In your OPINION. Educate people, then, they are reasonable right? So show them that it is "bad" somehow and get them to change, don't pass a law requiring them to change and then still act like this is a free country. And gimme a break with this environmental BS anyway - do you have any idea where the vast majority of the country's energy comes from? BURNING COAL. Do you have any idea how little pollution my Jeep makes in the few days a week I drive it for a couple of miles compared to your hybrid that you commute 45 minutes back and forth to work in every day?

Before you start banning stuff, why not have a mandatory recycling program? Or how about forcing people to justify taking a place across the country, after all, jets are responsible for more pollution per-capita than any other form of transportation. How about using your time and energy to convert all the huge, practically empty, smoke-spewing diesel busses that roam our city streets into hybrid ones? How about you lobby against the taxi-cab drivers in Las Vegas for the way they (not literally) derailed the monorail plan to connect the strip to the airport, potentially saving millions of dollars and countless tons of pollution? Get off your damn high horse and try to do something that will actually make a difference, not just make you "feel better" about yourself for being "opposed to" SUVs?

Simple. It's called the "penis-factor".

I always laugh at those soccer moms trying to park their H2s at the mall, and having to back in and out 4 or five times. Or having to park way out in BFE where they actually fit.

I also get mad when they take up two parking spaces, or park too close on one side so I can't get my door open.

I think the H2 and any of it's derivatives are pieces of crap. They're hella ugly, and completely impractical. Get a Wrangler isntead, then spend the other $60,000 on something useful, like a truck, and a boat, and a motorcycle, and a plamsa screen.

id get a .50 barrett and blow your head off while going through the engine block.

RE: The topic title. Depends if she were attractive. (Ba-Da-Boom-Cha!)

Page has a right to be able to drive safely; and these monstrosities prevent that.

A Freedom FROM something is as important as a freedom to DO something; I'd rather live in a place where murder was illegal than legal.

I have to agree with Page; It's impossible to do a left turn on a two lane road with a stop sign where someone is doing a right hand turn (imagine the directions are reversed for USAians) because instead of seeing oncoming traffic, you're seeing the door of some idiot's penis replacement.

And "we should not have to correct any wrong while there are still greater wrongs to fix!" is a fallacious argument, because then we'd get nothing done for forever trying to prevent the heat-death of the universe.

Well, my point is that it's not wrong, and there are tons of things that ARE wrong, so instead of spending time to dispute something that could be wrong in some people's eyes, why not take care of things that are definitely wrong in most people's eyes?

This whole idea that they block your view is insane, too. Have you ever driven behind a city bus? a school bus? a semi truck? a moving truck? It's silly to yell at people because their car is big. There are regulations governing how big a car or truck can be, and in fact, at least in washington, the bigger your vehicle, the more tax you pay (if it's rated to haul a load, which large SUVs are).

I still don't get this BS about pollution, because if you have a car that gets twice the gas mileage, but I go half as many miles as you, we are both spewing the same amount of crap into the air. There are a zillion other factors to look at when deciding whether one person or one vehicle puts out more smog.

If I could get a WWII jeep, I'd get it in an instant.
If I could get a HumVee, I'd get it with a little thought.
If I could get an H1, I'd think about it quite a bit first.
If I was offered an H2, I'd kick the person who offered it to me and insult their mother.

I'd like a Humvee if I had a big *** stretch of countryside to thrash it, but I don't.

I would never try to inflict something so unwieldy on our twisty roads and tiny parking spaces, for that I've got my little Renault Clio

Brian: You may recognise that the United States is about granting people freedoms, but those freedoms expressed come to an abrupt cut-off when they intrude upon other's freedoms, such as that for safety (a very good, general example is that one shouldn't be allowed to shout "fire!" in an open theatre). Being blocked by a bus is okay; they're meant for transporting dozens of people at once. Semi trucks are okay as well; they're transporting tons of products/materials. Hummers, on the other hand, do nothing but transport less than a normal pickup truck. They just simply are built to look big.

As for me, Id I wanted a giant vehichle, I'd probably get a Dodge Prospector (The van model, not the pickup). The van holds well over a dozen people, or 6-10 tons of stuff. My mother owns one (she used to use it for hauling mass equipment for her business), but it's currently needing a few replacement parts, and we currently don't need a 380 HP V8 to haul large ammounts of equipment right now, so it's just sitting.

As for the Hummer series, The H2 is just stupid (a US $50,000 waste in my opinion), the H1 is even more so (at something like double the price, though it is actually a studier vehichle), and the H3 is just an attempt to spin the environmentally-unsound name into the mainstream even more. A real Humvee, while nice, doesn't have too much use to me, and neither would a WWII-era jeep.

Oh right like minivans with tinted windows or baby curtains don't block views, or pickup trucks, or any car that's bigger than yours. If you're having such a hard time seeing, why don't you buy a bigger car? Instead of forcing the other 90% of the population into a smaller one?

if you're talking to me, I'm a college student and don't have money I can drop on a bigger car, and even if i did, i don't NEED a bigger vehicle except on one or two occasion, and that's not enough to justify buying one. Besides, why should i become part of the problem?


Tinted windows do suck. can anyone justify why they need them?

sure, its your right to have them, but a line has to be drawn when your damn opaque windows block other driver's vision.

Ther thing thats wrong with america is the "Hurray for me and f*** the rest of you!" attitude.

Brain's deal on pollution is pretty accurate. People think electric cars are great because they don't pollute, but most people don't even consider where the electricity comes from. Nearly half the power generated on the east Coast comes from coal or oil burning plants, which are the dirties power sources out there, in terms of pollutants beng realeased into the air. I'd rather see those plants, and even natural gas ones to some extent, replaced with solar and wind power plants because they are clean power sources. Once your drawing power from clean sources, then you can go after the cars

Privacy I assume. *shrug*

Yes, yes, all that is a problem too, but the point still stands that SUVs pollute more than normal cars.

If you drove a normal car, you'd pollute less. It's that simple.

You're just trying to distract people by throwing some other unrelated problems at them. Yes, there might be other, more significant problems, but it doesn't mean that SUVs aren't a problem at all. SUVs are a problem that are much easier to solve than anything else.

Exactly WHERE do you draw the line? So if you ban tinted windows, what do you do when the lady in the minivan puts curtains over the back and side windows so her kid doesn't get a sunburn? Have you ever lived in a desert? Or any place where it gets hot? Tinted windows help *a lot*

This idea that I have to justify everything I do is just insane. May as well turn us into China or something.

The other thing you could do is just not follow so closely.

And Mort: sure, if I got rid of my jeep and bought a hybrid, I would spew less exhaust fumes into the air - but creating that new hybrid would throw more crap into the air than using either or both combined. It simply takes more energy to create a new car (any new car) than to just use the one I have. Also, I may be making less energy than I was before, but YOU'RE still producing more than me because you commute 40 miles a day in rush hour traffic, because you're too stubborn to do "what's good for the world" and move closer to your work so the rest of us don't have to breathe your fumes. In fact, let's ban people from living more than 10 miles away from work, that will surely cut down on pollution.

I notice not one of you responded to my suggestion that you go after public transportation, huge semi-trucks, and jets because they produce the bulk of the pollution anyway.

No, because I'm not satan.

Yes, we're not responding to it because it's just not relevant.

You seem to be making the assumption that people with SUVs drive less kilometres in total than those without...

Somehow, I don't think so.

Yes, offroading might offer the possibility that you can make shortcuts to work to save distance, but I really doubt that this will make for substantially less total kilometres driven by SUV drivers in general. Especially considering that many SUV drivers will go offroad driving simply for the sake of offroad driving, adding to the total distance covered.

Even if SUVs did cover less distance than normal cars, they pollute a lot more, so they'd haver to cover a lot less distance in order to make a difference.

Many SUV drivers will use their SUV in the same way that they would a normal car, resulting in entirely unnecessary surplus pollution.


You seem to be making the assumption that SUV drivers live closer to work than those with normal cars.

uh. what.


Again, you're throwing out irrelevancies to try and distact us from the matter at hand. Stay on topic.

Whats a hummer?

So. california IS a desert, its just that we have irrigation so stuff will grow here. I know how hot it gets, but thats no excuse. Haven't people heard of sunscreen? It does wonders for preventing sunburns. Even better, The windows in my house have a uv coating on the glass that gives the glass a slight greenish tint, but it is very easy to see through and it stops ultraviolet rays. Why can't they do that on cars, assuming they don't do it already? My point is, they can solve the uv problem w/o tinting everything to near opacity.







Justify that remark! :p




I don't tailgate. I follow about 2 car lengths behind, which is the most you can do in this city w/o pissing people off by going too slow.

No, I'm telling you that *I* don't drive to work at all, that I work from home, and that even though I drive a Jeep, I pollute much, much less than most people who even have hybrids. Your contention that people who drive SUVs pollute "more" than others isn't proven, isn't a fact, and has no relevency whatsoever. Nobody has proven that SUVs are responsible for the majority of pollution - EVEN IF per-minute on the road they put out more exhaust (because they aren't a majority of vehicles on the road). You are arguing based on your "feelings" not based on fact.

Even if you were able to prove that SUVs are responsible for the majority of all pollution, that still wouldn't prove, not even a little bit, that I, owning an SUV, pollute more than you do. How about you take a look at the rest of a person's lifestyle choices?

You are waging this war against SUVs and it's completely and utterly silly! If you ban one thing that pollutes more than another thing with a similar function, you are going to go down the slippery slope of forcing everyone to justify every little thing that they own, and banning 90% of the stuff that is produced in this country.

I still contend that a city bus pollutes more in a day than my SUV pollutes in a year - not only in regards to smog, but also in the drippy oil mess that it leaves behind at every stop. A poorly running car that gets "decent" gas mileage can certainly polute more than any decently running SUV. You have to look at more than just the gas mileage: Look at the maintenance, look at the amount of miles driven, look at the year of the car, etc. SUVs nowadays pollute less than virtually every car produced in the 80s, so why don't we ban all those cars too? Why not force everyone to buy a new car every year!? Yeah, that's a great idea! Forget the fact that it takes more energy and pollution to make one new car than it does to just let me drive my damn jeep in peace.

I want a bumper sticker that says, "Your H2 is ugly, and your trophy wife is getting fat."

You can take that logic a loooong way, boy, a looooong way.

Yes please

.......Ok, we get the point Ewoklover...........

sorry, i did know that anyone was seeing it.

I want HL2.

I really don't care if someone has an SUV or something, we don't know everybody's lifestyles so just looking at someone driving an SUV and condemning them is pathetic.

However, I would prefer to never see a teenage girl driving a huge SUV through a crowded parking lot while talking on the phone. That sort of thing must definitely stop.

Generally I see alot of SUVs and such when driving around Tulsa, and when you consider there isn't much off-roading available a good percentage of those are probably unneeded. However I think when it comes to stuff such as parking at grocery stores, there should be areas for SUVs that are wider so theres more door space. When I get in/out of a car, I keep aware of the door's posistion so that I won't do damage to the car beside me.

However, it's a real slap in the face when I'll be considerate enough for that, but then some huge *** SUV has to park next to my aunt's Escort and block the door from opening more than 5".

They couldn't of maybe thought "Oh this seems to be a tight squeeze, maybe it would be considerate if I found a more spacious place to park."

And yes, there are more spacious places to park when we've been in this situation.

Other energy sources are available. There's plenty of hydroelectricity for the north-east. There's natural gas in the south-east. But those energy sources will never be harvested as long as you have a government that's funded by oil companies.

If I were getting an off roader id go for the Bowler Wildcat

Agreed!

I read the first page and part of the second before I got bored and just decided to reply.

I personally would not buy a Hummer as my experience with them is that they are uncomfortable. They are priced well into the luxo market and are basically out of reach of most people that will use them as they are intended to be used. I don't believe any typical anti-SUV arguments (which I believe are crap anyway) would apply to the H1 as most people that own them don't even drive them much at all.

I would consider an H2 if I were in the market for a pretty luxo-SUV like a Navigator. Still, I plan to buy a Dodge or Ford one-ton, dual rear wheel, crew cab, 4wd, diesel truck within the next couple of years which is bigger in most regards than any of the SUVs being discussed here and far more capable in the areas I'm concerned in.

I know. It's sad that that's the case

What's the problem with using oil and which government is funded by oil companies? The Saudi's?

The problem with using oil is that pretty soon there's not going to be any more.

Thrawn--we don't know how soon or how late we will run out of oil. Could be years, could be decades, could be centuries.

But how the hell did a hummer thread turn into an energy source debate?

Because it's about evil SUVs!

Those who desire alternative forms of energy should be happy that we're relying on oil now. Necessity is the mother of invention. When it becomes the case that we are actually running out of oil then it will be profitable to develop alternatives. Now it's a waste of money.

I know, there's nowhere around here to go. Still, like it or not, soem families really seriously need that kind of cargo room. As large inside as some cars can be, the midsize SUVs are probably mroe appropriate. The fullsize SUVs, I just don't get. Perhaps some families need third-row seating, but not nearly as many as there are full-size SUVs.

But I'm with Brian on this. It's their right to drive whatever they want. What about all those guys driving their muscle cars? Sure, they may not get in your way as much, but how about that 6.0L V12 in there?

Cars are cars, but sure as hell I'd like a Reliant Robin!

Wow. That thing is ugly!