Ah, the sport utility vehicle: leather-lined rectangles of metal that congest the streets of suburbia. One cannot go to the mall without being slammed against a huge gold-trimmed bumper of a Jeep Grand Cherokee or be impaled against the vast chrome grill of a Ford Explorer. Why such a boom of sport utility vehicle sales? No one uses them as they were intended, but who doubts the over 400,000-a-year Explorer buyers?

Now I don't think anyone who owns a sport utility vehicle actually "utilizes" them. I highly doubt that anyone would take their $30,000+ S.U.V. off-road. No one in his/her right mind wants to risk scratching the metallic paint or tracking mud onto the leather seats and velour carpeting. Despite what the commercials say, I don't see any Expeditions making expeditions up mountains nor do I see any Navigators navigating through some muddy forest. All I see are a couple of hundred Expeditions making needless expeditions to the local Starbucks and countless Navigators navigating the Neiman-Marcus parking lot. And besides, why explore the beauty of nature in your Explorer when you can explore the strange and exotic malls that dot the maps?

Maybe people buy sport utility vehicles for a sense of security. Darting through traffic, perched up high in a power-adjustable leather seat while the automatic climate control cools the vehicle and the 6-disc CD changers plays through the 11-speaker Bose sound system, not only makes one superior to that lowly commoner in a Yugo, it makes one feel in control of the road. This control, along with the overflow of luxury items, creates the sense of security and prestige that appeals to the power-hungry junior executives of America. To further add to that inflated sense of security, the four-wheel drive system assures you that you can whiz through the snow at 60-miles-per-hour to your own untimely death.

It's not the roaring power produced by the V-8 engine, the abundance of gold trim, or the bloated sense of security that accounts for the popularity of sport utility vehicles. It all comes down to this: they look really cool parked next to the Beemer. .