Get Outta My Way!(Column)(Product Announcement)

The view from the driver's seat of a GMC Yukon XL Denali is nothing short of commanding. From here, a driver feels omnipotent, like a swaggering despot looking down his nose on subjects scurrying like frightened ants. That was how I felt the other day, as I took the nine- passenger, 18-foot-3, two-and-a-half-ton, 310hp, 12mpg behemoth out for a test-drive. As someone who swears by his fuel-efficient compact car, I wasn't looking to buy one of these hot-selling monster trucks--which the automobile industry euphemistically calls "sport utility vehicles," to distance them from their exhaust-belching, fuel-guzzling, 18-heeled cousins. But I did want to know why my countrymen keep buying them, even as we earn other nations' scorn for leading the world in greenhouse-gas emissions and fuel consumption.

A cheerful dealer named Manny greeted me. (It's no minor affront to environmentalists that most SUVs are named after pristine wilderness; but the Yukon XL Denali pushes the marketing envelope by bearing the name of both a verdant Canadian territory and a spectacular Alaskan park.) The sticker price--$50,109--gave me a jolt. But I said I wanted my wife to feel safe. "That's what everyone says," Manny told me. "The more of these things that are on the road, the more unsafe all the other drivers feel... until they buy one themselves." It's the old cold-war theory of mutually assured destruction, updated for America's highways.

Manny hands me the keys. Climbing into this beast is like using a complicated piece of exercise equipment for the first time. You don't know where to put your arm to pull yourself up, or how your left foot gets into the car while your right foot is still on the ground. The Yukon XL Denali is so big, in fact, that passengers in the rear seats have their own radio controls so they can listen to different stations from the driver.

On the road, I feel as if I am driving a large, sodden sponge. Unlike a car, an SUV approaches the road like an ameba approaches a piece of food. Potholes are not merely absorbed but swallowed with a springy belch of the tractor-grade suspension system. The absolute power of a Yukon XL Denali corrupts absolutely. Even driving on the Brooklyn- Queens Expressway--one of the most arteriosclerotic of the nation's thoroughfares--I feel so invulnerable that only when I look down at the speedometer do I realize I'm going 90mph. And I find myself driving far more ...