Sunday, October 26, 2008
The rise and fall of the SUV
The New York Times business section this morning features a long article on the automobile industry. It includes this graphic breaking down sales of General Motors SUVs by model and year. The volatility is almost as shocking as the apparent inability of GM management to anticipate at least some of it.
I, for one, am glad that the SUV "era" is over. Yes, we own one which we use for pulling our horse trailer, but it is wasteful and annoying that the large ones became routine transportation in the suburbs. I will not be sorry to see fewer of the "dreadnought class" on New Jersey roads. You cannot see through them, you cannot see around them, and too often their drivers do not understand that they are driving a truck, not a car. There is a difference.
16 Comments:
By 
, at
Sun Oct 26, 01:03:00 PM:
This: http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_01_12_a_suv.html
is a wonderful article on the SUV and perceived safety from a few years back, originally published in the New Yorker.
By , at
Sun Oct 26, 02:36:00 PM:
GM stopped building full size station wagons so they could build more Suburbans. Our Chevrolet Caprice station wagon was the safest car on the road, in it's day. We drove 2 adults and 5 children in comfort and safety. It was a great car.
By , at
Sun Oct 26, 03:10:00 PM:
If you plotted the SUV data as percentages of all GM sales, you would see why they are dying. Why didnt GM see this coming? Wouldnt have done any good, but reasons are:
A) they made money on these until fuel hit $4.00
B) They suffer the curse of the market leader: sui generis thinking. I .e. if we are doing it, it must be the right thing.
C) As the organizational mastodon of all time, GM is admirably set up for efficiency, even in the white collar ranks. This requires long production runs of all the same kind of stuff, and is equivalent to white matter in animal brains, which controls wired-in behavior and only changes with new generations in new environments. Gray matter, required for agility, has been systematically evolved out of GM since Sloan. Case in point: GM has outsourced almost all of its IT (some of it gray matter), even to the point of outsourcing the management of outsourcers!! Extreme of the grim quest for efficiency.
Thus even if a new management team came in with an anything-goes agenda, it is highly unlikely they could evolve the culture toward agility fast enough. The answer: let them die.
A big government bailout of the auto industry would thus be counter-productive in the extreme. It would only prolong the pain and cost the taxpayers big bucks to save an ever-dwindling set of jobs. Evolution eventually reigns.
Possibly if Toyota took over, nuked the entire management, and rebuilt the plants to do short runs profitably, it could survive. But then it woulnt be GM anymore, would it?
By , at
Sun Oct 26, 03:44:00 PM:
Here's my $.02 from "the carpool lane":
Auto manufacturers could exploit a palpable market desire for smaller, more fuel efficient family cars by investing some R&D in the . . . seatbelt.
Figure out how to build in adjustable child-restraining seatbelts for all sizes of people (down to 2 year olds) with optional closures that toddlers can't undo.
Safety studies show that children from age two up are as safe in properly fitting seatbelts as they are in carseats & boosters. Parents know that toddlers and preschoolers don't sit still like crash-test dummies.
The main reason that members of my peer group cite for buying SUVs and minivans over station wagons -- or even sedans -- is needing to fit multiple carseats in their family cars.
Many states now have legislation requiring children up to the age of 8 (some also add weight requirements -- of up to as much as 80 lbs.) to use "belt-positioning" booster seats -- i.e., adaptive gear to make your seatbelt fit properly.
Have you seen a Britax carseat or belt-positioning booster seat recently? Can you picture two or more of those in your Camry or Accord?
By 
Purple Avenger, at
Sun Oct 26, 04:03:00 PM:
SUV's are the most ridiculous vehicles ever mass produced for passenger use. The traditional station wagon format is vastly more practical in 99% of the situation one encounters on a daily basis.
By Ed Rasimus, at
Sun Oct 26, 04:40:00 PM:
The only conclusion I can reach after reading the original and the comments is that none of you live West of the Mississippi. Try Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Nevada, Montana, Idaho, Utah and a lot of other places where:
a.) It snows
b.) There are hills
c.) Not all roads are six lanes wide, paved and filled with commuters on cell phones.
Station wagons in their revised format (vans, cross-overs, etc.) are practical for soccer moms in 30 MPH occasionally rains country. In fly-over land, however, the real 4x4 SUV is not an extravagance, it is an essential.
By Papa Ray, at
Sun Oct 26, 05:06:00 PM:
Yes. Ed speaks the truth, except he left out a bunch of states.
Like Texas, N.M. and the entire SW. Of Course our vehicle of choice is still a pickup. Now they have them with two fullsize seats, 4 doors and you can still order a "work truck" with a long bed on it.
But the folks down here are never ever going to give up their SUVs or Pickups. Even if they have to resort to getting parts from the junk yard.
For several reasons.
I won't even mention that without pickups it would be impossible for most service, building, etc contractors and workers to function...unless they all had trailers to pull, then of course there wouldn't be any cars that had the suspension or engine to pull them.
SUVs? Like Ed said, not everybody lives on paved roads, smooth roads or roads that arn't mud or underwater half the time or just overblown with sand that would catch a car or station wagon like a spider catches flys.
The SUV demand in the SW and where Ed was talking about will never be like it once was but the market is still there. Hell, the Mexicans have to have a pickup, the bigger the better, with all the bells and gismos. They spend more on their pickups than they do their houses. And guess what their women folk drive...you guessed it, SUVs.
Papa Ray
West Texas
USA
By TigerHawk, at
Sun Oct 26, 05:27:00 PM:
Did I or did I not limit my criticism to "routine transportation in the suburbs"? What is it today with people who are not even reading the posts? I have a goddamn Toyota Sequoia because we have horses to haul around. I totally get that some people have a legitimate need for a truck. When I visit Colorado in the winter I rent an SUV. But most of the people who bought SUVs live in suburbs and use them to fetch kids and groceries or, worse, drive at high speeds on roads not built for it. Whether you live in suburbs around New York, Washington, Richmond, Charlotte, Miami, Tampa, Jacksonville, Orlando, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Boston, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, New Orleans, Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, or San Diego, I respectfully submit that you probably do not need an SUV to haul your kids around to get you to work in the morning.
By The Warpiper, at
Sun Oct 26, 07:15:00 PM:
I drive a Ford F-150 extended for towing. If I could jerk my load down the road with my Outback, then I'd do that.
That being said, I have worked beaucoup accidents involving soccer moms driving these land yachts who are using those vehicles for no other reason than to transport their progeny around. One argument for the use of these vehicles is that they are safe. I would argue that in many cases, these vehicles keep their passengers safe from the cellphone addicted suburbanite behind the wheel more than they protect from other drivers. You don't have to be an attentive driver when you can squash the other guy without noticing that you did it.
As for the comments about our western states, I am sure that there is plenty of terrain out there that requires the use of a vehicle with offroad capability. The last time I visited Colorado, however, I was sure that I saw interstates, primary highways, suburbs and even WalMart parking lots. We have pretty rough terrain here in SC, also. We have swamps, rivers, lots of mud, and the occasional hill. You just don't see Buffy the Bronco-Driving Yugo Slayer in those places.
I'm all for the practical applications of SUVs. I just don't consider dropping the one kid off at a play date one of them.
By The Warpiper, at
Sun Oct 26, 07:21:00 PM:
Let me just add that I did not mean to imply that every idiot behind the wheel of a Ford Excursion dropping the kid off at the play date in the city is a Buffy. There are plenty of Bills and Bobs out there, too.
By Dawnfire82, at
Sun Oct 26, 07:26:00 PM:
"I respectfully submit that you probably do not need an SUV to haul your kids around to get you to work in the morning."
Well that depends on how many kids you have.
Family of five, it's probably not necessary.
Family of eight, it probably is.
By TigerHawk, at
Sun Oct 26, 08:36:00 PM:
Fair enough DF. I'll spot you all the people who live in northern mountains, at the end of dirt roads, and who have families of eight. That still leaves a lot of stupid SUVs.
By Dawnfire82, at
Sun Oct 26, 10:11:00 PM:
No doubt.
I just heard in your post echoes of that moral superiority of those around here who look sneeringly at my big truck from their 'Smart' cars. It never even occurs to them that, apparently unlike them, I have a house and a family and I moved regularly in the military (and thanks to DITY moves, my big ass truck even made me a few grand) and having a big 'gas guzzler' vehicle with a 32 gallon gas tank is an advantage. While it's kind of quaint that a barely-street-legal go-cart is sufficient for their transportation needs, they seem to fail to realize that not everyone has the same needs. Or the same budget.
Heh. My random collection of letters to prove I'm not a bot are "biden."
By , at
Mon Oct 27, 06:35:00 AM:
One thing that led to the demise of the traditional station wagon and the rise of the SUV is as mentioned in the original article that SUVs are trucks and thus don't fall under the fleet CAFE requirements for a manufacturer's line of vehicles. Tarting them up with comfort and convenience options and leather interiors also helps the manufacturer's profitability.
I also see a little reverse class envy going on here. "What do you mean, you can't afford a gas efficient Prius as your daily driver and an SUV to pull your horse trailer, fetch the 4x8 sheet of plywood from Home Depot, pull your 20 foot Boston Whaler?"
JLW III
By , at
Mon Oct 27, 12:24:00 PM:
TH - You are excluding a fairly substantial number of people in the suburbs who fall into this class as my family did. We used to have a minivan which worked for our three small children and any car pooling that we had to do with other children. However, when we had our fourth child all of our kids were under the age of seven, so they all had to have car seats and no one could sit in the front. If you wanted to participate in a car pool that was even remotely workable for your many kids activities you had to have room for at least two other kids which the minivan could not manage with car seats. Hence the Yukon/Suburban for many bigger families living in these suburban areas. Now my family appears to be bigger than most, however where I live in Texas and where I used to live in Pennsylvania the average family is three or four kids, so there may be a greater need than what you might expect.
Lastly, I grew up in a family of ten children and we made it to church by stuffing almost all of us, unbuckled into a station wagon and happily none of us got hurt. I dont think I want to chance that with my kids now that we are smarter about how to keep them safe. I realize that you hypothesize about how a smart car company could create a super safe car (which I think is called a volvo by the way), but I still believe in simple physics and if my SUV is bigger than your car - you lose...
By , at
Mon Oct 27, 04:24:00 PM:
@ed rasimus
"Try Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Nevada, Montana, Idaho, Utah"
Mountain Time Zone is only 5% of the U.S. population, but having grown up and lived west of the Mississippi most of my life--including long stretches in areas with a lot of snow--I understand your point.
Still, larger 4x4 SUV's are not essential. Front-wheel drive suffices in many areas, and smaller AWD vehicles like the Subaru Outback handle better and suffice for 95% of conditions faced by the typical family. There are many people in warmer areas of California and elsewhere who have never used 4WD during the life of a vehicle.
