judging by those numbers my friend got lucky...

 

stability control ******* works. it will save lives. and do you even know the extra cost for it? when i sold cars it was a difference of about 250-400 dollars.

 

Its just a way around poor engineering. I think SUV design needed to be regulated before MANDATING more crap for all cars.

 

damn i actually agree with this guy.



you must fix the fundamental problems with these vehicles before throwing technology at them. I mean think of it this way.



say someone makes boats. But they leave a hole in the bottom. They way they suggest to fix it is to mandate that everyone carries a bucket on the boat whereas if they just stopped making boats with holes in them theyd avoid the bucket issue all together.



that one was for you phins .



kevin.

 

Do I still have time to retract my statement?

 

Regulating SUV design? What are you supposed to change? A vehicle designed to go off road kind of needs large tires and a lot of ground clearance, a decent towing vehicle needs to be relatively heavy. They are already making SUVs more like regular cars every day, there still have to be ones out there that retain "utility" in the name.



They aren't being used for what they were designed, and 90% of drivers have no idea what the limit of their vehicle is, or what to do in any particular driving condition or situation.



The stupid thing about the article is that the author equates stability control with roll overs, as if the vehicle rolls in the middle of the road. I would be very surprised if a significant percentage of rollovers occur without the car first hitting the ditch and then rolling. If stability control were able to prevent the loss of traction that puts the car in the ditch it would prevent rollovers, but it would help prevent a lot of other crash types as well.

 

There are way to make safe vehicles fundamentally while also being offroad capable. Hell lots of people when they upgrade their suvs for extra offroad ability, with the proper additions, can make their vehicles safer. It's not a matter simply of size but of creating a platform with the necessary precautiouns built into it's structure to deal with it's eventual size.



Basically the SUV design is significantly flawd by the fact that they cant make the vehicles wide enough to properly deal with their height. It's just not logical. If it was possible to widen the size of them then they'd be safer, but they'd be even more of a pain in the *** on the roads.



hell we might as well trce rthis all the way back to the fault in our road system that the lanes are too narrow and we need to widen all the roads in the country.



which i could continue to lead onto a topic about the widening of americans in general but ill stop here.



i'm rambling, its saturday night... drunk posting?



kevi.

 

damn, im surprised somone agreed with me! i was expecting 100 people to disagree with me. but i also think extensive driver training would be a very good idea, but there are just a lot of stupid people in the world, so car manufacturers will keep on adding more stability and traction control systems to help the stupid people, but at the same time, they will keep adding gps, advanced stereos, dvd players, etc. to distract the stupid people.



if youre stupid, im sorry if i offended you.

 

when your wife and kids are driving around in a SUV because she feels safer higher off the ground-looking down on the road, and she likes the automatic 4WD for the rain and snow- lets see you call her stupid.



When the stability control keeps her on the road because SOMEONE ELSE was driving out of control- is SHE still stupid?



Hell- when she runs over a nail and her tire loses air and the tire pressure monitor tells her to pull over before she gets a blowout- is she STILL stupid?



When the side curtain airbags deploy because she got broadsided by someone tell her she is stupid for not getting out of the way

 

This is an easy one..



Dont buy an SUV cause you think they are safer... They should be owned for necessity. And the owner should realize that its a compramise in safety for its utility.