RDH - Bigger, Bolder, Stronger, Swifter

Bigger, Bolder, Stronger, Swifter

February 26, 2007

Sometime in about 2005, I realized that I'd been witness to a rather interesting trend. For at least the past decade, the bigger vehicles—especially the phenomenally popular light trucks that, by the mid 1990s, Americans had come to prefer—tended more often than not to be the ones pushing well beyond the speed limits, passing the majority of the smaller cars on the road.

But I wanted this impression to have a little more teeth to it, so I embarked on a seventeen-state automobile tour.

The terms of my study were pretty straightforward. I drove an inconspicuous late-model Japanese station wagon. It had a five-speed manual gearbox and all-wheel-drive. This was enough to inspire some confidence, but not so much as to draw attention to itself. And to ensure that people wouldn't notice that I was watching them, I traveled with three passengers—another adult and two small children.

Finally, I conducted the study without actually looking for any results. In other words, to ensure absolute objectivity, I did not allow myself to know at the time that I was conducting a study. The results, therefore, emerged more or less by themselves, helped along by my own preference for driving rather cautiously. I typically venture to average no more than five to ten miles an hour faster than the posted limits.* I was, in sum, in a perfect position to observe, without even really trying, the steady passage outside my windows of those vehicles that chose to travel faster than I did.

Let's move right to a discussion of the results. Fortunately for a subject that has been literally run into the ground, the United States is, more than ever, and especially from the perspective of the National Highway System, almost entirely uniform. My seventeen-state tour can, therefore, be discussed as if I had visited but two broad regions of the country.

NY, PA, OH, IN, IL, WI, MN, SD, WY, CO, NM, NV, UT, MT, ND

The trip unfolded with almost perfect consistency. One thing to do when you drive is to look at the other cars on the road. Naturally, I became acquainted or, more often, reacquainted with a variety of types. What I noticed more than anything else was that light trucks now dominate American roads. This must be true, I thought to myself, for two reasons: (a) Americans demand bigger cars than other people do, and (b) in the post-Carter era, those vehicles that qualify as light trucks and which therefore get a break under the Corporate Average Fuel Economy regulations have naturally filled the gap left by the departure of the large station wagon, made more or less obsolete by the enactment, in 1975, of those new standards.

"But are bigger vehicles safer than smaller ones, even at higher speeds?" Not necessarily, and particularly not to whomever they might run into. But your chances of dying on America's roadways are so slim (way less than a thousandth of a percent in any given year) that you shouldn't worry too much.

But light trucks match their dominance in terms of numbers by also simply owning the fast lane. The majority of the cars among those that passed us on our trip were what would be called sport-utility vehicles or pickup trucks, or, at the very least, those "crossovers"—SUVs on car frames—made especially popular in the wake of the Katrina gas price hike and the attendant dip in sales among trucks.

You name it and it passed us: Ford Explorers and Expeditions, F-150s and -250s and -350s, Lexus RX 330s and LX 470s, Cadillac Escalades and Pontiac Aztecs and Jeep Cherokees and Dodge Durangos and Nissan Armadas and Titans and Chevrolet Silverados and Tahoes and Suburbans and TrailBlazers, to name only the first several that come to mind. One after another, day and night, rain or shine—these big vehicles zoomed ever onward, in one mighty display of power and persistence. My fellow passengers and I marveled at all these rich people we have in this country, able to afford these big cars. If about half the wealth in the United States is owned by somewhat less than 5 percent of its population, well, then, we must be seeing, right here on America's roadways, how the other half lives.

I will not bore you further with the obvious. The picture was the same across all fifteen states listed in the subhead for this section. And because I was not actually conducting a study, my passengers and I managed to enjoy our little road trip without worrying about what people drove and why.

AZ, CA

Things changed over pretty much from the moment we left Phoenix one hot morning and headed west along Interstate 10 toward my mother's house in the Southern California desert. Clearly, we had left the land of American bourgeois automotive conformity, where the two-wheel-drive Ford Explorer is the emblem of the majority, and entered the realm of the sports-minded adventurer.

Now, more and more, what came into view and grew larger in the rear-view mirror were the grilles of full-sized pickup trucks, charging forward not on their own, as would inevitably become apparent, but with a trailer in tow. On this trailer there might be a pair of dirt bikes or a speedboat. Some of these multivehicle configurations must have been moving along at more than eighty miles an hour.

Somewhere near Quartzsite, if I remember correctly, it began to rain extremely hard. Visibility was terrible, and I, along with most of the pack, slowed down somewhat, nearly blinded. The rain persisted as we crossed the border into California.

Meanwhile, trucks and especially trucks with trailers continued to pass us on the left, forging along at speeds that I estimated at the time to be about 75 miles an hour. A few tractor trailers were doing the same. "They're the ones who drive this road all the time and know that it's just a straight line. The rest of us are being overcautious," I thought to myself.

Then we slowed down and "hit traffic" as they say. California and traffic are nothing unusual. But this slowdown persisted for more than two hours before we reached what turned out to be an accident site. Along the side of the road were three trucks, two boat trailers, and an enclosed camper—all in various states of disarray. No one seemed to be hurt.

That would be, as it turned out, the only real accident site that I would witness on my whole journey. And I must admit, it made an impression on me. Those are the people who live on the edge, who live bigger lives than the rest of us. It was there, along that road in the middle of the California desert, that I saw a little bit of the true American spirit.

NJ: An Afterword

Afterwords tend to be, on average, several pages long. This one will be just one paragraph. Since the summer of 2005, I've had the opportunity to take several more road trips, but only to New Jersey and back. I can report that New Jersey makes up for its status as a rather small state by featuring lots and lots of nice vehicles. I would even guess that on these little trips I've been witness to more big vehicles per mile of roadway than anywhere in any of the seventeen states I visited on my road trip. I even had a look at the new Ford Edge.

*I'm a financially cautious person. I might choose to drive faster if I had more money.