NEWS: Is It Wrong To Beat Up A Hummer?

If vandalism is expected, then said vandals should expect one day to show up at a hummer at the wrong time and get their fucking heads blown clean off. Doing stupid shit like this it's only a matter of time before they either murder someone for the cause or are in the wrong place at the wrong time and get killed by an angry car owner.

According to studies from the University of Washington and University of Virginia, vehicles in the light truck category - SUVs, pickups, and vans - are 3.4 times more likely to kill a pedestrian as compared to a typical car and 3 times more likely to cause serious injury if the pedestrian manages to live through the accident. I've seen fatality and serious injury numbers for car-SUV accidents somewhere before, too, and they were similarly high.

Anyway you shake it, a vehicle like an H2 has enormous costs to our society, with increased injury and fatality rates, increasing costs in road maintenance due to much higher GVW, and the whole horribly inefficient with respect to energy consumption issue.

Anyway, the auto industry's own marketing reports characterize SUV drivers as "insecure and vain" and "self-centered and self-absorbed." So there you go, that's why people buy SUVs.

While vandalism can be amusing and fun as long as you don't get caught, it's not generally very effective in advancing any sort of agenda.

Personally, I'd like to see fuel efficiency standards raised and rewritten to close loopholes that prevent some of these monsters from avoiding being counted. I'd also like to see a much larger gas guzzler sin tax slapped on 'em - like upwards of 50% -, and large SUVs of course being subject to that tax as well. And of course the dreaded increase in gasoline tax...

beat up, blown up, or at least shit in. i agree.
nice article. the video in the link is hillarious. this made my day.

"Need" has nothing to do with it. If you want one and can afford it, you can buy it. There's a lot of things we don't "need" that we are perfectly free to buy and enjoy.

I find it sad that you have such hostility toward an inanimate object. They don't "stand" for anything they're vehicles. And if people didn't buy them, they wouldn't make them.

And I wouldn't feel sorry for them if this happened either. I don't care what kind of vehicle someone owns or how you feel about it, you have no right to go vandalizing it to make some "statement".

It's not that simple, is it. If they didn't make them (and advertise them at vast expense - now why would that be?), people wouldn't buy them.

There's no good reason to drive a hummer or most anything beyond eating and sleeping and sex except that we like to do it, and it makes us happy. Everyone does different things to make themselves happy, except the main demographic on this website is predominantly young people with no money.

My coworkers all drive Lexuses, Porche Cayennes, BMW M-Series cars that get similar mileage to a hummer H2, and nobody really messes with them or beats up their cars. Maybe it's because despite being wasteful, they have taste?

So the best way to affect change is to remove all other options?

What about making owners of Hummer H2s pay more to offset the impact of their driving? Maybe if there was some sort of tax levied on every gallon of petrol, it would discourage high consumption and penalize higher utilization? Surely, such an idea would be unheard of.

Aww... the first 10 pages or so had me laughing my ass off... but by the end we got all serious again

That's not what I said; go look at it again. Since it was evidently not immediately understandable:
What I said was that the car manufacturers are actively driving the market. They are not just "responding to demand", as thrash242 implied; they are deliberately creating particular types of demand.

Works over here, at least to a certain extent. Fuel is still cheap enough that drivers let their cars idle when they could switch them off, so it can't be too much of a drag on the economy.

Fucking *yawn*.

I'm sorry. Was there a point?