This guy ties grill height directly to fatalities. They really are a menace, but it's by design. Quoth one designer, "I want it to look like a fist coming through the air."
> “SUV buyers want to be able to take on street gangs with their vehicles and run them down”
This was in 2002 …
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ebd0080238e863d04911...
> The point of these explicit associations with violence was not to reflect a growing brutalisation of society, but to identify people the market researchers describe as “especially self-centred”.
Which would contradict my guess: They're actually going after self-centered buyers, not necessarily angry, belligerent ones.