PROGRAM: CNN Insight International
HEADLINE: Can The War on Terror Wean Americans From Their Big Beloved SUVs?
BYLINE: Jonathan Mann, Bill Schneider
BODY:
Can the war on terror wean Americans from their big beloved SUVs?
JONATHAN MANN, CNN ANCHOR: Terror on the road? America's love affair with enormous oil-hungry sports utility vehicles may cause problems, but does it promote terrorism?
Hello and welcome.
Forget seeing the Statue of Liberty. Forget visiting Mt. Rushmore or getting a seat at the Super Bowl. It could be that the most American experience of our times is inside an SUV.
Sport's utility vehicles are everything, or most of what America expires to be: large and powerful, of course, comfortable for those inside, imposing on the outside, and loaded with conveniences from computer mapping systems to color TV's, even VCR's, not to mention cup holders, a lot of cup holders.
But what if SUVs weren't an expression of the American way of life? What if they were instead instruments of terror?
Sounds like a stretch, doesn't it? On our program today, can the war on terror wean Americans from their big beloved SUVs.
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MANN: Porsche is best known for fast and frisky sports cars, but now it too is making an SUV, the KN, starting at $55,000. Target market: Canada, but especially the United States.
Welcome back.
The point about a Porsche SUV is this: Porsche doesn't make pickup trucks or vans or station wagons or sedans. It only makes two different models, and both of them are sports cars, both of them until it went into the business of the SUV.
It says demand may outstrip supply by 4 to 1. Porsche has only learned what everyone knows: Americans want these cars.
Why? Joining us now from Washington is Sam Kazman. He's general counsel for the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Thanks so much for being with us.
Let me ask you, because these cars are not seen as frequently in countries outside the United States and Canada, what it is that makes them so popular in the United States.
SAM KAZMAN, COMPETITIVE ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE: Well, I think partly it's fashion, but partly it's also some very solid attributes that are becoming more and more difficult to find in American passenger cars.
SUVs offer very good cargo capacity. More importantly, their ability to carry lots of passengers is unparalleled. In the United States, for example, you hardly ever can find the old-style full-sized family station, which could hold three people in the front seat, three people in the back seat, and more people on a flip-up seat in the rear. SUVs offer that.
Now, the reason those characteristics have disappeared from many American passenger cars is because of the very same federal fuel economy standards that Miss Huffington and her campaign are seeking to make even more stringent.
MANN: Now, you're making a very interesting point here, and I'd like to draw it out a little bit to people who don't know the law in the United States. What you're saying is that one of the reasons that SUVs have become so popular is that more conventional large cars are no longer available...
KAZMAN: That's right.
MANN: And that's because of the law of this country.
KAZMAN: We have a program in this country of federal fuel economy standards for new cars. It's nickname is CAFE, and one consequence of CAFE has been to downsize the fleet of passenger cars, because one of the easiest ways to make a vehicle more fuel-efficient is to make it smaller and lighter, which gives you perhaps better miles per gallon, but also means you have a smaller, less crash-worthy vehicle.
And so one of the reasons that people have turned to SUVs are become that class of vehicle is not as tightly regulated, and so you can get SUVs which have a very high capacity for carrying people.
And so in effect, the very same folks who in the past supported more stringent fuel economy standards for passenger cars, resulting in their downsizing, are now trying to close off one of the few very legitimate escape hatches for people dissatisfied with what product they can find.
MANN: They say they're trying to do it, though, out of the highest possible motive. They're trying to do it, they say, because the United States, to their mind, has become too dependent on foreign sources of oil. Some of those sources of oil, breeding grounds for terrorism, which swings back and threatens the United States.
KAZMAN: Yes, I think this is really incredibly elitist nonsense.
If Miss Huffington really believed that every -- burning -- that every gallon of gasoline you consume is a contribution to terrorism, she wouldn't be urging us to cutback on our drug habit, she'd be urging us to cut it out entirely. She would be criticizing the driving that people do, not the vehicles they own.
After all, if I've got a gas guzzler that I only use once a week, I'm using much less gasoline than someone with an incredibly efficient car who drives 50 miles a day.
But Miss Huffington is not going after the American public's behavior, because she knows that's a very difficult thing to criticize...
MANN: Right, so if you're going to let people behave as they choose to, essentially respecting their freedom to choose to drive their cars, wouldn't across the board fuel-efficiency improvements help? Wouldn't more fuel-efficient SUVs or smaller SUVs make sense?
KAZMAN: Well, first of all, from the standpoint of safety, when you're pushing SUVs into the smaller range, to make -- when you're downsizing SUVs, you're creating a very severe safety problem.
Small SUVs are much less crash-worthy than large SUVs, just as small passenger cars are less safe than large passenger cars. And so one result of any increase in fuel economy standards for SUVs will be an increase in highway traffic fatalities. In fact...
MANN: Let me jump in to ask you one more question, because it really cuts to the heart of this, as we've been telling the story, which is the dangerous international implications of the United States needing to import so much oil from other countries, some of them quite distant countries that the United States essentially has to go to war to defend.
Wouldn't it make sense to change that kind of way of life?
KAZMAN: Not really, because oil is an incredibly precious commodity on a global scale, and the percentage of oil that we import (AUDIO GAP) has very little to do with how much oil is worth.
It's interesting that in the Gulf War of 1990, Great Britain was a net exporter of oil. It was not really dependent on foreign oil in any real sense, and yet Great Britain still saw fit to send 50,000 troops into the Gulf War.
You cannot look at our use of foreign oil, our alleged dependency, as creating some national security issue. And even if you do believe it's a problem, there are much more effective ways of dealing with it, much more politically honest ways, than to make even more stringent a very deadly program such as the fuel economy standards.
MANN: Sam Kazman, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, thanks so much for talking with us.
KAZMAN: Thank you.
MANN: We have to take another break, and then we're going to pursue this discussion and talk about the problem of getting enough oil for Americans and their cars.
Stay with us.
