Finally, after months of being bullied and bruised on the streets and expressways of Chicago, drivers find relief. Not big-time relief. But relief enough–the kind that tells you something bad isn’t going to get any worse, and may even get better.
It came in a recent Wall Street Journal piece that said the bloom was off America’s romance with the “light truck.” While sales aren’t exactly going south, their growth rate is finally leveling off.
“Light truck” is the industry’s term for a class of vehicles that includes vans, pickups, Suburbans, and most of all, sports utility vehicles, some of which are four-wheel-drives.
It is the sports utility vehicle that has been driving light-truck sales these last few years as more yuppies, buppies, ‘burbanites and Baby Boomers read into them whatever safari/survivalist/urban-escape fantasy that propels them to lose their senses and open their checkbooks. And they’re not cheap. Prices range from up to and beyond $80,000 for the Range Rover and the massive Humvee, down to just under $18,000 for the lowly Suzuki Sidekick.
“Light truck” sales growth has been phenomenal, averaging 9.8 percent a year between 1991 and 1996. It’s expected to top out in the next few years at an amazing 46 percent of all passenger vehicle sales, according to Nextrend, a market research group in Thousand Oaks, Calif.
The result is that from a scattered presence five years ago of a few Chevy Blazers and Jeep Cherokees, sports utility vehicles have come to be near ubiquitous on Chicago’s North Side in all their varied, bulky miens–Bravadas, Pathfinders, Yukons, Tahoes, Explorers, Wranglers, Mountaineers, 4Runners and their pesky little brothers–RAV4s, Trackers and Sidekicks.
A colleague observes that his condominium’s parking lot is so dense with the trucks that it resembles a staging area for a panzer division–“in case they have to make an overland assault on the Ben & Jerry’s store,” he quipped.
I know the feeling: lt’s like being socked in by an alien, intimidating presence, a scaled-down, neighborhood version of being in a truck sandwich while heading south on the Dan Ryan.
In my Near North Side neighborhood, which bridges Old Town and Lincoln Park, sports utility trucks are everywhere, sometimes numbering two out of five vehicles in a block.
I have no idea what’s behind all this. The Journal piece suggests owning such a truck is a fashion statement. Others suggest that owning an average sports utility truck, especially in the suburbs, is simply the 1990s answer to a station wagon.
Michael Marsden, who years ago developed a course on the automobile and American culture at Ohio’s Bowling Green University, says the light-truck trend is based on emotional more than intellectual needs. It reflects the two qualities every American is interested in from day one, said Marsden: Mobility and freedom from restraint of any kind.
“The SUV represents the ability to go where you want, when you want, even though the majority of people who buy them never go off the road and wouldn’t know what to do if they did,” said Marsden, who is dean of the college of arts and sciences at Northern Michigan University.
“But that’s not the issue,” he said. “It’s the symbolism of having a machine that depicts this rugged individualism, and at the same time, all the comforts of home. It is a nice contradiction.”
Novelist Richard Ford suggested in The New York Times recently that the light-truck mania may simply demonstrate the nature of the millennial moment “not to know the difference between want and need,” he wrote.
My beef with sports utility vehicles has to do with their “rugged individualism.” Like most other Chicagoans, I drive a modest sedan that efficiently gets me from point A to point B. Until the truck invasion, my dentless car was safely parked each evening between like sedans whose bumpers met mine, as they were meant to.
Then came the trucks, the full-sized ones with rear-mounted spare wheels and bumpers thick as steel girders a foot higher than those of the average sedan. Now, after finding hard-won parking spaces in my neighborhood on weeknights, I am jammed by Jimmys, mauled by Monteros, bashed by Blazers, bruised by Land Cruisers, and squeezed by Grand Cherokees, all aggressively seeking their piece of the curb.
OK, so maybe not always aggressively. But the point is that things can break when a gorilla tries to wedge itself into a space better suited for a chimpanzee.
In a year and a half, my car has had both parking lights and a tail light bashed in by the high-riding bumpers of trucks backing into parking spaces around me. A front right fender was dented high up by the misplaced bumper of a sports utility vehicle whose driver had a lousy eye for distances.
One morning, a parallel series of rounded dents appeared on the front of my car’s hood. Hovering barely inches away was the steel-encased continental wheel mounted on the rear of a hulking Chevrolet Suburban.
Of course, I wasn’t there to witness the infliction of this, but in this case I buy the guilt-by-association theory: Sports utility vehicles were parked adjacent to my car either before or after I parked.
Parking near a sports utility vehicle is only the half of it. When you’re on the road and there’s one in front of you, you can’t see past it to read the road ahead. It’s like sitting in a movie theater behind a basketball player with a cowboy hat.
Then there’s that ineffable something about owning a sports utility vehicle that seems to boost testosterone levels. A 1996 survey by a British behavioral psychologist found an exceptionally high number of complaints of aggressive tailgating by light-truck drivers.
Because of the trucks’ greater heft, being tailgated, or getting cut off by a non-signaling sports utility vehicle is experienced as a more aggressive act than if it is committed by the standard car. And fantasizing about fighting back is not an option. Size rules.
Winter is when the trucks engage their four-wheel-drives and truly lord it over lowly cars that must gingerly negotiate the snow.
“On those few occasions when the weather is crappy enough to actually require four-wheel drive, we are indeed in fat city,” said a colleague married for life to his Toyota 4Runner.
“But we’re basically paralyzed by all you peons who don’t have it,” he said. “If traffic cannot move, there’s no place for us to go.”
Boohoo. Go find an arctic blizzard or a muddy field. Drive through a jungle or up a mountain. Show us your stuff someplace where it’s really needed.
Of course, in those places, some Crocodile Dundee type might point out that your sports utility vehicle isn’t a serious piece of off-road work unless it’s equipped with a front-mounted Ramsey self-recovery winch (so you can pull yourself out of any difficulty); or an automatic manifold diversion valve that detours the engine’s exhaust upward from the low-lying tailpipe so the engine doesn’t flood out when the truck fords a river.
Perhaps the appeal of sports utility vehicles is that the user is higher up and more thronelike (sports utility vehicles’ driver’s seats are called “the command position”) than the hordes of lowly passenger cars; or in knowing that at 6,000 pounds, the truck could out-collide and out-survive the average 3,000-pound passenger sedan. Or maybe it’s just the headiness of having a vehicle for which paved roads are mere conveniences.
I suspect it’s the former reasons that compel so many women to drive sports utility vehicles, a striking, little-noted part of this trend. Like male owners who love to present the image of a man just itching to burst free from the bonds of urban civilization and go drive up a cliff somewhere, we have women owners, urban safari queens tooling about town on their way to Whole Foods or Saks.
Yet with a few exceptions, anyone who has seriously driven a sports utility vehicle knows they are rabid gas guzzlers and generally a lousy, unresponsive drive compared to today’s increasingly agile and fuel-efficient passenger cars. Despite generally powerful engines, the average truck, when in four-wheel-drive mode, has about as much acceleration as a rowboat.
The Wall Street Journal’s reporter quoted one owner who said he found himself longing for the greater responsiveness of the average passenger sedan.
“The truck craze is starting to look like one of those time-of-life phases that people grow out of,” wrote the reporter, who quoted an industry analyst’s projections for next year, when the trucks’ production is predicted to exceed demand by 1.7 million vehicles.
This may make it tough on those who come to their senses and decide to off their off-roader for a normal 4 1/2-foot-high car.
But with lowering demand–and probably prices (excess capacity is expected for five years)–beware the lawless example of one irate British truck owner who decided to sell his last April.
When told his 6-month-old, $22,000 Vauxhall Monterey 4WD was an obsolete model and had depreciated to $13,000, he drove it through the dealer’s showroom window, smashing into the back of the latest model, “in an astonishing act of revenge,” reported the London Daily Mail.
