Full article (free for 2 weeks)
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/041101/usnews/1trucks.htm
Demand for lift kits and similar accessories is on the rise. Sales of auto handling and
suspension products, including oversize tires and lift kits, rose to $7.3 billion last year from $5.7 billion in 1999, according to SEMA.
Jim Hoebeck,a father of four, was driving with his family back in June 2001 when Franks's F-150 pickup, lifted 13 inches, ran a red light in Escondido, Calif., and slammed into the driver's side of Hoebeck's Jeep Grand Cherokee. Hoebeck, 41, was killed instantly.
Although Franks was convicted of drunk driving, a civil jury found that the modifications to his pickup had made it more dangerous and ordered the
suspension lift-kit manufacturer, Trail Master Products, to pay about two thirds of the $3.3 million awarded to Hoebeck's family.
Between 1985 and 1988, police in Virginia did look at modified-vehicle crashes and determined that fatality rates, on average, were 29 times as high for crashes involving modified pickups as for those involving unaltered trucks.
As if the negative press wasn't bad enough, helping us out is some of the industry magazines, giving fuel to the groups that want to shut 4x4's down: Last June, an article in Truckin', a popular vehicle-accessory magazine, put it this way: "There is nothing like driving around in a truck with a big lift, when speed bumps are indistinguishable from freshly laid asphalt, and driving over a Miata hardly threatens to spill the coffee in your travel mug."
I'd say no one would really do something like that, but I had the misfortune to drive behind a guy earlier this week that was so insanely oblivious to anyone else, that I'm still ticked off (left and right turns from the middle lane that cut off traffic that was trying to go straight, coming to a stop next to a motorcyclist (in the same lane)...and the biker was mostly in the middle of the lane...rather than sit 5 feet further back in the stopped traffic, etc.
The few extemeists (on both sides) keep threatining to ruin it for the 97% of us who wheel, drive courtously, obay the law, and don't tear up the environment. Going after the manufacturers and winning sets a new battleground.