You might be interested in The High and the Mighty. It's more recent, about the boom in SUVs at the end of the 90s. It came out right before gas prices spiked in the mid 2000s. It ends with a bunch of questions that kind of got delayed b/c of the high gas prices, but are relevant again.

The part you might like about it is it looks at how the design eased insecurities in society and played into certain ideas of toughness/ruggedness but also sort of addressed women's desires that had been ignored up until then that were positive in one way, but still used safety standards that basically ignored women and had negative impacts in other ways.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/832299.High_and_Mighty