From talking to a few parents, the SUV craze is at least in part due to the perceived additional safety given that everyone else on the highway is driving a giant car. Probably stuck there.
In fairness, my most frequent form of transport is a rather large bus.
This goes back a long way. Even when I was a kid, I routinely heard other parents say they felt better with "a lot of steel" around them, not tooling around in some little tin can. In that sense, SUVs are just replacements for the full-size land yachts that everyone loved in the 50s and 60s. As it happens, I've always suspected that the safety/comfort argument is largely a pretense for people who just like to drive big cars, but it's a hard one to kill since there is, after all, a kernel of truth to it. Other things equal, a big, heavy car really is a bit safer than a small one if they hit each other.
