NEW YORK - People buy sports-utility vehicles in order to feel safe. Cruising high above a sea of sedans in a three-ton chunk of Japanese steel as you gleefully sideswipe a defenseless Geo Metro, belching airborne pollutants at 9 miles a gallon, you can't help but revel in your role as an automotive Osama bin Laden. You're big! You're fast! You're really, really big! But SUV buyers are quickly finding that riding high doesn't necessarily mean riding smart.

This week alone, Isuzu recalled 1,945 Trooper SUVs to repair gearbox parts that can cause a sudden loss of drive to the wheels, and Chrysler took back 8,144 1998 Dodge Ram pickup trucks (which feature the same chasis design as SUVs) because they have a screw that can rub against a fuel line, causing a fire.

An "enhanced" billboard in San Francisco

Now the Federal Highway Administration is banning further installation of two of the most common types of guardrail because they cause full-size pickup trucks - and probably SUVs - to roll over in a crash. According to King K. Mak, supervisor of tests at the Texas Transportation Institute, the very feature that allows pickups to climb muddy unpaved roads - exposed wheels inside small wheel wells - also makes them climb the guardrails, which are used on hundreds of thousands of miles of federal highways. When two-wheel-drive pickups were driven into the guardrails at a 25-degree angle at 62 miles per hour, they rolled over consistently.

Since four-wheel-drive SUVs are based on the same chassis design as pickups and ride 2 to 3 inches higher off the ground, researchers believe that they too will fare poorly in encounters with these guardrails. And a federal review of national crash records found that SUVs are more than twice as likely as regular cars to roll over when hitting a guardrail.

And you thought God was dead.

With the possible exception of Slobodan Milosevic, there can't possibly be enough room in hell for the vicious, selfish thugs who drive these metallic monstrosities. Far from eliminating SUV-unfriendly guardrails, we ought to install them everywhere - let's get SUV road terrorists off the roads, dead or alive.

Consider the mentality of the typical consumer who buys one of these things:

Seduced by commercials depicting the beasts climbing the side of Mount McKinley, this suburban yuppie fancies himself a rugged individualist, a tough outdoorsman who tools around the outback, though fewer than 2 percent of SUVs ever leave a paved road.

For the SUV buyer, fuel conservation becomes an issue only when gas prices are high. When gas averages a mere Defense Department-subsidized buck per gallon, who cares about a little ozone depletion?

But the real reason people shell out $40,000 for a glorified station wagon is the Law of Conservation of Momentum. When an object is hit by another object three times heavier, it absorbs three times the shock of impact, three times the damage, three times the body count. In the case of an SUV hitting a standard passenger car, the height differential also favors the SUV. Since only relatively wealthy people can afford them, the driving public has become segregated into two classes, predator and prey. Buying an SUV makes a statement: I deserve to live more than you do. Let your children die so that mine may live.

In other words, SUV drivers are dumb. They hate the planet. And they hate you.

Until a decade ago, full-size pickups were a rural phenomenon, driven by people who needed to haul stuff around. But a loophole that exempts the relatively small number of pickups from fuel-emissions standards has been foolishly extended to SUVs. The result is nothing short of an environmental disaster; now that SUVs account for half of all new vehicles sold in the United States, we've wiped out decades of progress fighting air pollution. And unlike the old pickups, SUVs are too souped up for their huge size, making them far more dangerous to other cars. Furthermore, the SUV-related death toll will undoubtedly skyrocket in the next few years as used models become the car of choice for America's accident-prone teen drivers.

The problem is so huge that the reasonable solution would be an outright ban, but we live in a country where individual choice and corporate profits invariably win out over the public good. The only way to put an end to SUV madness is to ostracize the idiots who buy them. Whenever you walk past one in a parking lot, put your used gum on the windshield. Spit on it. Catch up on your shaving cream art skills. Disown anyone who buys one.

In the end, however, nothing is better than getting rid of both the SUV and the moron who buys one. Let's leave those guardrails where they are!

-Ted Rall, a cartoonist and columnist for Universal Press Syndicate, is author of "Revenge of the Latchkey Kids." Copyright 1998 Ted Rall

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