Editor’s note: Auto accidents happen for manyreasons. These reasons, however, do not includeone’s credit score, address, sex, or age. Althoughthose factors are used as predictors of future dri-ving experience, they are lacking, and leave sig-nificant room for improvement in the field of pre-diction. As Daniel Finnegan, president ofQuality Planning Corporation, explained at the2004 Schiff’s Insurance Conference, auto-insur-ance rating, as we currently know it, is weaklypredictive. It is, as he put it rather provocatively,about ninety-eight percent astrology: insurancecompanies have virtually no idea which specificdrivers are going to have accidents.

Any edge that underwriters can gain thathelps them calculate which drivers will haveaccidents will make a huge difference in results.It’s not difficult to imagine that, eventually,cars will be equipped with monitoring devicesthat send information back to the insurancecompany in real time, where it will be analyzedby sophisticated underwriting programs.Examples of useful information would includewhere the car is being driven, how fast it’sgoing, how many miles it is driven, what timeof day the driving occurs, whether the driver isimpaired in any way, how often the steeringwheel is being turned, and so on. The gatheringof such information will undoubtedly raise se-rious concerns about privacy, but it seems likean inevitability. If the information is avail-able, eventually it will be used.

The following article by Malcolm Gladwellexplores the issue of auto safety and S.U.V.s.Contrary to what you might think, big cars arenot necessarily safer than small cars. They areoften more dangerous—for both their own dri-vers and for drivers of other cars. Why? Read on.

In the summer of 1996, the Ford MotorCompany began building theExpedition, its new, full-sized S.U.V.,

at the Michigan Truck Plant, in the

Detroit suburb of Wayne. The Expeditionwas essentially the F-150 pickup truckwith an extra set of doors and two morerows of seats—and the fact that it was atruck was critical. Cars have to meet strin-gent fuel-efficiency regulations. Trucksdon’t. The handling and suspension andbraking of cars have to be built to the de-manding standards of drivers and passen-gers. Trucks only have to handle like,well, trucks. Cars are built with what iscalled unit-body construction. To be lightenough to meet fuel standards and safeenough to meet safety standards, theyhave expensive and elaborately engi-neered steel skeletons, with built-incrumple zones to absorb the impact of acrash. Making a truck is a lot more rudi-mentary. You build a rectangular steelframe. The engine gets bolted to the

front. The seats get bolted to the middle.The body gets lowered over the top. Theresult is heavy and rigid and not particu-larly safe. But it’s an awfully inexpensiveway to build an automobile. Ford hadplanned to sell the Expedition for$36,000, and its best estimate was that itcould build one for $24,000—which, inthe automotive industry, is a terrificallyhigh profit margin. Sales, the companypredicted, weren’t going to be huge. Afterall, how many Americans could reasonablybe expected to pay a $12,000 premium forwhat was essentially a dressed-up truck?But Ford executives decided that theExpedition would be a highly profitableniche product. They were half right. The“highly profitable” part turned out to betrue. Yet, almost from the moment Ford’sbig new S.U.V.s rolled off the assembly

SCHIFF’S

SCHIFF’S INSURANCE OBSERVER • 300 CENTRAL PARK WEST, NEW YORK, NY 10024 • (212) 724-2000 • DAV I D@IN S U R A N C EOB S E RV E R.C O M

September 9, 2005Volume 17 • Number 15 I N S U R A N C E O B S E R V E R

The world’s most dangerous insurance publicationSM

How the S.U.V. Ran Over Auto Safety

An agent delivers a policy to a nonstandard risk.

BigandBad by Malcolm Gladwell

SCHIFF’S INSURANCE OBSERVER ~ (212) 724-2000 SEPTEMBER 9, 2005 2

line in Wayne, there was nothing “niche”about the Expedition.

Ford had intended to split the assem-bly line at the Michigan Truck Plant be-tween the Expedition and the Ford F-150pickup. But, when the first flood of ordersstarted coming in for the Expedition, thefactory was entirely given over to S.U.V.s.The orders kept mounting. Assembly-lineworkers were put on sixty- and seventy-hour weeks. Another night shift wasadded. The plant was now runningtwenty-four hours a day, six days a week.Ford executives decided to build a luxuryversion of the Expedition, the LincolnNavigator. They bolted a new grille on theExpedition, changed a few body panels,added some sound insulation, took a deep

breath, and charged $45,000—and soonNavigators were flying out the door nearlyas fast as Expeditions. Before long, theMichigan Truck Plant was the most prof-itable of Ford’s fifty-three assembly plants.By the late 1990’s, it had become the mostprofitable factory of any industry in theworld. In 1998, the Michigan Truck Plantgrossed $11 billion; profits were $3.7 bil-lion. Some factory workers, with overtime,were making $200,000 a year. The de-mand for Expeditions and Navigators wasso insatiable that even when a blizzard hitthe Detroit region in January of 1999—burying the city in snow, paralyzing the air-port, and stranding hundreds of cars on thefreeway—Ford officials got on their radiosand commandeered parts bound for otherfactories so that the Michigan Truck Plantassembly line wouldn’t slow for a moment.The factory that had begun as just anotherassembly plant had become the company’scrown jewel.

In the history of the automotive indus-try, few things have been quite as unex-pected as the rise of the S.U.V. Detroit isa town of engineers, and engineers like tobelieve that there is some connection be-tween the success of a vehicle and its tech-nical merits. But the S.U.V. boom was likeApple’s bringing back the Macintosh,dressing it up in colorful plastic, and sud-denly creating a new market. It made nosense to them. Consumers said they likedfour-wheel drive. But the overwhelmingmajority of consumers don’t need four-wheel drive. S.U.V. buyers said they likedthe elevated driving position. But when,in focus groups, industry marketers probedfurther, they heard things that left themrolling their eyes. As Keith Bradsher writesin “High and Mighty”—perhaps the mostimportant book about Detroit since RalphNader’s “Unsafe at Any Speed”—whatconsumers said was “If the vehicle is uphigh, it’s easier to see if something is hid-ing underneath or lurking behind it.”Bradsher brilliantly captures the mixtureof bafflement and contempt that manyauto executives feel toward the customerswho buy their S.U.V.s. Fred J. Schaafsma,a top engineer for General Motors, says,“Sport-utility owners tend to be more like‘I wonder how people view me,’ and aremore willing to trade off flexibility or func-tionality to get that.” According toBradsher, internal industry market re-search concluded that S.U.V.s tend to bebought by people who are insecure, vain,

self-centered, and self-absorbed, who arefrequently nervous about their marriages,and who lack confidence in their drivingskills. Ford’s S.U.V. designers took theircues from seeing “fashionably dressedwomen wearing hiking boots or even workboots while walking through expensivemalls.” Toyota’s top marketing executivein the United States, Bradsher writes,loves to tell the story of how at a focusgroup in Los Angeles “an elegant womanin the group said that she needed her full-sized Lexus LX 470 to drive up over thecurb and onto lawns to park at large partiesin Beverly Hills.” One of Ford’s seniormarketing executives was even blunter:“The only time those S.U.V.s are going tobe off-road is when they miss the drive-way at 3 a.m.”

The truth, underneath all the rational-izations, seemed to be that S.U.V. buyersthought of big, heavy vehicles as safe:they found comfort in being surroundedby so much rubber and steel. To the engi-neers, of course, that didn’t make anysense, either: if consumers really wantedsomething that was big and heavy andcomforting, they ought to buy minivans,since minivans, with their unit-body con-struction, do much better in accidentsthan S.U.V.s. (In a thirty-five-m.p.h. crashtest, for instance, the driver of a CadillacEscalade—the G.M. counterpart to theLincoln Navigator—has a sixteen-percentchance of a life-threatening head injury, atwenty-percent chance of a life-threaten-ing chest injury, and a thirty-five-percentchance of a leg injury. The same numbersin a Ford Windstar minivan—a vehicleengineered from the ground up, as op-posed to simply being bolted onto apickup-truck frame—are, respectively,two percent, four percent, and one per-cent.) But this desire for safety wasn’t arational calculation. It was a feeling. Overthe past decade, a number of major au-tomakers in America have relied on theservices of a French-born cultural anthro-pologist, G. Clotaire Rapaille, whose spe-cialty is getting beyond the rational—what he calls “cortex”—impressions ofconsumers and tapping into their deeper,“reptilian” responses. And what Rapailleconcluded from countless, intensive ses-sions with car buyers was that when S.U.V.buyers thought about safety they werethinking about something that reachedinto their deepest unconscious. “The No. 1 feeling is that everything surround-

Editor and Writer . . . . . . . . David SchiffProduction Editor . . . . . . . . . Bill LauckForeign Correspondent . . Isaac SchwartzEditorial Associate. . . Yonathan DessalegnCopy Editor . . . . . . . . . . . . John CaumanPublisher . . . . . . . . . . . Alan ZimmermanSubscription Manager . . . . . . Pat LaBua

Editorial OfficeSchiff’s Insurance Observer300 Central Park West, Suite 4HNew York, NY 10024Phone: (212) 724-2000Fax: (434) 244-4615E-mail: David@InsuranceObserver.com Website: InsuranceObserver.com

Publishing HeadquartersSchiff’s Insurance ObserverSNL c/o Insurance Communications Co.One SNL Plaza, P.O. Box 2056Charlottesville, VA 22902Phone: (434) 977-5877Fax: (434) 984-8020E-mail: Subscriptions@InsuranceObserver.com

Annual subscriptions are $189. For questions regarding subscriptions pleasecall (434) 977-5877.

© 2005, Insurance Communications Co., LLC.All rights reserved.

Reprints and additional issues are avail-able from our publishing headquarters.

Copyright Notice and WarningIt is a violation of federal copyright law toreproduce all or part of this publication. You arenot allowed to e-mail, photocopy, fax, scan, dis-tribute, or duplicate by any other means thecontents of this publication. Violations of copy-right law can lead to damages of up to $150,000per infringement.

Insurance Communications Co. (ICC) is controlled bySchiff Publishing. SNL Financial LC is a research and pub-lishing company that focuses on banks, thrifts, real estateinvestment companies, insurance companies, energy andspecialized financial-services companies. SNL is a nonvot-ing stockholder in ICC and provides publishing services to it.

SCHIFF’SThe world’s most dangerous insurance publicationSM

I N S U R A N C E O B S E R V E R

ing you should be round and soft, andshould give,” Rapaille told me. “Thereshould be air bags everywhere. Thenthere’s this notion that you need to be uphigh. That’s a contradiction, because thepeople who buy these S.U.V.s know at thecortex level that if you are high there ismore chance of a rollover. But at the rep-tilian level they think that if I am biggerand taller I’m safer. You feel secure be-cause you are higher and dominate andlook down. That you can look down ispsychologically a very powerful notion.And what was the key element of safetywhen you were a child? It was that yourmother fed you, and there was warm liq-uid. That’s why cup holders are absolutelycrucial for safety. If there is a car that hasno cup holder, it is not safe. If I can put mycoffee there, if I can have my food, ifeverything is round, if it’s soft, and if I’mhigh, then I feel safe. It’s amazing that in-telligent, educated women will look at acar and the first thing they will look at ishow many cup holders it has.” During thedesign of Chrysler’s PT Cruiser, one ofthe things Rapaille learned was that carbuyers felt unsafe when they thought thatan outsider could easily see inside theirvehicles. So Chrysler made the back win-dow of the PT Cruiser smaller. Of course,making windows smaller—and therebyreducing visibility—makes driving moredangerous, not less so. But that’s the puz-zle of what has happened to the automo-bile world: feeling safe has become moreimportant than actually being safe.

In the fall of 2003, I visited the auto-mobile-testing center of ConsumersUnion, the organization that publishes

Consumer Reports. It is tucked away in thewoods, in south-central Connecticut, onthe site of the old Connecticut Speedway.The facility has two skid pads to measurecornering, a long straightaway for brakingtests, a meandering “handling” coursethat winds around the back side of thetrack, and an accident-avoidance obstaclecourse made out of a row of orange cones.It is headed by a trim, white-hairedEnglishman named David Champion,who previously worked as an engineerwith Land Rover and with Nissan. On theday of my visit, Champion set aside twovehicles: a silver 2003 ChevroletTrailBlazer—an enormous five-thousand-pound S.U.V.—and a shiny blue two-seater Porsche Boxster convertible.

We started with the TrailBlazer.Champion warmed up the Chevrolet witha few quick circuits of the track, and thendrove it hard through the twists and turnsof the handling course. He sat in thebucket seat with his back straight and hisarms almost fully extended, and drove withpracticed grace: every movement smoothand relaxed and unhurried. Champion, asan engineer, did not much like theTrailBlazer. “Cheap interior, cheap plas-tic,” he said, batting the dashboard with hishand. “It’s a little bit heavy, cumbersome.Quiet. Bit wallowy, side to side. Doesn’tfeel that secure. Accelerates heavily. Onceit gets going, it’s got decent power. Brakesfeel a bit spongy.” He turned onto thestraightaway and stopped a few hundredyards from the obstacle course.

Measuring accident avoidance is akey part of the ConsumersUnion evaluation. It’s a simple

setup. The driver has to navigate his ve-hicle through two rows of cones eight feetwide and sixty feet long. Then he has tosteer hard to the left, guiding the vehiclethrough a gate set off to the side, and im-mediately swerve hard back to the right,and enter a second sixty-foot corridor ofcones that are parallel to the first set. Theidea is to see how fast you can drivethrough the course without knocking overany cones. “It’s like you’re driving downa road in suburbia,” Champion said.“Suddenly, a kid on a bicycle veers out infront of you. You have to do whatever ittakes to avoid the kid. But there’s a trac-tor-trailer coming toward you in the otherlane, so you’ve got to swing back into yourown lane as quickly as possible. That’s thescenario.”

Champion and I put on helmets. Heaccelerated toward the entrance to the ob-stacle course. “We do the test withoutbrakes or throttle, so we can just look athandling,” Champion said. “I actuallytake my foot right off the pedals.” The carwas now moving at forty m.p.h. At thatspeed, on the smooth tarmac of the race-way, the TrailBlazer was very quiet, andwe were seated so high that the roadseemed somehow remote. Champion en-tered the first row of cones. His armstensed. He jerked the car to the left. TheTrailBlazer’s tires squealed. I was throwntoward the passenger-side door as thetruck’s body rolled, then thrown towardChampion as he jerked the TrailBlazer

back to the right. My tape recorder wentskittering across the cabin. The whole ma-neuver had taken no more than a few sec-onds, but it felt as if we had been sailinginto a squall. Champion brought the carto a stop. We both looked back: theTrailBlazer had hit the cone at the gate.The kid on the bicycle was probably dead.Champion shook his head. “It’s very rub-bery. It slides a lot. I’m not getting muchcommunication back from the steeringwheel. It feels really ponderous, clumsy. Ifelt a little bit of tail swing.”

I drove the obstacle course next. Istarted at the conservative speed of thirty-five m.p.h. I got through cleanly. I triedagain, this time at thirty-eight m.p.h., andthat small increment of speed made a dra-matic difference. I made the first left,avoiding the kid on the bicycle. But, whenit came time to swerve back to avoid thehypothetical oncoming eighteen-wheeler,I found that I was wrestling with the car.The protests of the tires were jarring. Istopped, shaken. “It wasn’t going whereyou wanted it to go, was it?” Championsaid. “Did you feel the weight pulling yousideways? That’s what the extra weightthat S.U.V.s have tends to do. It pulls youin the wrong direction.” Behind us was astring of toppled cones. Getting theTrailBlazer to travel in a straight line, afterthat sudden diversion, hadn’t been easy.“I think you took out a few pedestrians,”Champion said with a faint smile.

Next up was the Boxster. The top wasdown. The sun was warm on my forehead.The car was low to the ground; I had thesense that if I dangled my arm out the win-dow my knuckles would scrape on the tar-mac. Standing still, the Boxster didn’t feelsafe: I could have been sitting in a go-cart.But when I ran it through the handlingcourse I felt that I was in perfect control.On the straightaway, I steadied theBoxster at forty-five m.p.h., and ran itthrough the obstacle course. I could havebalanced a teacup on my knee. At fiftym.p.h., I navigated the left and right turnswith what seemed like a twitch of thesteering wheel. The tires didn’t squeal.The car stayed level. I pushed the Porscheup into the mid-fifties. Every cone was un-touched. “Walk in the park!” Championexclaimed as we pulled to a stop.

Most of us think that S.U.V.s are muchsafer than sports cars. If you asked theyoung parents of America whether theywould rather strap their infant child in the

SCHIFF’S INSURANCE OBSERVER ~ (212) 724-2000 SEPTEMBER 9, 2005 3

SCHIFF’S INSURANCE OBSERVER ~ (212) 724-2000 SEPTEMBER 9, 2005 4

back seat of the TrailBlazer or the passen-ger seat of the Boxster, they would choosethe TrailBlazer. We feel that way because inthe TrailBlazer our chances of surviving acollision with a hypothetical tractor-trailerin the other lane are greater than they are inthe Porsche. What we forget, though, is thatin the TrailBlazer you’re also much morelikely to hit the tractor-trailer because youcan’t get out of the way in time. In the par-lance of the automobile world, theTrailBlazer is better at “passive safety.” TheBoxster is better when it comes to “activesafety,” which is every bit as important.

Consider the set of safety statistics(see the table to the right) compiled byTom Wenzel, a scientist at LawrenceBerkeley National Laboratory, inCalifornia, and Marc Ross, a physicist atthe University of Michigan. The numbersare expressed in fatalities per million cars,both for drivers of particular models andfor the drivers of the cars they hit. (For ex-ample, in the first case, for every millionToyota Avalons on the road, forty Avalondrivers die in car accidents every year, andtwenty people die in accidents involvingToyota Avalons.)

Are the best performers the biggest andheaviest vehicles on the road? Not at all.Among the safest cars are the midsize im-ports, like the Toyota Camry and theHonda Accord. Or consider the extraordi-nary performance of some subcompacts,like the Volkswagen Jetta. Drivers of thetiny Jetta die at a rate of just forty-seven permillion, which is in the same range as dri-vers of the five-thousand-pound ChevroletSuburban and almost half that of popularS.U.V. models like the Ford Explorer or theGMC Jimmy. In a head-on crash, anExplorer or a Suburban would crush a Jettaor a Camry. But, clearly, the drivers ofCamrys and Jettas are finding a way to avoidhead-on crashes with Explorers andSuburbans. The benefits of being nim-ble—of being in an automobile that’s capa-ble of staying out of trouble—are in manycases greater than the benefits of being big.

I had another lesson in active safety atthe test track when I got in the TrailBlazerwith another Consumers Union engineer,and we did three emergency-stoppingtests, taking the Chevrolet up to sixtym.p.h. and then slamming on the brakes.It was not a pleasant exercise. Bringingfive thousand pounds of rubber and steelto a sudden stop involves lots of lurching,screeching, and protesting. The first time,

the TrailBlazer took 146.2 feet to come toa halt, the second time 151.6 feet, and thethird time 153.4 feet. The Boxster cancome to a complete stop from sixty m.p.h.in about 124 feet. That’s a difference ofabout two car lengths, and it isn’t hard toimagine any number of scenarios wheretwo car lengths could mean the differencebetween life and death.

The S.U.V. boom represents, then,a shift in how we conceive ofsafety—from active to passive. It’s

what happens when a larger number of

drivers conclude, consciously or other-wise, that the extra thirty feet that theTrailBlazer takes to come to a stop don’treally matter, that the tractor-trailer willhit them anyway, and that they are betteroff treating accidents as inevitable ratherthan avoidable. “The metric that peopleuse is size,” says Stephen Popiel, a vice-president of Millward Brown Goldfarb, inToronto, one of the leading automotivemarket-research firms. “The bigger some-thing is, the safer it is. In the consumer’smind, the basic equation is, If I were totake this vehicle and drive it into this

Driver OtherMake/Model Type Deaths Deaths Total

Toyota Avalon large 40 20 60Chrysler Town & Country minivan 31 36 67Toyota Camry mid-size 41 29 70Volkswagen Jetta subcompact 47 23 70Ford Windstar minivan 37 35 72

Nissan Maxima mid-size 53 26 79Honda Accord mid-size 54 27 82Chevrolet Venture minivan 51 34 85Buick Century mid-size 70 23 93Subaru Legacy/Outback compact 74 24 98

Mazda 626 compact 70 29 99Chevrolet Malibu mid-size 71 34 105Chevrolet Suburban S.U.V. 46 59 105Jeep Grand Cherokee S.U.V. 61 44 106Honda Civic subcompact 84 25 109

Toyota Corolla subcompact 81 29 110Ford Expedition S.U.V. 55 57 112GMC Jimmy S.U.V. 76 39 114Ford Taurus mid-size 78 39 117Nissan Altima compact 72 49 121

Mercury Marquis large 80 43 123Nissan Sentra subcompact 95 34 129Toyota 4Runner S.U.V. 94 43 137Chevrolet Tahoe S.U.V. 68 74 141Dodge Stratus mid-size 103 40 143

Lincoln Town Car large 100 47 147Ford Explorer S.U.V. 88 60 148Pontiac Grand Am compact 118 39 157Toyota Tacoma pickup 111 59 171Chevrolet Cavalier subcompact 146 41 186

Dodge Neon subcompact 161 39 199Pontiac Sunfire subcompact 158 44 202Ford F-Series pickup 110 128 238

Fatalities per Million Cars

SCHIFF’S INSURANCE OBSERVER ~ (212) 724-2000 SEPTEMBER 9, 2005 5

brick wall, the more metal there is in frontof me the better off I’ll be.”

This is a new idea, and one largely con-fined to North America. In Europe andJapan, people think of a safe car as a nim-ble car. That’s why they build cars like theJetta and the Camry, which are designedto carry out the driver’s wishes as directlyand efficiently as possible. In the Jetta,the engine is clearly audible. The steeringis light and precise. The brakes are crisp.The wheelbase is short enough that thecar picks up the undulations of the road.The car is so small and close to theground, and so dwarfed by other cars onthe road, that an intelligent driver is con-stantly reminded of the necessity of dri-ving safely and defensively. An S.U.V.embodies the opposite logic. The driver isseated as high and far from the road aspossible. The vehicle is designed to over-come its environment, not to respond to it.Even four-wheel drive, seemingly themost beneficial feature of the S.U.V.,serves to reinforce this isolation. Havingthe engine provide power to all fourwheels, safety experts point out, doesnothing to improve braking, althoughmany S.U.V. owners erroneously believethis to be the case. Nor does the featurenecessarily make it safer to turn across aslippery surface: that is largely a functionof how much friction is generated by thevehicle’s tires. All it really does is improvewhat engineers call tracking—that is, theability to accelerate without slipping inperilous conditions or in deep snow ormud. Champion says that one of the oc-casions when he came closest to death wasa snowy day, many years ago, just after hehad bought a new Range Rover.“Everyone around me was slipping, and Iwas thinking, Yeahhh. And I came to astop sign on a major road, and I was dri-ving probably twice as fast as I shouldhave been, because I could. I had traction.But I also weighed probably twice asmuch as most cars. And I still had onlyfour brakes and four tires on the road. Islid right across a four-lane road.” Four-wheel drive robs the driver of feedback.“The car driver whose wheels spin onceor twice while backing out of the drive-way knows that the road is slippery,”Bradsher writes. “The SUV driver whonavigates the driveway and street withoutdifficulty until she tries to brake may notfind out that the road is slippery until it istoo late.” Jettas are safe because they

make their drivers feel unsafe. S.U.V.s areunsafe because they make their driversfeel safe. That feeling of safety isn’t thesolution; it’s the problem.

Perhaps the most troublesome as-pect of S.U.V. culture is its atti-tude toward risk. “Safety, for mostautomotive consumers, has to do

with the notion that they aren’t in com-plete control,” Popiel says. “There are un-expected events that at any moment intime can come out and impact them—anoil patch up ahead, an eighteen-wheelerturning over, something falling down.People feel that the elements of the worldout of their control are the ones that aregoing to cause them distress.”

Of course, those things really aren’toutside a driver’s control: an alert driver, inthe right kind of vehicle, can navigate theoil patch, avoid the truck, and swervearound the thing that’s falling down.Traffic-fatality rates vary strongly withdriver behavior. Drunks are 7.6 timesmore likely to die in accidents than non-drinkers. People who wear their seat beltsare almost half as likely to die as thosewho don’t buckle up. Forty-year-olds areone-tenth as likely to get into accidentsthan sixteen-year-olds. Drivers of mini-vans, Wenzel and Ross’s statistics tell us,die at a fraction of the rate of drivers ofpickup trucks. That’s clearly becauseminivans are family cars, and parents withchildren in the back seat are less likely toget into accidents. Frank McKenna, asafety expert at the University of Reading,in England, has done experiments wherehe shows drivers a series of videotapedscenarios—a child running out the frontdoor of his house and onto the street, forexample, or a car approaching an inter-section at too great a speed to stop at thered light—and asks people to press a but-ton the minute they become aware of thepotential for an accident. Experienceddrivers press the button between half asecond and a second faster than new dri-vers, which, given that car accidents areevents measured in milliseconds, is a sig-nificant difference. McKenna’s workshows that, with experience, we all learnhow to exert some degree of control overwhat might otherwise appear to be un-controllable events. Any conception ofsafety that revolves entirely around thevehicle, then, is incomplete. Is theBoxster safer than the TrailBlazer? It de-

pends on who’s behind the wheel. In thehands of, say, my very respectable andprudent middle-aged mother, the Boxsteris by far the safer car. In my hands, it prob-ably isn’t. On the open road, my reactionto the Porsche’s extraordinary road man-ners and the sweet, irresistible wail of itsengine would be to drive much faster thanI should. (At the end of my day atConsumers Union, I parked the Boxster,and immediately got into my own car todrive home. In my mind, I was still at thewheel of the Boxster. Within twenty min-utes, I had a $271 speeding ticket.) Thetrouble with the S.U.V. ascendancy is thatit excludes the really critical component ofsafety: the driver.

In psychology, there is a concept calledlearned helplessness, which arose from a se-ries of animal experiments in the 1960’s atthe University of Pennsylvania. Dogs wererestrained by a harness, so that they couldn’tmove, and then repeatedly subjected to aseries of electrical shocks. Then the samedogs were shocked again, only this timethey could easily escape by jumping over alow hurdle. But most of them didn’t; theyjust huddled in the corner, no longer be-lieving that there was anything they coulddo to influence their own fate. Learnedhelplessness is now thought to play a role insuch phenomena as depression and the fail-ure of battered women to leave their hus-bands, but one could easily apply it morewidely. We live in an age, after all, that isstrangely fixated on the idea of helpless-ness: we’re fascinated by hurricanes andterrorist acts and epidemics like SARS—situations in which we feel powerless to af-fect our own destiny. In fact, the risks posedto life and limb by forces outside our con-trol are dwarfed by the factors we can con-trol. Our fixation with helplessness distortsour perceptions of risk. “When you feelsafe, you can be passive,” Rapaille says ofthe fundamental appeal of the S.U.V. “Safemeans I can sleep. I can give up control. Ican relax. I can take off my shoes. I can lis-ten to music.” For years, we’ve all made funof the middle-aged man who suddenlytrades in his sedate family sedan for a shinyred sports car. That’s called a midlife crisis.But at least it involves some degree of en-gagement with the act of driving. The manwho gives up his sedate family sedan for anS.U.V. is saying something far more trou-bling—that he finds the demands of theroad to be overwhelming. Is acting out re-ally worse than giving up? continued

SCHIFF’S INSURANCE OBSERVER ~ (212) 724-2000 SEPTEMBER 9, 2005 6

On August 9, 2000, theBridgestone Firestone tirecompany announced one ofthe largest product recalls in

American history. Because of mountingconcerns about safety, the company said,it was replacing some fourteen milliontires that had been used primarily on theFord Explorer S.U.V. The cost of the re-call—and of a follow-up replacement pro-gram initiated by Ford a year later—raninto billions of dollars. Millions more werespent by both companies on fighting andsettling lawsuits from Explorer owners,who alleged that their tires had come apartand caused their S.U.V.s to roll over. In thefall of that year, senior executives fromboth companies were called to CapitolHill, where they were publicly berated. Itwas the biggest scandal to hit the auto-mobile industry in years. It was also one ofthe strangest. According to federalrecords, the number of fatalities resultingfrom the failure of a Firestone tire on aFord Explorer S.U.V., as of September,2001, was two hundred and seventy-one.That sounds like a lot, until you remem-ber that the total number of tires suppliedby Firestone to the Explorer from the mo-ment the S.U.V. was introduced by Ford,in 1990, was fourteen million, and that theaverage life span of a tire is forty-fivethousand miles. The allegation againstFirestone amounts to the claim that itstires failed, with fatal results, two hundredand seventy-one times in the course of sixhundred and thirty billion vehicle miles.Manufacturers usually win prizes for fail-ure rates that low. It’s also worth remem-bering that during that same ten-year spanalmost half a million Americans died intraffic accidents. In other words, duringthe nineteen-nineties hundreds of thou-sands of people were killed on the roadsbecause they drove too fast or ran redlights or drank too much. And, of those, afair proportion involved people in S.U.V.swho were lulled by their four-wheel driveinto driving recklessly on slick roads, whodrove aggressively because they felt in-vulnerable, who disproportionately killedthose they hit because they chose to drivetrucks with inflexible steel-frame archi-tecture, and who crashed because theycouldn’t bring their five-thousand-poundvehicles to a halt in time. Yet, out of allthose fatalities, regulators, the legal pro-fession, Congress, and the media chose tohighlight the .0005 percent that could be

linked to an alleged defect in the vehicle.But should that come as a surprise? In

the age of the S.U.V., this is what peopleworry about when they worry aboutsafety—not risks, however commonplace,involving their own behavior, but risks,however rare, involving some unexpectedevent. The Explorer was big and impos-ing. It was high above the ground. Youcould look down on other drivers. Youcould see if someone was lurking behind orbeneath it. You could drive it up on some-one’s lawn with impunity. Didn’t it seemlike the safest vehicle in the world.

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of “TheTipping Point: How Little Things Can MakeA Big Difference.” His most recent book,“Blink: The Power of Thinking WithoutThinking,” was published this year.