[Porsche-O-Phile]

You're lucky if you're hit by a kid in a car only weighing 2,000 pounds. I know you said 2,000+, but it's worth pointing out that more and more parents encourage their newly-minted drivers to get bigger and heavier vehicles for their own protection. This is not unexpected and it does make a certain amount of sense, but the unintended consequence is that it's touched off an "arms race" in recent years where everyone feels compelled to drive (or tell their kids to drive) the most obnoxiously large vehicle they can get their hands on. While it's good to want to protect your kids, and mass certainly helps with that, this logic runs afoul of common decency in that it deliberately "protects the kids" at the expense of everyone else. The goal becomes "be bigger/heavier than everyone else" which is another way of saying "be more likely to kill them than they are to kill you". So we've created the situation where we have our least experienced drivers rolling around in the most hazardous, highest-center-of-mass vehicles with the highest rollover potential, the greatest loss of control potential and the most likelihood to kill others due to size, weight and bumper height (right at head level of most "ordinary" cars).

Not sure what the solution here is, but it would be nice to see an emphasis on DEfensive rather than OFfensive strategy - choosing a car for your teen that's a bit smaller, better on gas, with good safety features, crumple zones, passenger cages, etc. is probably a bit more socially responsible than turning them loose in a 7,000# SUV.

Just something to think about.