1. I sat in the damn thing and realized that it was basically a very expensive, uncomfortable truck with not much room inside. 2. I drove it and realized that high center of gravity made it very, very unsafe. No maneuverability. 3. In the first few months that my ex drove it (like an asshole) he got FOUR, countem, tickets. 4. Between gas, insurance, and car payments, he was shelling out $800/month. That was some serious money we could have been spending on a million other things. 5. We split up.
[WS:] You did the right thing, Joanna. SUVs are asshole mobiles and it is a shame to even be seen in one. The only time I rode in one was when I visited my friend in New Jersey who owned some overpriced monstrosity whose name escapes me with a myriad of gadgets inside. She was basically a good person, but always status-conscious & doing everything to keep up with the Joneses, so she must have felt "obliged" to shell over 50 grand on an SUV when everyone in New Jersey seemed to own one.
Based on my casual and unscientific observations, SUV drivers are more likely to be assholes than drivers of other types of vehicles. They often take two parking spots - perhaps because the idiots do not know how to park the fucking thing properly - and they tend to drive more aggressively than others, cutting other people off, tailgating, blinding others with their high beams, etc.
I think the reason of that is two-fold. First, SUVs have a greater appeal to assholes, so assholes are more likely to buy and drive them than non-assholes. Secondly, their very design (height, mass, menacing look) and culture that surrounds them (the sense of status, entitlement) provokes asshole reactions in otherwise normal people who happen to drive them.
I was once bumped into by one of those monstrosities. The woman who drove the fucking thing tried to get into a parking spot and started backing without even looking who was behind her, and bumped into my Saturn. Instead of apologizing, she was annoyed and tried to minimize the whole thing telling me that "nothing happened." Indeed, the Saturn being made of plastic showed no visible signs of impact. I tried to be nice and did not file a police report, but later realized that the impact misaligned my lights to the tune of $50 to re-align them.
On another occasion, I was driving in the left lane of an interstate in York, PA to give way to the merging traffic. I was doing about 65 mph in a 50 mph zone, but that was too slow to an asshole mobile behind me who was tailgating and blinking his lights to force me into the right lane and the merging traffic. I was not yielding so the asshole got pissed and swerved to the right lane himself to overtake me and drove right into an 18-wheeler merging into the traffic. Not much happened to the 18-wheeler but the asshole mobile bounced and went off the road. I hate to admit that, but I felt a deep sense of schadenfreude.
Wojtek