The Ford Expedition is really just a F-150 pickup. It costs 24k to make, but they sell it for $36k. The Lincoln Navigator is just a dressed up Expedition that sells for $46k! I can't believe that such an expensive car is on a pickup truck frame! That's just as cheap as bolting on ground effects to a Honda Civic!

"The Truth, underneath all the rationalizations (for buying S.U.V.s), seemed to be that S.U.V. buyers thought of big, heavy vehicles as safe: they found comfort in being surrounded by so much rubber and steel. To the engineers, of course, that didn't make any sense, either: if consumers really wanted something that was big and heavy and comforting, they ought to buy minivans, since minivans, with their unit-body construction, do much better in accidents than S.U.V.s"

The issue is continued in an online Q & A:

Does the relationship between passive safety and active safety change when the roads of the nation become lousy with S.U.V.s? In other words, when light trucks were only twenty per cent of the nation's vehicle fleet, active safety might have worked better. Does there come a point, at fifty per cent and rising, when how we judge a safe car has to change?

I would actually make the opposite case. If every car on the road was a Mini, then the cost of an accident would be quite small: if you are in a Mini and you hit a Mini, you aren't going to be that bad off. So, in the old days, the premium on active safety wasn't so large. On the other hand, if every car on the road is an S.U.V., the cost of an accident grows substantially. When a Ford Explorer hits a Chevy TrailBlazer, both parties suffer enormously. And, if a Ford Explorer hits a Mini, the Mini driver is a dead man. I’m more interested in active safety now than ever before. As a non-S.U.V. owner, I simply cannot afford to get into any accident at all these days.