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.
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