents involving Ford Taurus mid-size 78 39 117 Toyota Avalons.) Nissan Altima compact 72 49 121 Are the best performers the biggest and heaviest vehicles on the road? Not at all. Mercury Marquis large 80 43 123 Among the safest cars are the midsize im- Nissan Sentra subcompact 95 34 129 ports, like the Toyota Camry and the Toyota 4Runner S.U.V. 94 43 137 Honda Accord. Or consider the extraordi- Chevrolet Tahoe S.U.V. 68 74 141 nary performance of some subcompacts, Dodge Stratus mid-size 103 40 143 like the Volkswagen Jetta. Drivers of the tiny Jetta die at a rate of just forty-seven per Lincoln Town Car large 100 47 147 million, which is in the same range as dri- Ford Explorer S.U.V. 88 60 148 vers of the five-thousand-pound Chevrolet Pontiac Grand Am compact 118 39 157 Suburban and almost half that of popular Toyota Tacoma pickup 111 59 171 S.U.V. models like the Ford Explorer or the Chevrolet Cavalier subcompact 146 41 186 GMC Jimmy. In a head-on crash, an Explorer or a Suburban would crush a Jetta Dodge Neon subcompact 161 39 199 or a Camry. But, clearly, the drivers of Pontiac Sunfire subcompact 158 44 202 Camrys and Jettas are finding a way to avoid Ford F-Series pickup 110 128 238 head-on crashes with Explorers and Suburbans. The benefits of being nim- the TrailBlazer took 146.2 feet to come to drivers conclude, consciously or other- ble—of being in an automobile that’s capa- a halt, the second time 151.6 feet, and the wise, that the extra thirty feet that the ble of staying out of trouble—are in many third time 153.4 feet. The Boxster can TrailBlazer takes to come to a stop don’t cases greater than the benefits of being big. come to a complete stop from sixty m.p.h. really matter, that the tractor-trailer will I had another lesson in active safety at in about 124 feet. That’s a difference of hit them anyway, and that they are better the test track when I got in the TrailBlazer about two car lengths, and it isn’t hard to off treating accidents as inevitable rather with another Consumers Union engineer, imagine any number of scenarios where than avoidable. “The metric that people and we did three emergency-stopping two car lengths could mean the difference use is size,” says Stephen Popiel, a vice- tests, taking the Chevrolet up to sixty between life and death. president of Millward Brown Goldfarb, in m.p.h. and then slamming on the brakes. Toronto, one of the leading automotive It was not a pleasant exercise. Bringing he S.U.V. boom represents, then, market-research firms. “The bigger some- five thousand pounds of rubber and steel a shift in how we conceive of thing is, the safer it is. In the consumer’s to a sudden stop involves lots of lurching, Tsafety—from active to passive. It’s mind, the basic equation is, If I were to screeching, and protesting. The first time, what happens when a larger number of take this vehicle and drive it into this

SCHIFF’S INSURANCE OBSERVER ~ (212) 724-2000 SEPTEMBER 9, 2005 4 brick wall, the more metal there is in front make their drivers feel unsafe. S.U.V.s are pends on who’s behind the wheel. In the of me the better off I’ll be.” unsafe because they make their drivers hands of, say, my very respectable and This is a new idea, and one largely con- feel safe. That feeling of safety isn’t the prudent middle-aged mother, the Boxster fined to North America. In Europe and solution; it’s the problem. is by far the safer car. In my hands, it prob- Japan, people think of a safe car as a nim- ably isn’t. On the open road, my reaction ble car. That’s why they build cars like the erhaps the most troublesome as- to the Porsche’s extraordinary road man- Jetta and the Camry, which are designed pect of S.U.V. culture is its atti- ners and the sweet, irresistible wail of its to carry out the driver’s wishes as directly tude toward risk. “Safety, for most engine would be to drive much faster than and efficiently as possible. In the Jetta, Pautomotive consumers, has to do I should. (At the end of my day at the engine is clearly audible. The steering with the notion that they aren’t in com- Consumers Union, I parked the Boxster, is light and precise. The brakes are crisp. plete control,” Popiel says. “There are un- and immediately got into my own car to The wheelbase is short enough that the expected events that at any moment in drive home. In my mind, I was still at the car picks up the undulations of the road. time can come out and impact them—an wheel of the Boxster. Within twenty min- The car is so small and close to the oil patch up ahead, an eighteen-wheeler utes, I had a $271 speeding ticket.) The ground, and so dwarfed by other cars on turning over, something falling down. trouble with the S.U.V. ascendancy is that the road, that an intelligent driver is con- People feel that the elements of the world it excludes the really critical component of stantly reminded of the necessity of dri- out of their control are the ones that are safety: the driver. ving safely and defensively. An S.U.V. going to cause them distress.” In psychology, there is a concept called embodies the opposite logic. The driver is Of course, those things really aren’t learned helplessness, which arose from a se- seated as high and far from the road as outside a driver’s control: an alert driver, in ries of animal experiments in the 1960’s at possible. The vehicle is designed to over- the right kind of vehicle, can navigate the the University of Pennsylvania. Dogs were come its environment, not to respond to it. oil patch, avoid the truck, and swerve restrained by a harness, so that they couldn’t Even four-wheel drive, seemingly the around the thing that’s falling down. move, and then repeatedly subjected to a most beneficial feature of the S.U.V., Traffic-fatality rates vary strongly with series of electrical shocks. Then the same serves to reinforce this isolation. Having driver behavior. Drunks are 7.6 times dogs were shocked again, only this time the engine provide power to all four more likely to die in accidents than non- they could easily escape by jumping over a wheels, safety experts point out, does drinkers. People who wear their seat belts low hurdle. But most of them didn’t; they nothing to improve braking, although are almost half as likely to die as those just huddled in the corner, no longer be- many S.U.V. owners erroneously believe who don’t buckle up. Forty-year-olds are lieving that there was anything they could this to be the case. Nor does the feature one-tenth as likely to get into accidents do to influence their own fate. Learned necessarily make it safer to turn across a than sixteen-year-olds. Drivers of mini- helplessness is now thought to play a role in slippery surface: that is largely a function vans, Wenzel and Ross’s statistics tell us, such phenomena as depression and the fail- of how much friction is generated by the die at a fraction of the rate of drivers of ure of battered women to leave their hus- vehicle’s tires. All it really does is improve pickup trucks. That’s clearly because bands, but one could easily apply it more what engineers call tracking—that is, the minivans are family cars, and parents with widely. We live in an age, after all, that is ability to accelerate without slipping in children in the back seat are less likely to strangely fixated on the idea of helpless- perilous conditions or in deep snow or get into accidents. Frank McKenna, a ness: we’re fascinated by hurricanes and mud. Champion says that one of the oc- safety expert at the University of Reading, terrorist acts and epidemics like SARS— casions when he came closest to death was in England, has done experiments where situations in which we feel powerless to af- a snowy day, many years ago, just after he he shows drivers a series of videotaped fect our own destiny. In fact, the risks posed had bought a new Range Rover. scenarios—a child running out the front to life and limb by forces outside our con- “Everyone around me was slipping, and I door of his house and onto the street, for trol are dwarfed by the factors we can con- was thinking, Yeahhh. And I came to a example, or a car approaching an inter- trol. Our fixation with helplessness distorts stop sign on a major road, and I was dri- section at too great a speed to stop at the our perceptions of risk. “When you feel ving probably twice as fast as I should red light—and asks people to press a but- safe, you can be passive,” Rapaille says of have been, because I could. I had traction. ton the minute they become aware of the the fundamental appeal of the S.U.V. “Safe But I also weighed probably twice as potential for an accident. Experienced means I can sleep. I can give up control. I much as most cars. And I still had only drivers press the button between half a can relax. I can take off my shoes. I can lis- four brakes and four tires on the road. I second and a second faster than new dri- ten to music.” For years, we’ve all made fun slid right across a four-lane road.” Four- vers, which, given that car accidents are of the middle-aged man who suddenly wheel drive robs the driver of feedback. events measured in milliseconds, is a sig- trades in his sedate family sedan for a shiny “The car driver whose wheels spin once nificant difference. McKenna’s work red sports car. That’s called a midlife crisis. or twice while backing out of the drive- shows that, with experience, we all learn But at least it involves some degree of en- way knows that the road is slippery,” how to exert some degree of control over gagement with the act of driving. The man Bradsher writes. “The SUV driver who what might otherwise appear to be un- who gives up his sedate family sedan for an navigates the driveway and street without controllable events. Any conception of S.U.V. is saying something far more trou- difficulty until she tries to brake may not safety that revolves entirely around the bling—that he finds the demands of the find out that the road is slippery until it is vehicle, then, is incomplete. Is the road to be overwhelming. Is acting out re- too late.” Jettas are safe because they Boxster safer than the TrailBlazer? It de- ally worse than giving up? continued

SCHIFF’S INSURANCE OBSERVER ~ (212) 724-2000 SEPTEMBER 9, 2005 5 n August 9, 2000, the linked to an alleged defect in the vehicle. Bridgestone Firestone tire But should that come as a surprise? In company announced one of the age of the S.U.V., this is what people Othe largest product recalls in worry about when they worry about American history. Because of mounting safety—not risks, however commonplace, concerns about safety, the company said, involving their own behavior, but risks, it was replacing some fourteen million however rare, involving some unexpected tires that had been used primarily on the event. The Explorer was big and impos- Ford Explorer S.U.V. The cost of the re- ing. It was high above the ground. You call—and of a follow-up replacement pro- could look down on other drivers. You gram initiated by Ford a year later—ran could see if someone was lurking behind or into billions of dollars. Millions more were beneath it. You could drive it up on some- spent by both companies on fighting and one’s lawn with impunity. Didn’t it seem settling lawsuits from Explorer owners, like the safest vehicle in the world. who alleged that their tires had come apart and caused their S.U.V.s to roll over. In the Malcolm Gladwell is the author of “The fall of that year, senior executives from Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make both companies were called to Capitol A Big Difference.” His most recent book, Hill, where they were publicly berated. It “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without was the biggest scandal to hit the auto- Thinking,” was published this year. mobile industry in years. It was also one of the strangest. According to federal records, the number of fatalities resulting from the failure of a Firestone tire on a Ford Explorer S.U.V., as of September, 2001, was two hundred and seventy-one. That sounds like a lot, until you remem- ber that the total number of tires supplied by Firestone to the Explorer from the mo- ment the S.U.V. was introduced by Ford, in 1990, was fourteen million, and that the average life span of a tire is forty-five thousand miles. The allegation against Firestone amounts to the claim that its tires failed, with fatal results, two hundred and seventy-one times in the course of six hundred and thirty billion vehicle miles. Manufacturers usually win prizes for fail- ure rates that low. It’s also worth remem- bering that during that same ten-year span almost half a million Americans died in traffic accidents. In other words, during the nineteen-nineties hundreds of thou- sands of people were killed on the roads because they drove too fast or ran red lights or drank too much. And, of those, a fair proportion involved people in S.U.V.s who were lulled by their four-wheel drive into driving recklessly on slick roads, who drove aggressively because they felt in- vulnerable, who disproportionately killed those they hit because they chose to drive trucks with inflexible steel-frame archi- tecture, and who crashed because they couldn’t bring their five-thousand-pound vehicles to a halt in time. Yet, out of all those fatalities, regulators, the legal pro- fession, Congress, and the media chose to highlight the .0005 percent that could be

SCHIFF’S INSURANCE OBSERVER ~ (212) 724-2000 SEPTEMBER 9, 2005 6