Posted on 05/09/2005 6:52:14 AM PDT by MississippiMasterpiece
It's a Saturday morning on San Leandro's Marina Boulevard auto row, and the big SUVs have been sitting on the lots, waiting for someone to come in and start that dealer dollar dance that ends up with the customer slightly bewildered but paying a lot less for that vehicle than he thought he was going to.
Once in a while, there are takers, although the dealer has to discount the SUV heavily just to get it moving.
Salvador Sotello, for example, recently paid F.H. Dailey Chevrolet in San Leandro $41,000 for a new Chevy Tahoe LT (yes, with leather) SUV that had a sticker price of $58,000. The sale was an anomaly in what is otherwise a pretty dismal selling season. "It's been pretty quiet," saleswoman Crystal Gonzalez said the other day. "Been pretty slow."
At Broadway Ford in Oakland, the grilles of the Mustangs, SUVs and the lone Thunderbird smile at the passing traffic, but the showroom is empty, it appears, of customers; several salesmen are in sight. Up at Albany Ford-Subaru, salesman Myers Howard, sitting a few feet away from a big Ford pickup truck, says things on the Ford side of the showroom "are slow." That might be the understatement of the day.
Just this past week, General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. underwent the humiliation of seeing their credit ratings reduced by Standard & Poor's Ratings Services to the status of junk. The reasons are becoming clear -- the two big companies can't sell much of what they produce.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Gotta be a tree hugger.
You are wrong. If you have the proper lights and signals you can drive a tank on the road, as long as weight requirements and licensing are correct.
I don't care what the mileage is, I can't get past the purchase price.
So you support those who would kills on a daily basis? You better get rid of your car and start walking.
That should frost them! Personally I think brownsfan and thoughttomato are the same guy.
Bookmark
That time to react is called tailgating.
What you have said explains why the red states and the blue states are not yet engaged in open warfare. It is not justification for adopting the thinking of the left.
"socialism is superior to capitalism."
TROLL!
Not at all. If you make enough money and you really care, donate to charity.
The left is always wrong.
Ya, isn't thoughtomato a freaking genuis?
Remember though, these aren't conservatives. They're Republicans. Big difference. I have a full size Dodge truck and a Harley, so I can honestly say I see both views from the road. I don't like SUVs just because it's not my style. Never have seen a SUV that I would want to drive. But I'm also not going to tell someone what they should drive out of concerns of 'safety' either. If you've got a gaggle of kids or need a vehicle for transporting something you don't want to get wet, I guess a SUV is definitely the way to go. And it should be a person's right to go buy one instead of a group of nannies telling us what we should drive
My Tahoe costs me about 45 bucks to fill up now, vs. about 32 or so if gas were a buck fifty a gallon. I fill up roughly 4 times a month, so thats an extra $48. I'd rather spend that on other things, of course, but I'd gladly pay an extra 50 a month to not have to drive a vehicle that gets 20 mpg, since that's what would be required to bring the fuel costs down to what my Tahoe would use at a dollar fifty a gallon.
I remember my sister getting gas after she first started driving. Sometime around 1973. I think gas prices were 39 cents a gallon then.
If you'll notice I have not said a word about mileage other than to note that higher gas prices means fewer SUVs on the road. I could care less about oil consumption, what I want is to be able to drive on the road normally without having to play defense against what SUV drivers who feel invulnerable - or just don't care about how they affect others on the road - might do.
Name-calling is the last resort of the man who has run out of arguments. Given that I made the effort to put forward an honest, straightforward expression of how I see it, don't you think it appropriate to meet it with at least a polite response, if not a reasonable one?
If you buy one of those it's more likely you have an addiction to plastic. I call them have-a-lunches since they look like a toy that transformed out of a plastic lunch box.
It isn't name-calling if it is true. You're talking about some kind of government agency that will hear and approve a citizen's "need" for an SUV.
There's no good word for it. It's fascist.
Also, for clarification, name-calling would be if I said YOU were fascist. I don't know that. But the opinion you state is fascist.
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