Why do people drive unnecessarily large cars (AKA "SUVS")?

Theoretical, at most, and still requires a person to create danger (often someone outside the vehicle). And largely irrelevant in a country with 300,000,000+ vehicle-kilometres between any cause of fatality.

And of course we know that complaints about SUVs are insidious, since the people whining about them have a broader agenda that would not stop there. Ergo the exaggerated bs complaints about SUVs cannot be taken in isolation.

So I say **** it. If you want an SUV, buy one. Just make you drive it in a reasonable manner, like the vast majority of Irish drivers.

How do these threads relate to the "the vast majority" of Irelands 3,257,621 drivers?

And how do you explain Ireland having among the lowest rankings globally for road fatalities? Or having approximately 300,000,000 vehicle-kilometres between any cause fatalities? Or a supermajority of pedestrian fatalities being caused by the pedestrian, not the driver?

But hey, at least you proved one thing: that we can't take whining about SUVs in isolation - it's an insidious part of something bigger. Thanks for proving that :)

Quite the opposite - it shows that grossly irresponsible road use is what causes fatalities and vehicle size is at most a secondary (and in this country theoretical) factor.

Yes, this handful of examples could indeed be a representative sample of the other 3.257+ million drivers in Ireland.

Or, as it more likely, it is representative of a portion of bad drivers and you're (again) lying about the rest.

False. It means they very likely drove in a reasonable manner. As I think it was you who pointed out, some drivers avoid serious accidents by sheer dumb luck - but by definition sheer dumb luck only protects to a limited and highly unpredictable extent. If bad driving was as commonplace as Andy et. al. claims, it would be showing in the statistics.

So you claim - but there are over 3.25 million drivers in Ireland - how many of them are you trying to slur with this nonsense?

You could say that, but you’d be wrong.

Again, that "if" is carrying a lot of weight.

Firstly, as someone asked above, how do you define an SUV?

Secondly, is this a practical, realistic concern for an individual driver? Given that have the basis data for all-cause fatalities, in order to show a practical concern, not a theoretical one, you need to show how often children die as a result of collisions with SUVs who would have survived had they caused a collision with a car.

I suspect the number would go from ~3 incidents per billion vehicle-kilometres to a figure far, far lower.

And we cannot leave aside that claims about the supposed dangers of SUVs in Ireland are inherently linked to others, and that even if we replaced every SUV with a Toyota Aygo, the demonisation of drivers in certain quarters would continue, the usual suspects would just move on to some other demand for more taxes, more regulations, more restrictions, more enforcement and so forth.