SUVs

I feel your concerns about sport utility vehicles (editorial, Feb. 16) are overblown. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, discredited when highway fatalities failed to skyrocket with the death of the 55 mph national speed limit, has been looking for a new cause. No longer able to up their customers’ rates for going 58 mph in a 55 zone, the insurance companies, through the institute, are now trying to convince all who will listen that SUV owners are a class apart that should pay for its excesses--safety and excess gasoline consumption being the dual talking points.

Using class envy as the battering ram, the insurance industry will succeed in its drive to up SUV owner premiums regardless of driving record. This is obscene in a free society. We are awash in cheap, plentiful gasoline. Who uses how much of this gasoline is the subject of supply and demand and personal choice, not government dictate. As for safety, I often ride motorcycles around the Western U.S.--every automobile from a Geo Metro to the biggest SUV is a potential menace, but in 40 years of riding, I’ve never been hurt. Concern yourself more with matters of personal responsibility and less with citizen oversight.

BRUCE ARMSTRONG

Santa Barbara

* In addition to having an unfair advantage in a crash and guzzling lots of imported gas, you forgot to mention that SUVs block the view of the road to cars traveling behind them. If the freeway is coming to a sudden stop, the following car will have more trouble stopping in time. If the following car compensates by staying farther behind, it means greater distances between vehicles and more highway congestion.

LARRY POST

Beverly Hills

* Ricardo Martinez of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is going to ask the manufacturers of SUVs to make them more “crash compatible” with cars? Why doesn’t this bureaucrat lobby to make the autos we drive stronger and safer instead? How do The Times and Martinez plan to make any vehicles we drive more “crash compatible” with the big semi trucks that travel our same roads? The pollution thing is a nonissue, because our state dictates the mandatory standards, not the makers of the vehicles.

I travel the highways in my line of work and I do have confidence in the maker of my vehicle, a GMC pickup, that I will survive a crash.

JOHN JULIS

Bellflower