I love my SUV, but…

…some people simply shouldn’t be driving them. And by “some people” I mean those people who can’t park them.

Let’s set aside the environmental argument for a minute, which I admit is valid. I’ll simply agree up front that there is an entire environmental-national security-big oil-is-strangling us argument to be made. We shan’t discuss the merits of it, because this post isn’t about that.

This post is about people who drive SUVs but have no freakin’ idea where they fit. This afternoon I watched my neighbor make 3 attempts to park his/her SUV. (I shall leave the pronoun vague to avoid appearing as though I have a gender bias.) He/She was trying to get this SUV, which isn’t even a full-sized model, into a parking space that had no cars on either side of it. None. And yet it took 3 tries to get this SUV anywhere near being in between the lines.

If you can’t park an SUV, you shouldn’t be driving it. Period. End of story. But too many families with kids buy these things to haul around all the crap that having kids requires. Why? My guess is because they don’t want to be stigmatized with a minivan. Minivans are “uncool”, so they buy SUVs instead.

Except that minivans drive better and are easier to both load and get in and out of. I’ve driven both, and if I had a family, I’d drive a minivan. And what happened to the station wagon option? Station wagons are being made by nearly every car maker these days, and I would wager that the average station wagon has as much cargo space as the average mid-size SUV, if not more. And they are easier to get into and load as well.

There should be a driving test to own an SUV. If you can’t park it on the first try at the dealer, he shouldn’t be able to sell it to you. That’s all I’m saying.

Oh, and on a related note, if you ever go into a Chevy dealer and ask for a Corvette with an automatic transmission, no matter how bad the traffic is where you live, it should be legal for the dealer to slap the sh*t out of you and send you packing. But that’s a discussion for another posting…