People like to say that the choice to buy an SUV is driven by practicality.

But minivans and station wagons are amazingly practical while also being less harmful to other road users and less likely to rollover than a top-heavy SUV. But they get ignored because SUVs are cool and minivans and station wagons are not.

What sucks is that huge, heavy EVs like the Hummer EV are going to create a domino effect that will force other classes of cars to get bigger.

Crash tests are being redesigned to account for the emergence of heavier, taller vehicles. That means that smaller cars will need to be beefed up (i.e., get larger and more expensive) in order to protect their passengers.

This new test by the IIHS is a great example of that. It was designed to better simulate the impact from a truck or SUV than prior tests. Popular cars like the Camry and Altima performed poorly on this new test and, as a result, Toyota and Nissan essentially have no choice but to make next the generation of those cars larger and heavier in order to get good safety ratings.