The “big car safe, small car unsafe” debate took another interesting turn this week, as researchers from UC Berkeley have released a report arguing that large cars significantly increase the risk of death on American roads. Recent data on the most and least died-in vehicles seemed to show that larger vehicles do indeed keep drivers safer, but this new report seems to roll back the impact of that finding. Slate reports that researchers

studied accident data from eight states, identifying the type and weight of vehicles involved in collisions by their VIN numbers. The researchers confirm that the heavy cars kill. Indeed, controlling “for own-vehicle weight, being hit by a vehicle that is 1,000 pounds heavier results in a 47 percent increase” in the probability of a fatal accident. The chance is even higher if the heavy car is an SUV, pickup truck, or minivan. (Taller vehicles tend to do outsize damage, too.)

The researchers then set out to calculate the value of the “external risk” caused by our heftier vehicles. First, they considered a scenario in which a driver chose between a car with the 1989 model-year average weight of 3,000 pounds or the 2005 weight of 3,600 pounds. The heavier car increased the expectation of fatalities by 0.00027 per car—27 deaths per 100,000 such vehicles. “Summing across all drivers,” they write, “this translates into a total external cost of $35 billion per year,” using the Department of Transportation’s value of a statistical life of $5.8 million. Judging against a baseline in which a driver chose the smallest available car, such as a Smart Cars, the cost is $93 billion per year. The price tag climbs beyond $150 billion per year if you include the cost of pedestrian and motorcyclist deaths and figure in multi-car collisions.

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The Chevrolet TrailBlazer and its many sibs are extinct. The Ford Explorer nameplate survives, but it’s now attached to a car-based crossover. Only one family of domestic midsize conventional SUVs remains—and, quite ironically, it’s based on a Mercedes platform. We’ve examined the five-seat Jeep Grand Cherokee before. For those more focused on people hauling than rock crawling Chrysler more recently introduced the seven-seat Dodge Durango. Is the all-new 2011 Durango only for people who need the dependable towing capacity of a conventional SUV? Or can it compete with the transverse-engined competition on their own terms?

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The Touareg TDI is not your father’s Oldsmobile. I know, because I unfortunately drove my father’s 85HP, 1983 Cutlass Cierra diesel when I was a kid. Since my dad was a glutton for punishment, this was not his first unreliable GM diesel; we also had a 1979 Oldsmobile Cutlass Cruiser with the infamous diesel V8. After about 30,000 miles, both our diesels smoked like a 60 year old hooker. Since potential clean diesel shoppers seem to fall into the 30-60 year old demographic, this is still the image that diesel brings to mind for many, not the reliable but low-volume European diesels from the 70s and 80s. If sales numbers are any indication however, BMW Mercedes and VW have been changing the tide of public opinion.

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You have your reasons. Gas prices might be high and headed higher, and car-based crossovers handle better, but you want your full-sized, full-lux, body-on-frame conventional SUV. GM and Ford, the segment’s traditional rulers, have had nothing new to offer in five years. But Infiniti has as much faith in the segment’s continued vitality as you do—why else would they have introduced an all-new QX56 for the 2011 model year?

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As Detroit was skipping a decade or two of car R&D by concentrating on packing increasing numbers of 128-ouncer-ready cup holders and faux-wood trim into big trucks, it became necessary to make it clear to the targeted buyer demographics that these trucks really weren’t, you know, trucks. In fact, they were more about protection from street crime and potholes than anything else, which is where slapping Mercury badges on the Explorer and Oldsmobile badges on the Blazer came in. (Read More…)

Imagine, for a moment, you are a plant. Well, not just any plant. You are Robert Plant, and everywhere you go, people want you to sing “Stairway to Heaven”. I’d rather not, you tell them. Never liked that one much, to be honest. We’ve a much better song that I’d much rather sing. Called ‘Kashmir’, dontcha know. Much better, that one. For years, you refuse to perform the song. You cancel a proposed Led Zeppelin reunion because the promotion company insists, positively insists, that you play “Stairway”. You’d rather play “Kashmir”. And since you don’t really need the money, that’s the end of it.

I suspect the people who run Ford can sympathize a bit with Mr. Plant. Their “Stairway” is a four-door SUV called the Explorer. You might have heard of it. Sold a bunch, that Explorer, even though it was always kind of a hokey tune, a Ranger truck with a cap and a couple rows of plastic-leather seats, perched sky-high on underinflated Firestones.

The Explorer was never a truly outstanding answer to the family-wagon question, so a couple years back Ford created the Flex, which is an outstanding answer. It should have made the Explorer obsolete, but there were two problems. It wasn’t really an SUV, and it wasn’t an Explorer. And since Ford, unlike Zeppelin’s Golden God, needs the money…

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Car enthusiasts have been apt to criticize SUVs as irrational because few owners ever take them off-road. But, by the same token, how many owners of high-performance sports cars drive them at anything approaching their full potential? Venturing beyond cars, how many owners of diver’s watches actually scuba dive? And how many dSLR cameras are being used just like a $99 point-and-shoot? Clearly people are psychologically attracted to high-performance objects, even if they won’t actually utilize the potential of these objects. This doesn’t mean that the objects themselves don’t make sense. And yet, during my week with a Lexus LX 570, I struggled to make this 5,995-pound, technology-packed, luxurious SUV make sense.

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Volkswagen is dead set to gain market share in the U.S. this year, and it’s rolling out the big guns. They might add an SUV larger than the Touareg to reach hearts, minds and wallets of American customers. (Read More…)

Time was Land Rovers evolved at a leisurely pace, with a redesign perhaps once every decade or two, and name changes pretty much never. But, if you want some of those soccer mom dollars, this just won’t do. So the Disco II became the LR3 (on this side of the pond at least; in the more tradition-minded UK it became the Disco 3). And, just five years later, the LR3 was itself superceded by the LR4. Will the smaller LR2 become the LR3 when it is next redesigned? I suppose they’ll cross that bridge when they come to it. Perhaps they’ll toss the alphanumeric rubbish into the dustbin. The topic for today: what’s the LR4 got that the LR3 did not?
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It’s a rough world out there: First new cars and especially SUVs were pretty much unsalable. A few months ago, the recession drove used car prices sky-high. Then truck sales were back with a vengeance. Now that you finally have a new shiny SUV in the driveway (yeah!) you wake up and it has lost a huge chunk of its value, overnight. Says USA Today today: “The run-up in gas prices past $3 a gallon has been running down the value of used SUVs, causing prices to plummet below levels listed in well-known buying guides.” (Read More…)

When Porsche introduced the world to its first production SUV in 2003, it set off an intense, polarized debate that continues to this day. For some, the Cayenne was a crossing of the Rubicon (no pun intended) leading to the dumbing-down of a proud marque… for others, it was a new, more accessible way to experience the brand. Sure enough, sales of the Cayenne have been good (significantly better than the Cayman and Boxster combined), but Porsche seems to have let passion for its brand run out of control.

Since the Cayenne controversy, every V6 Panamera and Cayman S has given the anti-Cayenne faction evidence of the slippery slope of brand destruction they saw coming with Porsche’s first SUV (and which Jack Baruth traces back as far as the 914). And now, as if to confirm the worst fears of even some of its own executives, Porsche is throwing rocket fuel on the fire in the form of a new, smaller SUV. The question this time: after the Cayenne, Pana V6, and various sins against the fanbase (some more deadly than others), are the purists still fired up enough to rage against the Cajun?

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After ruling the American roads for most of the 1990s and 2000s, the conventional midsize SUV has rapidly become an endangered species. GM, Ford, and others have abandoned the segment entirely. The Grand Cherokee, from its inception intended for more of an on-road role than other Jeeps, has become ever more refined and luxurious in a bid to survive. Nissan still offers the Pathfinder, but will it still be a conventional SUV if and when it’s redesigned? The Borrego? A mistake Kia won’t be making a second time. Only one company has had the guts and/or cluelessness to recently redesign a midsize SUV that is first and foremost an SUV. Could the 2010 Toyota 4Runner be the last of its kind?
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For all its size and big talk about technical excellence, Daimler doesn’t seem to be doing much of its advanced powertrain R&D itself. News that the firm’s future hybrids will be Toyota-developed is joined by the revelation that Mercedes, not GM, is the mystery OEM which has hired Amp Electric Vehicles to develop an EV SUV prototype. AutoSpies reports that

It seems when Mercedes representatives  visited AMP a while back they were so impressed with the [Amp-electrified Chevy Equinox], that they quickly commissioned a ML-350 test mule for further evaluation.   Our exclusive spy photos reveal that a previously unregistered 2009 Pearl White ML-350 bearing manufacturer plates has arrived at AMP’s facility and is currently in the process of electrification by their engineers.  Upon completion this now all electric ML is slated to undergo testing later in the month.

Which is an interesting turn of events for Daimler’s EV partnership strategy. With a $50m stake in Tesla, one might assume that Daimler would turn to the California firm to electrify its ML. After all, Toyota also has also invested $50m in Tesla as well, and Tesla is electrifying a RAV-4 prototype for Toyota. On the other hand, Daimler has not had much luck with its Tesla-powered Smart EV, so perhaps the Germans are diversifying away from the hype-driven Silicon Valley startup. If so, that’s not a good sign for Tesla or Toyota. Watch this space…

Jeep has released the first pictures of its next refreshed product, the 2011 Jeep Wrangler, but the changes don’t exactly jump out. That’s because, besides a new body-color hardtop and five new exterior colors, the changes have all taken place on the inside. You know, where they’re most needed. Have they done the job? Hit the jump for the first peek…

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