Gas-guzzling death traps

The thing that annoys me about SUVs isn't that they guzzle gas or are unsafe, per se, but the conflation of causes that made it the most popular car model of the last 20 years. They just didn't deserve to be. American car companies were out of ideas, so they lobbied for what was essentially a truck, i.e. something to haul freight with and built a salon on top of it, to be legally recognised as a passenger vehicle. The public, compliant as ever thought that it was safe and roomy. But just because you're high up doesn't mean you win. It handles worse than an average American car, which already feels like toboganing down a hill on a sack of wet cement, mostly because it wasn't designed to go faster than 90 kilometers an hour or so. An overpowered engine that wastes an absurd amount of fuel to move considerably less weight than it could. It is also not an off-road vehicle, regardless of what the brand says, if you go off-road you might need suspension or a good differential, a manual gearbox. It's a horrible useless machine that just doesn't do any of the things people thought it could do. There is no reason to lament the downfall of the American car industry, they haven't done anything useful since the sixties, this is it's tomb.