Even with gas prices climbing year after year, it’s a losing battle to get Americans out of their big gas-guzzlers and into smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. The reason most people give for this is that big cars are safer in accidents than small ones. It’s probably true, but the fact that this answer is so common says more about American drivers than it does about what they drive.
I once read an interview with the head of a European car company. The exec was talking about the changes he’d had to make to his cars to make them palatable to American buyers. What surprised him most was the number of cupholders they’d had to add. In Europe, he said, people drive their cars, they don’t eat or drink in them. And then he said something else that made sense of the whole we-don’t-like-small-cars thing.
Americans resign themselves to the idea that crashes are inevitable, he said, and therefore buy the biggest, heaviest cars they can get in order to increase their odds of survival. Europeans buy small, quick, good-handling cars that are easier to drive out of situations that might lead to an accident.
This difference in attitudes about the inevitability of accidents is why we Yanks love our SUVs and full-size pick-ups, and why we’ll probably never fully accept small cars as viable alternatives. In addition, there are already so many behemoths on the road, piloted by drivers whose attention is divided among the road, a burrito, a Big Gulp, a ringing cell phone, and texting, that it’s hard to argue against taking the civilian version of an Abrams tank to work.
Still, you really have to wonder if a skilled, aware driver at the wheel of small, nimble car might scoot out of the path of oncoming disaster more easily than a guy in a Hummer. We won’t know until we shake off the notion that a car is a living room, dining room, and office. Until then, it’s doubtful that small cars will ever capture the hearts of Americans.