Detroit Circles the Trucks
To hear some tell it, sport-utility vehicles, minivans and pickup trucks are the devil’s carriage--little more than gas-guzzling road hogs that foul the air and threaten the safety of others on the road.
While this view is increasingly voiced by some Washington regulators, environmentalists and anti-car crusaders, it is not widely shared by consumers, who are driving light trucks off showroom floors in record numbers.
Still, auto makers are concerned that the attacks could sully the image of the popular and profitable vehicles. Eventually sales could be dampened, insurance rates increased and costly new emissions and safety rules imposed.
The high-stakes debate swirling around light trucks represents a potential evolution in federal safety policy, setting the stage for standards that not only require vehicles to protect their own occupants but also pose no hazard to others. Pressure is also increasing to set equal pollution standards for cars and trucks.
Detroit sees the assault on light trucks as unfair; it paints critics as zealots who skew the facts to push political or social agendas. Detroit also complains that it gets little credit for significant safety and emissions improvements made over the last two decades.
That debate over safety and emissions has yet to curtail consumer infatuation with trucks.
Sales of sport-utilities, which rose 14% in an otherwise flat market last year, continue to be brisk.
Growth should continue, albeit at a slower pace, as long as trucks are seen as more fashionable and functional than most cars, analysts say.
Tim Keel, a packaging engineer in Fullerton, says power, size and ruggedness--not fuel economy and safety--were his main considerations recently when he was scouting for a new vehicle. He didn’t even consider a car. He settled on a red 1998 Dodge Durango, a muscular Chrysler-made sport-utility.
The eight-seat, 4,700-pound Durango, which gets a meager 15 miles to the gallon, is big enough to carry all Keel’s work material and half his daughter’s softball team. He finds it more stylish than a car or minivan, and he can take it off-road whenever he wants.
“It meets all my needs,” he said.
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Endorsements like this help explain why sport-utilities and other light trucks are among the most popular vehicles on the road today, accounting for 45% of all new-vehicle sales last year. That’s up from 20% in 1980.
Sales of light trucks jumped 4% last year, as car sales fell 2%. Some analysts predict truck sales will equal car sales in two years, though others say trucks’ popularity is beginning to wane.
Light trucks are a cash cow of the Big Three auto makers, which control 85% of the U.S. light-truck market but only 60% of the car segment, in which foreign producers are gaining ground. About two-thirds of the record $16.2 billion the Big Three earned in 1997 came from light trucks, with most of the rest coming from financing and non-auto operations. The Big Three on average don’t earn any profits on cars, industry analysts say.
As manufacturers rake in as much as $10,000 in profit on some popular sport-utilities, such as the Ford Expedition and General Motors’ Chevy Suburban, the concerns of safety advocates and environmentalists are mounting.
The safety debate is focused on vehicle compatibility and aggressiveness. Several recent studies have concluded that light trucks, although generally safer for their own occupants when involved in multiple-vehicle crashes, are more likely to cause fatalities in cars they hit.
The conclusion is met with derision by auto officials and enthusiasts who note that the dynamics of collisions are widely known: heavier objects inflict more damage on lighter ones.
“When a bigger vehicle hits a smaller vehicle, the smaller vehicle is disadvantaged,” said Robert Eaton, chairman of Chrysler and an engineer. “That’s the law of physics.”
Vehicle incompatibility is not new. In the 1970s, the under-2,000-pound Volkswagen Beetle shared the roads with 4,000-pound-plus Cadillacs, Chryslers and Oldsmobiles. And big rigs have always mingled with passenger vehicles, resulting in 5,125 crash fatalities in 1996.
Over the last two decades, vehicle safety has vastly improved, a reflection of better highways and more crash-worthy vehicles equipped with seat belts and air bags and safety cages that surround occupants.
The number of highway deaths fell from 51,100 in 1980 to 41,900 in 1996, even as the number of vehicles increased 38% and the number of miles traveled rose 63%. Today there are 1.7 fatalities per 100 million miles traveled by motorists, half the 1980 rate.
Although there were 202 million vehicles on U.S. roads in 1996--55 million more than in 1980--the number of deaths in multiple-vehicle crashes has been remarkably stable at about 10,400 annually.
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What is troubling to federal safety regulators is that about half those fatalities occurred in crashes between light trucks and cars, even though the trucks make up only a third of the vehicle fleet. Ricardo Martinez, administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, worries that multiple-vehicle deaths will increase as sport-utilities grab a larger portion of the fleet.
“The rise of sport-utility sales and their compatibility with the rest of the fleet has been an issue of growing concern for several years,” he said.
Federal fatality statistics show that in crashes between cars and sport-utilities or pickups, car occupants are four times more likely to die than are truck riders. In side-impact crashes, occupants of a struck car are 27 times more likely to die.
Regulators attribute the disproportionate carnage to the disparate masses of the vehicles. The average truck today weighs 1,000 pounds more than the average car. That’s up from 350 pounds in 1984.
Researchers say there is more at work than just weight differences, however. Design features of light trucks, including frame rigidity and ride height, contribute to the greater damage inflicted in collisions with cars.
NHTSA safety researcher Hampton Gabler said a Ford Taurus mid-size sedan and a Ford Ranger pickup both weigh about 3,000 pounds. But the Ranger typically causes more damage and injury in crashes than the Taurus. Gabler speculates that this is because the pickup has a stiffer frame that imparts a harder blow.
Trucks generally are built using a frame-on-body technique in which the outer panels are placed over two steel rails. Most cars use a “unibody” design that integrates the body panels with lighter structural elements. The car design allows for crush zones that absorb energy in a crash.
The higher riding height of light trucks is another factor that may make them more deadly in crashes. It is also a strong selling point because it offers drivers a good view while providing enough ground clearance to take the four-wheel-drive vehicles off-road. Surveys, however, show that only 15% of truck owners ever venture off the pavement.
In crashes, sport-utilities--riding, on average, 8 inches higher than most mid-size cars--are more likely to override bumpers and door sills, intruding further into a struck vehicle and causing more injury to occupants.
Auto officials agree that compatibility is an issue worthy of study, but feel that media coverage has overstated the safety dangers presented by the growing number of light trucks.
“Light trucks and SUVs get in substantially fewer crashes than do passenger cars, and when they do they have substantially better safety records,” said Ernie Grush, a safety engineer at Ford.
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The car companies also argue that safety researchers often overlook driver behavior when studying compatibility. Pickups, for example, are more likely to be driven by young males who drink and drive and speed.
While market research by the auto companies shows that consumers like trucks for their style, image, greater road visibility, and towing and off-road capability, many also feel safer in them.
“One reason people buy sport-utilities is for the extra protection they provide,” said James Bragg, owner of Fighting Chance, a Long Beach-based car-buying advisory service. “They don’t care if they are a danger to others.”
But vehicle mismatches are a growing concern to the insurance industry. After studying the problem, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an industry research group, recently recommended that auto companies redesign vehicles to minimize the compatibility differences between cars and trucks.
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At the same time, the group reported that only 14% of car occupant deaths occur in collisions with pickups or sport-utilities. The rest involve crashes with other cars, large trucks or single-vehicle mishaps.
“Compatibility improvements are not panaceas,” said Brian O’Neill, president of the insurance institute.
Despite growing safety concerns about light trucks, only two insurers, Progressive and Farmers, the nation’s third-largest insurer, have raised liability premiums on sport-utility vehicles in selected markets.
“It is not a widespread thing for us,” said Diane Tasaka, spokeswoman for Farmers, who added that collision and comprehensive rates are lower for sport-utilities because those vehicles suffer less damage and passengers suffer less injury in crashes.
Compatibility could result in a whole new approach to safety regulation. The manufacturers say current regulations obligate them to maximize occupant safety for each vehicle. Now, they say, regulators are suggesting they need to extend occupant protection beyond each vehicle to others sharing the road.
“We are being asked to look at the design issue from a different perspective,” said Bob Lange, engineering safety director for General Motors.
Auto makers most worry that the federal government will mandate rules that could compromise the safety of light trucks in order to increase protection for passenger cars.
“We don’t want to reduce the risks to car occupants at the expense of light-truck occupants,” said Barry Felrice, director of regulator affairs for the American Automobile Manufacturers Assn., the Big Three’s lobbying arm.
Martinez of the NHTSA is increasing pressure on Detroit to make quick design changes, by threatening new regulations and keeping the issue in the public eye. (He has opened crash tests to reporters and is sponsoring a safety summit in June on the issue.)
Martinez has praised the design of some foreign models, such as the ML320 from Mercedes-Benz and the RX300 from Toyota’s luxury Lexus division. Mercedes’ sport-utility features a less rigid frame and a lower bumper. The Lexus sport-utility is based on a car chassis.
“You can design this issue away,” Martinez said. “The auto makers have an opportunity to deal with this issue now.”
Auto makers are studying their options, including adding more side protection to cars and adjusting vehicle ride heights. But they warn that there are no easy solutions that can be implemented quickly.
“There is no magic bullet we have identified so far,” said Priya Prasad, a Ford safety expert.
Even while light trucks are under siege by safety critics, a potent rear-guard action is being waged over another key issue: the vehicle’s high environmental impact.
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Environmental groups, appalled by hulking sport-utilities that get as little as 12 mpg and spew tons of nitrous oxides, carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons into the air annually, have put light trucks in their cross hairs.
“These are nothing more than $35,000 pollution machines,” said Daniel Becker, who heads the Sierra Club’s global-warming project.
The auto makers counter that today’s vehicles are 96% cleaner than those sold in the 1970s and within a few years will be 99% cleaner. Still, emissions and fuel economy standards are laxer for light trucks than for cars, which environmentalists says amounts to a license to pollute.
Light trucks were originally accorded lower fuel economy standards because they constituted less than 20% of the nation’s fleet and were largely used by farmers and businesses for commercial purposes.
But today light trucks make up a third of the fleet and have become passenger car surrogates, just as likely to be spotted at the country club or kids’ soccer game as at a construction site.
“It seems utterly ridiculous that light trucks are subject to much less stringent fuel economy and emission standards when the majority of them are used as passenger cars,” said Chris Cedergren, president of Nextrend, an auto consulting firm in Thousand Oaks.
Higher gas taxes might encourage consumers to drive more fuel-efficient vehicles, some experts say, but that is politically unpalatable.
Another alternative is to raise federal fuel economy standards for both cars and trucks. But the Republican-controlled Congress has blocked such efforts in recent years. The Clinton administration, which advocates higher fuel efficiency levels, has backed down in return for Big Three cooperation in a 10-year industry-government effort to create prototype vehicles that get 80 mpg.
Pressure is building on other fronts. California last year proposed requiring light trucks to meet the same pollution standards as cars beginning in 2004. Even more important, President Clinton backed the global-warming treaty hammered out in Kyoto, Japan, in December requiring developing nations to sharply curtail emissions of greenhouse gases early in the next century. The agreement could require auto makers to sharply reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
The Kyoto accord will have a hard time getting past the U.S. Senate, but the auto makers may be forced by global competition to develop electric, hybrid and alternative-fuel vehicles. Environmental groups argue that much of the technology is already available.
At the North American International Auto Show in Detroit in January, each of the Big Three trotted out a variety of experimental concept vehicles equipped with advanced batteries, direct-injection engines or fuel cells that get 65 mpg or more.
Ford used the occasion to announce that beginning this year, its sport-utilities and minivans will meet the same emissions standards as its passenger cars. Rivals quickly moved to match Ford’s initiative.
Analysts say that as long as the price of gasoline in the United States remains so low--less than bottled water is the common refrain--consumers are not likely to turn to smaller cars any time soon.
“People are not buying fuel economy,” said J.T. Battenberg, president of Delphi Automotive Systems, GM’s parts unit.
Indeed, both U.S. and foreign auto makers are betting that the truck segment will stay hot for some time. They are planning to introduce nearly two dozen new sport-utility models in the next few years, and analysts estimate sales for the segment could top 2.5 million in four years.
“America’s love affair with higher-emission vehicles is not about to end,” said Rik Kinney, senior vice president of Dohring Co., an auto market research firm based in Glendale.
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Mutt and Jeff
A comparison of the 1998 Ford Expedition XLT sport-utility vehicle and the 1998 Honda Accord LX sedan illustrates the growing concern about auto safety and tailpipe emissions. The Expedition is much heavier and bigger and rides higher than the Accord, making it likely to inflict greater damage or injury in a crash with a smaller passenger car. It also is less fuel-efficient and emits more pollution than the Honda.
Ford Expedition
Vehicle class: Full-size sport-utility
Body style: Four-door
Curb weight: 5,329 pounds
Payload capacity*: 1,800 pounds
Towing capacity: 6,100 pounds
Seating capacity: Six to nine
Dimensions (inches):
Length: 204.6
Width: 78.6
Height: 76.6
Ground clearance: 8.6
Construction: Body-on-frame
Drive system: Four-wheel drive
Engine: 4.6-liter V-8
Horsepower/revs. per min.: 215/4,400
Fuel economy (miles per gallon): 14 city/18 highway
Emissions***:
NMOG: 0.32
CO: 4.4
NOx: 0.7
Base price****: $31,465
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Honda Accord
Vehicle class: Mid-size passenger car
Body style: Four-door
Curb weight: 3,053 pounds
Payload capacity*: 937 pounds
Towing capacity: NA**
Seating capacity: Five
Dimensions (inches):
Length: 188.8
Width: 70.3
Height: 56.9
Ground clearance: 6.2
Construction: Unibody
Drive system: Front-wheel drive
Engine: 2.3-liter 4-cylinder
Horsepower/revs. per min.: 150/5,700
Fuel economy (miles per gallon): 23 city/30 highway
Emissions***:
NMOG: 0.075
CO: 3.4
NOx: 0.2
Base price****: $19,485
*Passenger and cargo weight.
**Not applicable.
***In grams per mile. NMOG: non-methane organic gases; CO: carbon monoxide; NOx: nitrous oxides.
****Includes destination charges.
Sources: Ford Motor Co., Honda Motor Co., American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.
