SUV Popularity Is a Product of Industry

Re “Fear and Loathing on the Highway,” Nov. 10:

Sport utility vehicles return the highest profit per unit than any other category of automobile. This, combined with lower safety requirements (read: lower costs of manufacture) and higher fuel consumption, makes these vehicles very desirable items for both the auto and the gas industries to push on to the consumer. Again, it appears we are being led to think what the Industrial Powers want us to think, rather than to use our common sense. Lives are being compromised for the dollar once again!

MARTIN MANN

West Hills

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To see these vehicles used on city streets is the height of silliness, just one more Southern California idiocy.

DIANA ASHLEY

Los Angeles

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Although I am working on my anger issues, I long for the day when there are enough beat-up old BBVs (Big Butt Vehicles) being driven by poor people to totally destroy their cachet.

SUSAN WOLFSON

Burbank

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As a frequent visitor to the snow country, where SUVs can make at least make some claim to practicality, I was amused by a statistic that the Mammoth Police Department issued last winter, stating that 75% of all accidents in the Mammoth area involved SUVs.

PAUL W. ROSENBERGER

Manhattan Beach

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I believe that the sudden preponderance of these monster-trucks-that-pretend-to-be-cars is the worst thing to hit the roads since car phones (when used for chitchat, not emergencies). I wish a strange alien invasion of sorts could zap every oversized SUV and make them all disappear, never to reappear (only when they are empty of people, of course, because many of my friends have these “cars,” and I wouldn’t want to hurt anyone).

I am originally from Montreal, Canada, where we actually could use these moving machines, but nobody has one. (Well, maybe there are one or two.)

LORI WENGER

Via E-Mail