Posted on 07/30/2008 7:46:30 AM PDT by SmithL
But it's coming fast. You can sense the shadow, the darkening, the imminent and oily doom. The dinosaurs are trembling, scribbling out their wills as fast as possible. They know the end is near, the signs are all in place, as that giant $63K Toyota Land Cruiser V8 you bought just a couple years ago violently depreciates down to less than half of what you paid for it. Ouch.
Yes, the imploding petroleum economy has spoken, and this is what it said: The era of the big, happy, dumb SUV is over.
Will you celebrate? Mourn? Mark this year on your calendar with the bright red Sharpie of petro-economic ignominy mixed with the cold tears of terrified Detroit CEOs, and dash off to buy a nice scooter? Well, why not?
Twenty years. That's about how long these great and ridiculous beasts stomped the Earth without peer or predator or even much coherent justification, how long the full-sized SUV has been at the center of warped American automotive identity, giving soccer moms and frat dudes alike a false and often dangerous sense of security and capability, when all the beasts really offered was horrible mileage and appalling handling and many thousands of fiery rollover deaths, mixed with aesthetics straight from the caveman-with-a-sledgehammer school of design. Ah, we loved them well.
Shall we enjoy a brief retrospective? Because I believe it was Ford MoCo who (arguably) fired the opening salvo,...
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
The end of the SUV? Hardly. Other predictions that sucked wind include the end of the rear wheel drive and the demise of the convertible ...
Mummy HUA alert...
Minorities and Children hit hardest, don't they know?
...made me smile...
Almost time to buy an Excursion.
How many people can an H1 Hummer seat? I’m hoping that they’ll be very reasonably priced here pretty soon.
There is a place for small fuel efficient cars and a place for SUVs and pickups. You won’t be able to load up the little fuel efficient car with the kayaks and the kids for a vacation somewhere....that’s what the SUV is for. In contrast one shouldn’t be driving the SUV just to go to the grocery store...that’s what the little hybrid or electric car will be for.
I do kind of agree with him on the H2 though. Ugly and pointless.
My SUV is paid for. I had my 14 year-old daughter run the math for me, as an exercise for her to see that the MSM was hyping us all — The math problem: Let’s say we keep our Eddie Bauer 4X4 5.8L SUV Expedition for three more years. We’ll drive it 20K a year. How much would gas have to cost (right now) in order for it to make sense that we buy a new car (now) for $24K that gets twice the gas mileage of our Expedition?
Her answer: ~$14/gal. (I got a higher number, but she got the point)
p.s. Good thing the ole’ ‘97 Mustang REAR-WHEEL DRIVE, CONVERTIBLE gets 32 MPG on the highway ;-) ... if not very quickly
Impact:
Ahh, would that Miss Morford's elitism was suffering the same fate as the SUV fleet.
What an arrogant little toad. 'Pod.
That’s precisely the argument I’ve been making to people.
The SUV is great for people who have kids and need to take them to sporting events etc. It allows you to carpool with your neighbors and have enough room to take a lot of them in one vehicle and thus save gas, time, aggravation etc. It is also great for families that like outdoor activities with their kids. If you need to commute long distances get a commuter car(a small, inexpensive, high mileage car) so that you save on gas and also on depreciation when you put in long miles. But for active families that have kids SUVs are great. I suspect that the people who hate SUVs so much are singles, divorced and homosexuals who get bitter when they see happy families with lots of kids.
I see brand new homes of all sizes with barely enough garage space for two Yugos.
It was bound to happen sooner or later anyway. American tastes are fickle and automotive fads rarely last more than a decade. The SUV has been the vehicle du jour since the early 1990’s, but it may be time for it to join tailfin equipped behemouths, giant station wagons, and bubble-topped land yachts in the dustbin of automotive fads gone by. There were SUV’s before the 1990’s, and there will always be SUV’s produced in some capacity, but I really do think that American automotive tastes are moving on. As for my daughter, she can buy her own car.
My wife just traded her Durango for a Saturn Vue crossover. We were going to hold onto the Durango (paid for) and give it to our teenage daughter, but she grimaced when we offered it to her. Apparently SUV’s have all the cachet of a minivan with the younger generation. That fact alone dooms them (the teenagers of today will be driving the auto market in 10 years).
We have an SUV and we will always have an SUV. We use it to haul things for home improvements, etc.; we use it to tow our boat; we use it as a passenger car; we use it to transport dogs (big dogs)...what car or truck can do all that. The SUV is a multipurpose vehicle, one could argue that it saves in that it serves many purposes and keeps one from having to own two vehicles.
Odd. The last sentence of the first paragraph should have been at the end of the second paragraph. Not sure how I did that.
one could only hope they go away. maybe then they’ll go back to making functional SUVs. yeah, i need the bigger engine, lower gearing and heavy duty tow package.. but why does that mean i need a/c, power everything, 8 speakers, leather, heated seats, chrome wheels, sunroof, heated mirrors, nav systems, keyless entry and $20,000 worth of other crap?
its all nice, but i just need something that’ll hold the family and tow my trailers.
and don’t even get me started on how they butchered the jeep line.
for later
And for all their bitching, it was the liberals and CAFE that made the SUV what it is today, by killing the full-sized stationwagon. Had they not done that, the minivan era never would have happened, and consequently neither would the large SUV phenomenon.
The SUV was a fad brought on by baby boomers & yuppies who didn’t want a mini-van or station wagon because that would make them look like dull suburban people. With Cheap gas, home-equity lines of credit, leasing and a used market SUVs became the Fad of the 1990’s.
The SUV will go back to being a niche product like the convertible, purchased by people who will actually take the thing off-road (and the prices and add-ons will go down in price).
Personally, SUV’s never made any sense. You had less passenger and storage space than a mini-van, more difficult to get into and it handled like a boat.
I was recently accosted by SUV critic who sneered about how expensive gas was and did I still like my SUV. I said I bought it for my daughter because it is a safe vehicle so gas price can’t change that. He looked dumb founded.
I want an H3 when I pay off my truck, but I still have to convince hubby, he wants me to get another GMC truck on our "five year rotation plan"...he gets the hand-me-down truck and we sell his old truck to recoup the down payment for the new one, that is how it works for us. He said "What if you need to haul something?" I told him, "Well, I could use YOUR truck and I would LET YOU drive MY Hummer for a day". Somehow, he wasn't amused.
Not a chance.
The liberals can't stand America and American exceptionalism.
"Let's not the rest of the world catch up with us; let's make Americans suffer while calling them selfish and immature and unrefined."
Those folks in San Fran haven’t stopped hallucinating since the 1960’s.
Yup, my standard response is that they can drive a clown car if they want, but my family’s safety is worth alot more than a few bucks worth of gas. That usually shuts them up.
Mo'ford is too busy gloating to realize that these vehicles are not disposable unibody, front-wheel-drive junk. They *last* with a moderate amount of maintenance.
I am delighted to own a Ford Explorer, the object of Mark's irrational hatred. Betcha I can keep it on the road longer than Morford can survive the health risks associated with his, er, "lifestyle".
I would agree with all but the A/C (but then, I live in TX where it’s a necessity).
I’d love to see a manual-transmission suburban again.
Yeah people thought big ol gas hogs were dead during the 70s gas crunch too. And they were for about 15 years, then the SUV hit the scene. Eventually gas will be cheap again or will be replaced by something cheap, and when you get right down to it Americans like their vehicles big and roomie with lots of doo-dads.
When they have to make up facts for their arguments, its time to tell them to shut up until they know what they're talking about. The SUV has been around for many years before this writer's knowledge of history. The SUV has been a major mode of travel in rural America longer than I have been alive (almost 50 years).
This writer doesn't know what the heck he is talking about. The SUV in some fashion will always exist because there is a need.
Obama eluded to that when speaking to the House Dem Caucus yesterday:
“We are in a historic time” “extraordinary opportunity...the American people are hurting” “because of gas prices, jobs being lost, health care unaffordable and they can't figure out how to finance a college education”
“because the American people are having such a difficult time...anxious about the future, this is one of those moments where BIG CHANGE CAN HAPPEN.”
its not as much of an issue with me- i’m in MI. i’ve used mine maybe half a dozen times in the last 2 years. besides, i spend most of the summer on a bike.
i’ll admit tho, its a nice convenience, especially when i have the kids with me. or if i need to be on the phone.
Morford is a perfect example of someone who has been buggered too hard and too often. What a smug a$$.
I just took delivery of my new Cadillac Escalade ESV two days ago. What a ride! 403HP, 6-speed trans, magnetic-shock suspension!
Go ahead...some of you gloat. Tell me about how much money I’ll spend on fuel. If you can’t afford it, don’t buy it. (The irony is that Cadillac almost paid me to buy it they cut such a screaming deal.)
The greatest pleasure I’m deriving from this ‘truck’ is looking at the smarmy, sanctimonious, and morally preening expressions on the faces of the Prius drivers as I blow past them in black and chrome.
Ha, that is funny because I was re-e-e-eally tempted to. Personally, I have driven GMC trucks all my life and never had a single problem with them. My husband owned a Ford Taurus when I met him that threw oil so bad that you couldn't get out of it without getting it on your clothes. He is now a bonafide GMC lover.
I thought we had already seen the end of Morford - what happened??
The SUV will go back to being a niche product like the convertible, purchased by people who will actually take the thing off-road (and the prices and add-ons will go down in price).
Actully, the SUV was born of the CAFE regs that were intended to push the car manufacturers away from large, rear-wheel-drive sedans and station wagons. Light trucks were, at that time, exempt from the regulations. Instead of meekly complying with the federal government, the manufacturers chose to move the station wagon to the truck chassis.
Station wagons were always more popular than vans, even in the '60s and '70s. Back then, vans were mostly commercial vehicles. The custom "conversion" van phenomenon of the '70s was an attempt to make vans seem "cool", but it certainly wasn't aimed at families (quite the contrary, IIRC).
I think all of that leads up to the popularity of SUVs vs. minivans. There was more to it than mere "fad".
We just bought our first SUV last month. A 2008 Ford Escape Limited V6 with 200 HP rated at 18/24 MPG (it actually gets closer to 20/28). We couldn’t be happier!
Yeah, and in 1985 one of my coworkers declared to me that the 30-year fixed mortgage was dead and would never be revived. That didn’t come about either.
The SUV is great for ditzy soccer moms (ROT IN HELL) who are always getting doped up on xanax and causing accidents on 206, ruining Clemenza’s commute home.
When I was a kid, you didn’t (expletive) with guys who drove a blazer, as they WOULD be able to kick your ass.
Remember that for democrats all of us common people (not them)who make a comfortable but not rich living are indeed "the rich" whom they are going to tax the daylights out of. My kids are certainly not "rich" either and for them, with children, an SUV is the logical vehicle to have.
Bozo there can write what he wants, but let him show me a car that can get 21-22 mpg on the highway WHILE TOWING ANOTHER CAR like my Xterra SUV can do. Let him come up with something that can tow more than maybe 1000lb of trailer. There isn’t much out there that can do that. Certainly most of the new “crossovers” can’t do that. most of them are rated to tow....nothing.
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