Caution: We Brake for Newton

Big people drive big cars. If one generalization seems safe in modern America, it is that the richer or more important you are, the more tons of steel and tinted glass you ride around in. Little people, if they drive at all, drive little cars, and you know without getting out your high school physics book what happens when big cars hit little cars. Perhaps it is fitting in some Darwinian way; we lowly ones in our eggshells offer minimal resistance as the Trumps and Keatings crunch over us, car phones in hand, on the way to their bankruptcy hearings and leveraged buyouts. Indeed, it seems part of the American Dream to become rich enough to wrap oneself in so much tanklike armor that one barely feels the bump of the riffraff undertire. But now that dream is under attack, according to an organization calling itself the Coalition for Vehicle Choice. According to the coalition, a collection of the usual well- meaning but misguided dupes, liberals, Congressmen, pessimists and wimps is threatening to make us all drive weenie cars by raising the required gas mileage of new autos.

The point was made bluntly with a full-page ad in the New York Times that featured a photograph of a large car demolishing a smaller one. A headline blared in big black type, THE LAWS OF PHYSICS CANNOT BE LEGISLATED AWAY. The occasion for this uplifting lesson is the debate on George Bush's energy plan, which emphasizes domestic energy production to the exclusion of conservation. Environmentalists point out that raising fuel-economy standards from 27.5 m.p.g. to 34 (Honda and Toyota just announced they would start selling some cars with engines that do twice as well) would save more oil than expedited drilling in Alaska could provide. The carmakers clearly wanted to nip that idea in the bud. Efficient cars are smaller cars, and therefore fuel economy, they say, is dangerous to your health.

As a science writer, I have to commend the coalition for this attempt to introduce physics into the national discourse, which surely needs an intellectual lift, but there are problems. Big cars are safer only for the people who happen to be riding in them at the time, much the way that Uzis are safer only for the people holding them. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration doesn't count the number of lungs damaged by ozone from automobile exhaust. The birds and seals suffering and dying along whatever pristine coast an oil tanker chooses to run aground on don't make the tally. But they are traffic victims, as surely as are pedestrians run over in a crosswalk.