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In a report to company shareholders, Ford Chairman William C. Ford, the great-grandson of Henry Ford, said that the company recognized the environmental impact of SUVs, which account for one-fifth of the company's sales, and was seeking technological solutions to address it. But he said that the company would continue to build SUVs to keep up with the strong market demand.

Ford told reporters he did not want his company to end up in the court of public opinion being linked with tobacco companies, which continue to manufacture a product that causes serious health damage (and have suffered enormous financial judgments against them). He pointed out that Ford had voluntarily kept tailpipe pollution emission well below legally permitted levels, and had voluntarily put bars below the bumpers of its Ford Excursion -- which weighs twice as much as a Jeep Grand Cherokee and gets 10 miles to the gallon in the city -- in order to diminish harm to other cars in collisions, though safety laws did not require the bar.

"If we did not provide that vehicle someone else would," Ford said, "and they wouldn't provide it as responsibly as we do." 

Salon asked a number of people involved in transportation and environmental issues for their reaction to Ford's announcement.

Ron Harbour is president of Harbour & Associates in Detroit, which tracks the automobile industry.

It's kind of surprising [Ford] would make this kind of comment because SUVs are very important to the company. They make up more than 20 percent of Ford's U.S. sales. Bill Ford has been trying to put a green face forward, but it's a little contradictory because the company keeps introducing new SUVs. The whole issue about emissions and fuel economy is relative to size. Ford could make smaller SUVs, but that's not what people want. You can't blame Ford for building them, because that's what consumers are buying. Ford has built smaller SUVs and no one buys them. As long as fuel is relatively inexpensive, SUVs will remain affordable and people will still want them. Companies have a choice not to make them, but they'll be dramatically less profitable. So I guess they'll just apologize for them. But it's not like they're doing some dastardly deed. They're just satisfying customer needs.

Daniel Becker is director of global warming and the energy program for the Sierra Club.

The auto industry has denied for years that anything is wrong with these vehicles. But [Bill Ford] told my boss that if Ford doesn't improve emissions from its vehicles, the Sierra Club will turn it into the tobacco industry of the 21st century.

Ford has a long way to go. They make the Excursion, which we've named the Exxon Valdez of vehicles. It only gets 12 miles per gallon. It's the most polluting vehicle ever made. It creates 134 tons of global warming pollution over its 124,000-mile life expectancy. We'll watch and see what they do. We're very hopeful. I hope what they're doing is giving shareholders and analysts advance notice that they will put cleaner technology on their vehicles. If they're blowing smoke, we'll find out soon enough. This could have tremendous impact on the industry because if Ford makes cleaner vehicles, everyone else would follow. Auto companies are responsible for the SUV problem because consumers haven't had a chance to buy cleaner SUVs.

Jerry Taylor is the director of Natural Resource studies for the Cato Institute.

The Ford announcement is awfully weird. It seems really odd to me. This is just an example of corporate spin and P.R. For whatever reason, the company feels like they need to throw a sop to the environmentalists. The fellow from Ford basically said "Our products are really bad and harmful, but we're going to keeping selling them anyway." What the hell was that?

It's not entirely clear that fuel consumption has hurt the environment. Petroleum is growing more abundant, not more scarce, and auto emissions are not a real threat to public health. We've had massive gains in urban air quality at the same time so many SUVs are on the road. If Ford, however, feels that by all objective measures, their vehicles are harmful, then they have every right to say so.

But I disagree. If the environment is becoming cleaner and not more dirty, then I don't see a problem with SUVs. Even if SUVs did have an impact on pollution, there's no reason to stop driving them if that impact is marginal.

Environmentalists say that we don't really pay the true cost of fuel. What costs of gasoline aren't borne by consumers? It's nonsense. It's not true. The Clean Air Act put $30 to $50 billion of regulations on the oil industry, and that's passed right on to consumers. Ask an environmentalist, "What is the cost of a cubic foot of clean air?" and they answer: "I don't know."

Camille Paglia is a Salon columnist.

If I had the cash and the driveway space for two cars, I'd definitely buy an SUV (I've been ogling the gunmetal-silver, leather-lined, deluxe Nissan Pathfinder for years). But it's not a very practical vehicle for negotiating the mad congestion and pretzeling ramps of the Northeastern corridor.

As a gas-guzzler, the SUV is a cultural throwback to the grandiose, shark-fin Cadillac battleships of the 1950s, when pumped-up, fetishistically buffed American cars lorded it over the puny ladybugs (Volkswagen, Fiat, Renault) of economically pinched postwar Europe.

My quarrel with the SUV is that 75 percent of East Coast owners don't know how the hell to drive it. I go white with fear a dozen times a week as some white, middle-class soccer mom in a trance rockets past in an SUV with one hand on the wheel and the other on a cell phone pressed to her ear: She can neither signal nor safely steer through turns, which the massive, high-held weight of the SUV makes especially tricky.

Monica Lewinsky's embarrassing wipeout on a California highway last year shows that the problem is not the SUV; it's ditzy owners of both sexes who need primers on how to handle a quasi-military vehicle. I blame auto companies not for making and selling the SUV but for their failure to educate the public about the difficulties and dangers of driving an armored tank on the open road.

Next page | David Horowitz: "The people have voted: They want SUVs"