Tuesday, Dec 30, 2003 at 17:01
Here y'are Leroy the article in full. Copied from the Herald Sun
Stuff you
mine's a 4WD - Sally Morrell
Sitting behind a four-wheel-drive is a bit like sitting behind a woman in a big hat at the theatre.
You can't see a thing, but she couldn't care less.
These monsters, now breeding all over our roads, are a mobile version of, "I'm all right Jack, stuff you'.
Trying to turn right the other day, I couldn't see past the four-wheel-drive doing the same opposite me. I knew I'd have to wait until they made their move to see any oncoming traffic.
Then another four-wheel-drive driver came up behind me and had the gall to toot me for taking so long. If I wasn't filled with Christmas spirit I would have got out and asked him to take a look at the view from where I was sitting.
But it's not just this sort of arrogance, and never being able to squeeze into a
park wedged between two of them, that really gets me down.
It's just that they seem so unsafe.
Well, unsafe for everyone not in one, that is. I really worry about the damage these careering battering rams could do to me and my easy-crumple car in the careless twitch of a steering wheel.
I'll never forget a man telling me at a party that the reason he had brought a four-wheel-drive for his wife was because she was a hopeless driver.
"I was worried about her and the kids on the roads, but I don't have to worry any more," he said blithely.
No, he doesn't have to worry. I do.
His wife will mow us all down, but she and the kids will be fine. And the stats prove it.
The
Monash Accident Research Centre found, after analysing data from more than a million Australian crashes, that the drivers of these things tend to skip lightly from the wreckage of a bingle that might have crushed the driver of a tin box. But, unfortunately, that tin box driver is in far deeper strife hitting a four-wheel-drive.
That's a good bargain for the urban cowgirl, perched up high behind her steering wheel and a lousy hand for the rest of us steers.
Let alone the fact that they know and we know that they can't see
young children behind them when they are reversing. Great, since most of the time I see them they are parked around schools.
And what's with the bullbar? I've been driving for more than 20 years and I've yet to see a bull on a bitumen road. But they sure do damage to any pedestrian in their way. Again, just the sort of thing we need around our kids at pickup time.
I don't want to bag all four-wheel-drive drivers. Some of my best friends and all that. It's just that I find it selfish to buy such a car when all you are going to do with it is take in (sic) on the school run and to and from the
supermarket.
Size, a lot drives head off-road, or that's what the TV ads claim. But a hell of a lot never seem to leave a suburban street.
Or if they do, just head down the highway to the coast or up to the snow once a year. Hardly tough terrain needing four-wheel-drive with a chassis designed to survive running over a land
mine.
My
old car could get to the snow just as easily with a few chains and the Great Ocean Road can actually be done on six-cylinders.
The real worry, of course, is that these Stuff-You vehicles are so numerous that now one in five new cars is one of these people-crunchers, and that's even before we've caught the US bug for the Humvee - a truck-ear that's around 2m high, 2m wide and 6m long.
When there's few of them on the road, you can be sure there'll be more. The maths Is simple - it's becoming too dangerous not to have one yourself.
Who knows? Maybe I'll even buy one myself one day.
If only to keep the kids safe from the rest of them
morrells@heraldsun.com.au
Quoted from the Herald Sun 29 December 2003.Laterally Literal
Seriously Cerebral
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