Dealing With Wheeling : Those cool-looking sport utility vehicles are all the rage now, but owners should learn the basics to avoid an off-road headache or disaster, O.C. experts warn.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Two men, headed back from a camping trip in Mexico and caught in the usual South County freeway snarl, saw a way out: Hey, we’re in an off-road vehicle, right? Let’s go off-road.

They turned onto Camino Capistrano, and when it dead-ended at a mini-wilderness, they kicked in the four-wheel drive and headed across the railroad tracks that run atop a steep, gravel-sided embankment.

Up one side they went, over the top and . . . nowhere else. Their vehicle was astraddle the rails like a teeter-totter, all four wheels off the ground.

And, yes, they could see a train coming.

Their ignorance of what a four-wheel-drive vehicle can and cannot do cost them a totaled vehicle, a huge bill from Amtrak for a dented locomotive and considerable embarrassment--but not their lives. Some are not so lucky.

One man, taking two friends up the Santiago Peak road, simply didn’t know the turning radius of his four-wheeler and took a hairpin turn too wide. The vehicle rolled down the steep slope, killing all three men.

And only two weeks ago a man taking his brand-new four-wheeler into Trabuco Canyon to try it out in the rain found he had gone too far. Stuck behind a flooded creek, he tried to help his 11-year-old companion wade across, but the boy was swept away and drowned.

“People buy these vehicles, and all of a sudden they feel invincible,” says Harry Lewellyn of Anaheim Hills, who writes articles and newsletters about off-road driving and teaches its techniques.

“How many times do you see in TV commercials one of these vehicles on top of a mountain by an impossible canyon? They dropped that vehicle and those people there by helicopter. But some people come straight from these jump-and-splash commercials and try to emulate them.”

When things go wrong, “most of the time it’s people with standard Blazers or Broncos who have just gotten it for Christmas or something,” says John Watts, a reserve captain with the Orange County sheriff’s search-and-rescue force. “They don’t have an understanding of the difference between four-wheel drive on dirt and two-wheel drive on concrete.”

*

Most don’t need to understand. What the automotive industry calls the sport utility vehicle or SUV--a cross between a passenger car and a light truck--has become an upscale status symbol, and about 95% never leave the pavement, says George Peterson, president of AutoPacific Inc. in Santa Ana, an automotive consulting firm. In fact, 60% of the sport vehicles sold in California are two-wheel-drive versions, Peterson says.

The typical sport vehicle owner is a 37-year-old father--a manager, administrator or professional with an annual household income of $71,000 who wants to assume the vehicle’s “tough and rugged” image. The other kind of vehicle that most closely matches this owner profile is the sports or “sporty” car.

The sport vehicle is probably this man’s second car, says Peterson, for while two-thirds of them are owned by men, more than half are driven by women. These women like sport vehicles because they wouldn’t be caught dead in a minivan. “The minivan has become the station wagon of the ‘90s,” a symbol of parental practicality, he says. “The SUV says ‘younger.’

“Plus, they sit up high over the road, and they feel they don’t have to be intimidated by other drivers around. It’s a don’t-mess-with-me statement. They’re very practical, too--you can haul a lot of things in them--and they can be very luxurious. Anything you find in a Lincoln you can find in a sport utility vehicle.”

What attracts the men, however, is what the industry calls the “occasional-use prerogative,” Peterson says. Driving along a freeway, they see a winding dirt road disappear into the hills and get satisfaction in believing “I could go there if I wanted to.”

“They want to be able to do it,” Peterson says, “but they rarely do it.”

Which is just as well, says Mike Lundquist, training coordinator for the California Highway Patrol in Santa Ana. “Many have no clue how to drive them off the pavement, and there is no requirement that you receive any kind of special instruction. But when it rains a little and there’s snow on top of Saddleback, they say, ‘Hey, I got a four-wheeler. Let’s go.’ ”

But there is a long list of important factors they may not understand.

* Sport vehicles are top-heavy.

It says so right on the dashboard or sun visor in a warning label required by law. Not only are sport vehicles set higher off the ground for better road clearance, their bodies are taller and wheel bases narrower than that of the usual passenger car. Add to that several cases of beer strapped to the roof rack and you’ve got a vehicle that is, well, tipsy.

This height has the effect of giving the driver a feeling of invincibility while at the same time making him or her more vulnerable to rolling the vehicle. Federal highway statistics show that in proportion to the number of vehicles on the road, sport vehicles have no more fatal accidents than ordinary passenger cars, but they have three times the rate of rollover fatalities.

Fewer than 10% of these rollovers occur on the road pavement. “Going around a curve and rolling is very rare,” says Barry Felrice, an associate administrator at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

More than 90% occur when the vehicle, usually because of a driver’s mistake, leaves the pavement and goes onto a soft shoulder. The federal statistics don’t include the numerous rollovers that occur away from public roads and highways.

* Sport vehicles abide by the laws of physics.

“In general, they are heavier and beefier,” says Bob Knoll, director of automotive testing for Consumer Reports magazine. “Depending on your emotional makeup, this might give you the push you need to be more aggressive.

“Then overlay the fact that most of them have inferior handling capability to passenger cars. They steer slower, they’re somewhat more cumbersome and clumsy. So we have a person sitting with a high, commanding view, feeling bigger and stronger than anybody, and now he’s got four-wheel drive. If he believes all the hype, he believes he can go anywhere, do anything and not be limited by the laws of physics and gravity.

“It’s only in the commercials they’re going like the hammers of hell. You always see these things flying through the air, but you never see them land, and you never see them move afterward. If you’re really off the road, you should be just picking your way.”

In the Snow Belt, where four-wheel-drive vehicles are supposed to be at their best, it is common to see them crashed onto the medians and shoulders of icy highways where ordinary cars continue to crawl by, Knoll says.

The reason is that while four-wheel drive provides greatly superior traction, it provides nothing else. “You can go like hell, but you can’t stop or turn any better than a passenger car. For sensible people, they offer a tremendous advantage--you can get up icy driveways--but for those who feel invincible, all it does it put them in the ditch.”

* Sport vehicles are usually more capable than their drivers.

“What four-wheel drive means to many people is they’ll be farther off the road when they get stuck,” Knoll says. “Literally, that’s what’s going to happen to them. In a regular car, they’d get stuck early and could walk back to the road.”

Lewellyn says that the first thing he does in his off-road driving field trips is lead his students into an area where they will get stuck in order to erode their illusions of invincibility. Then he shows them the tricks.

Some are rather basic. Some students don’t even know how to put their SUVs into four-wheel drive, Lewellyn says. They assumed they were in four-wheel drive all the time.

Most don’t realize that a slope you can descend may be too steep to climb back to the road. Such a mistake on Santiago Peak required a helicopter to lift out the stranded sport vehicle--at a cost nearly equaling the price of the vehicle.

Stuck far from roads and telephones, these drivers often are grateful to see another four-wheeler come up and offer help. Sometimes, however, the help is just another a hazard.

“Guys with tow ropes and winches love to pull out other people,” Watts says. Unfortunately, they often are no better trained than the driver in trouble.

“They pull off bumpers, and now the guy who’s stuck is mad. We have to go up and mediate this a lot.

“One guy was stuck in a stream bed, and another who was trying to pull him out just jerked the rear axel right out. You have to dig it out first, but they don’t know that. The tow trucks that come out have chains, matting, winches, wood cribbing, shovels, all sorts of stuff, but that doesn’t sink in.”

* Sport vehicles hate water.

But their drivers love it. It makes mud and fills up streams in the canyons, and both are a lot of fun to splash through. Then when people get stuck, they call for help. “This happens every time it rains here,” Watts says. “Every time it rains.

“They watch programs like ‘Baywatch,’ ‘CHiPS,’ those tractor-pull shows, and they figure they know everything there is to know about vehicles and rain.” In fact, Watts says, they are appallingly ignorant about water in the wilds, and that ignorance is the greatest danger they face.

Having driven deep into, say, Trabuco Canyon and come upon a rain-swollen stream, they utter what Watts considers the death mantra of the naive off-roader: “It’s only two feet deep.”

While the “two feet” may be true, the “only” is false, Watts says. The stream that swept the 11-year-old to his death two weeks ago was barely deeper, he says.

“Their experience is with the surf or the water hose. They see it’s only 10 feet wide, two feet deep, and they’ve waded in water like that before. They don’t understand that this isn’t just water.”

It’s rushing faster than it appears, Watts says. The water beneath the surface travels faster than the water on top, perhaps 35 m.p.h., which by itself exerts tremendous force.

But the water is also supersaturated with silt, making it much heavier, he says. The speed and increased density of the water make it capable of carrying along at high speeds rocks that it couldn’t normally move at all.

“Just a foot or two of water will move a bowling ball-size rock, and not just one. There’s boulders, pebbles, rocks, pieces of wood, dirt, branches. If you step into that, you’re going to get hit by a rock. You break your ankle, and you fall to your knees. Now you break your knee. Then you fall, you get hit in the head and you’re dead. You were trying to cross a series of thrown rocks. It’s exactly like stepping into a cement mixer.”

Sending your sport vehicle in will have much the same result, he says.

Small, light vehicles will start to slide sideways, and if drivers can’t get to the other bank quickly, the vehicle may float or fill with water and be washed away. Even “dualies”--with dual rear wheels, typically the biggest and heaviest of the sport vehicles--will be “beaten into submission” in two feet of such water, Watts says.

Trying such a crossing is almost always unnecessary. Creeks swell rapidly during a storm--it’s the “flash flood” always mentioned in weather forecasts--but they recede just as quickly, Watts says. If the people in Trabuco Canyon had climbed back into their sport vehicles and waited two hours, they could have crossed the stream easily, he says. No one would have drowned.

* Sport vehicles can be your friend.

Just learn a few basics.

Watts says that at the very least, drivers should find a safe, open space and get to know how their vehicles behave on dirt while in four-wheel drive. They should learn to judge exactly where their wheels are. They should check the amount of their vehicles’ “wheel cheat”--the difference between the track of the front wheels and the track of the rear wheels while turning.

Lewellyn says books, magazines, community college courses and field trips can teach drivers how to judge terrain and whether they and their vehicle can cope with it.

And Knoll says the little book that came with the vehicle, “the least-read book in the world,” has plenty of good advice about off-road driving.

“They’re getting very good now,” he says. “They’re almost interesting.”