SUV’s

I’m a gearhead, and have been one for as long as I can remember. Colin Chapman was my hero as a preteen, and I have great memories of forcing my poor dad to take me to Can Am races back in the glory days of Bruce McLaren and Jim Hall.
In high school, I worked in a race-car shop to pay off the bills for the suspension and engine work I had done to my Austin Cooper S so I could race it more successfully in autocrosses (and on Mulholland Drive).
I’ve had BMW’s (including a M5), Saabs, and a variety of other cool vehicles…including a proto-SUV, a Toyota FJ60 Land Cruiser.
I’m laying this out so that when I criticize SUV’s you don’t think I’m some kind of hair-shirt environmentalist who believes that we should all drive Suzuki Swifts running on recycled french-fry oil. I’m not. The smell of carb solvent is actually kind of pleasant to me (even though I wear gloves now when I handle it), and one wonderful thing about Tenacious G is that she doesn’t go ballistic when I wash small parts in the kitchen sink.
I love vehicles, and love good design and good engineering wherever I can find it.
And when I bought my Land Cruiser, I bought it for many of the reasons people buy SUV’s today.
I had driven an Acura before that, and had been tail-ended hard enough to require knee surgery by an unlicensed, uninsured woman in a Buick. When the car was totaled, I determined to replace it with something safer.
And I worked in a highly status-conscious industry, where my peers competed to own the most expensive and exotic vehicles. So I tried a sidestep and bought something that at the time had no slot in the status curve…a truck.
The Land Cruiser model I had was bare-bones; cloth and exposed metal in the interior, manual transmission and windows, it was the furthest thing from the leather-lined luxury cars my peers drove.
And it was safe; I had an accident in which a Mercedes driver threw his door open in front of me; I probably did $15,000 in damage to his car. The rubber end cap for the bumper cost $25 to replace.
People got out of my way; at the time, vehicles that size were fairly unusual, and merging onto the 110 was suddenly much easier.
Plus Moby (it was white) was just damn cool. The FJ60 series had that hard-to-define elegance that good design always has.
It did have some drawbacks. It got 14mpg highway or street. It was more than a bit hard to park, and had the turning radius of a semi. My wife tore her skirts getting into it all the time. It was slow. The suspension was so stiff that it make my sons carsick regularly…we re-nicknamed it ‘the Chuck Wagon’.
I had driven back and forth to the Bay Area almost weekly when I was in college; I could drive my BMW 2002ti from Berkeley to LA in five hours, have dinner, go out, and still have some energy left over to dance for a while.
Driving Moby to SF was tiring. It took seven hours. When we got there, we were a bit spent. At first I thought it was just age; then we drove up with a friend in their Mercedes, and realized that the car was fatiguing us. It was noisy, rough, slow, and steered vaguely enough to require constant focus and attention.
And one day we caught a ride in a Taurus wagon taxicab and realized that it was almost as large inside as the Land Cruiser. It even had a rearward facing jumpseat so we could seat two more kids.
And we started thinking about it. We’d had Moby for seven years, and it looked like it would run another seven easily. But it was worth almost as much as we’d paid new for it, and the hassles were starting to add up.
So we sold it, and bought a Taurus wagon. I also sold my M5 and bought a Mustang convertible. Part of this was about my giving up on the idea of a car as a status object – heresy here in L.A., I know. But I was tired of working to pay for something that basically impressed parking valets.
But a part of it was just the realization that while the Land Cruiser was a brilliant piece of machinery for running safaris in Kenya, or for hauling journalists in Afghanistan, it wasn’t really a good solution to transporting a family living in Los Angeles.
And over the following years, as I saw more and more people move to Suburbans, and Expeditions, and Excursions, I’d occasionally scratch my head.
My neighbors both had Tahoes (mini-Suburbans) at one point; we all went skiing to Mammoth together (us in our Taurus), and while they could carry more than we could, it wasn’t very much more at all.
And the front-wheel drive of the Taurus worked fine in the six inches of snow that we faced.
Ultimately, we had Littlest Guy and went from two sons to three, and decided we wanted something bigger. We looked at a Suburban, and then bought an Aerostar minivan. It was bigger inside, cheap to run, relatively easy to drive. I went through a couple of years with no car at all, just a motorcycle and rental cars, and then when we divorced, bought a Subaru Outback.
I wanted a slightly macho wagon, didn’t want to spend the $$ to get an Audi or BMW, and just wasn’t in touch with my inner Soccer Mom enough to drive a Taurus again. The Outback was as big as a Forerunner or other midsize SUV inside, and drove brilliantly…I managed to shock more than a few sports cars with it.
When Tenacious G and I got together, we decided we needed a big car again, and looked once again at SUV’s and decided to buy an Odyssey minivan. It drove far better than a Suburban, was as big inside, smaller outside, got better gas mileage, and was better built. As soon as TG lets me supercharge it, it will be the perfect urban family vehicle.
So my objection to SUV’s isn’t aesthetic, it isn’t moral, it’s functional.
If I lived in Wyoming, and had two miles of dirt road to cover on my way to drop the kids at school then head to the office – and two months a year it was six inches of muck, and four months a year six to twelve inches of snow – my old FJ60 or one of the modern ‘upscale’ replacements would begin to make sense. And that’s exactly what’s being sold with each SUV – the image that you don’t live on a curved street in a suburb in Thousand Oaks, but on the old family homestead in rural Wyoming.
And in buying the ‘image’ of the SUV, folks are like the self-deluding people who believe that wearing Ralph Lauren will suddenly give them a generations-old family place on the Cape. The style isn’t the thing.
And for a true gearhead, the idea of buying image over function just doesn’t sit well.

15 thoughts on “SUV’s”

  1. Hi, A.L.
    Great post. Finally, someone is able to point out the (many) flaws of an SUV without demonizing them. Ya think y’could give a few pointers to the eco-freaks? I get so tired of listening to their shrieks and moans.
    Hale
    P.S. My first car (in 1982) was a 1965 Cadillac Fleetwood, which finally died in 1985. I’ve been driving Mazda 626s since 1985– thrifty, inexpensive, FUN, and they wear like iron. (I put 258,000 miles on my 1986 626 between November 1985 and October 1997.)

  2. I’ve always had a pick-up or SUV. Even in the 1960’s when they weren’t stylish. Value, reliability, and space.
    I’ve also had sports cars. A SAAB Sonnett III, a Taurus SHO, aand now a 1960’s MGA. Power, handling, excitement.
    I don’t race my SUV and it’s never tipped over, in fact, never leaned over either.
    I don’t carry 3 kids or a roomful of furniture in my sports car but I do enjoy an exhilerating drive.
    I’ll leave you alone to enjoy your minivan if you’ll leave me alone to enjoy my vehicles. The “SUV controversy” has to be the least valuable waste of human endeavor I ever heard of.

  3. Joe:
    No problem, as long as they meet the same standards as the cars they replace.
    My issue with SUV’s (other than the ones here) are that they are participating in a relulatory loophole…
    …use them like cars, regulate them like cars…
    A.L.

  4. YOU WROTE: “I had driven an Acura before that, and had been tail-ended hard enough to require knee surgery by an unlicensed, uninsured woman in a Buick. When the car was totaled, I determined to replace it with something safer…”
    Not only did she hit you but she did surgery on you as well…(ha ha–I am by far a worse writer than you so I can poke a little fun).
    Actually, well done. I drive an SUV and the reason I do so is because I am a oversized person and a bit of a clausterphobic. I like the roominess. I like not having my kids kick my seats and my wife sitting right on top of me. I also like the fact that if I get hit I stand a fairly good chance of coming out of it in better shape than if I drove a car–and more importantly so do my kids. I also take it camping and off-roading and use it to haul around big loads for work. That puts me in a minority I am sure–most don’t even go offroad with their SUV, it is my understanding, but mine seems to steer towards mud and dirt–I like to reward it as often as possible.

  5. Functionally my Suburban is much better than a Taurus wagon or a minivan (Ford Windstar to be exact)-my wife has had both as company vehicles.
    I can put my eldest son in the far backseat, the younger in the middle backseat, hook them each up with individual TV/VCR units complete with Playstation 2 and Gamecube, and drive 6 hours to the beach with minimal pain. In addition, I can throw my golf clubs, fishing gear, 4 suitcases, cooler, beach toys, and boxes of provisions in the back. Impossible to do in a wagon or minivan without folding the back seat down.
    So I would assert that “functionality” is mostly a matter of personal opinion.
    I have a question for those who gripe about SUVs: Does it matter to you that it’s what I want to drive?
    I don’t like onions, and their scent on your breath bothers me. But I don’t have a problem with you eating them.

  6. Patrick:
    Two things: Go look at Consumer Reports and compare the Odyssey and Suburban; the Odyssey is smaller, has three rows of seats and holds almost as much behind the third row, gets better gas mileage, turns more tightly etc. etc.
    Next, I completely accept your right to eat onions or drive a Suburban…I just think that they should pass the same regulatory standards as all other passenger cars, and I’m happy to be part of a meme that works to make them less cool than they are otherwise assumed to be.
    A.L.

  7. “I can put my eldest son in the far backseat, the younger in the middle backseat, hook them each up with individual TV/VCR units complete with Playstation 2 and Gamecube, and drive 6 hours to the beach with minimal pain.”
    Nothing quite like spending quality time with the kids, talking with them, finding out what’s going on in their lives, etc. Or you could just sit them in front of an idiot box so they don’t bother you…
    As Bugs would say, “what an ultramaroon”

  8. Not only should SUVs and light trucks meet the emissions standards for cars, but should fit into the same CAFE standard.
    Right now, we have two CAFE standards. If you were a auto producer, would you rather sell a heavy station wagon, or a light SUV? Obviously the light SUV. The heavy station wagon would pull down your average car fuel efficiency, while the light SUV pushes up your average truck fuel efficiency. By going to a single standard, we’d eliminate this distortion.
    It would be pretty easy too…Just take a weighted average of the two standards (i.e. if 40% of new vehicles are trucks and 60% are cars, take 0.4*truck CAFE + 0.6*car CAFE), and you have a new CAFE that encourages big cars over small trucks, but that still allows the same mix.
    I went to Toyota and Honda’s webpages. The only advertised wagon on either was the Matrix, which is practically a hatchback.

  9. I’m a gearhead too; I used to race in pro rally and enjoyed it, still watch rallying on Speedvision, but hate SUV’s, again because they’re nothing but bloated, non-functional vehicles.
    Another little heads-up, I don’t read Car and Driver like I used too, but Patrick Bedard wrote in his column recently dumping on liberals because, because, because. Go read the article, it was one of the most poorly thought out and free-wandering pieces of journalism I’ve seen in awhile, and reinforced why I mostly just browse those magazines on the rack rather than actually purcase them and shovel a few dollars into the coffers of ignorant repugs. Just like them to think they’re the only ones who like cars in the world . . . Gee, I wonder who the current long-reigning world champion in Formula One is? Hmmmmm. . . . A German, Michael Schumacher, just like all the other big race drivers out there, to say nothing of all the really great performance cars out there. Anyway, so much for my little rant. . . .

  10. I guess I’m a second-gen gearhead. Dad used to run ‘shine with the Allison boys, and mother was that tall, built California girl that just passed you doing 140.
    By the time I was 14 I had totalled 9 cars, all offroad. I had two dirt-track stockers that a jailbird buddy sold me for cigarette money, and I raced them illegally using his name.
    I used a cut-down 1918 Case truck to hunt abandoned vintage tin all over the Siskiyou Mountains.
    Since then, I’ve pieced together and driven everything from a ’36 Duesenberg to the only known 1917 Maybach-Mercedes 21-liter racer.
    I’ve also driven most of the so-called Sport-Utilities… and been disgusted.
    They are neither sporty nor utilitarian.
    I had a real utility vehicle – a 1964 International Harvester Travellette (crewcab) that I used for everything, from coast-to-coast travel to running a tree topping service. It had bumpers made of light railway iron, and could push-start a loaded dump truck.
    It was not sporty, but it weighed less and handled better than most sport-utes.
    I’ve had sporty cars(light and agile)and racing cars(powerful and agile). None have much in common with sport-utes.
    And SUV’s are boring. If you get rough with them they start dropping expensive pieces of plastic all over the countryside. They roll over like a barrel in the surf. I’ve always believed that a 4×4 that has never been offroad is like a knight that has pristine weapons and undented armor: a pretty fraud.
    Sport utility vehicles, as a concept, are a lie and a hoax perpetrated upon our easily-frightened mediocre-driving middleclass.
    They are an attempt at buying safety at the expense of their drivers’ neighbors, and are thus unethical.
    -A suggestion: few SUV’s meet the required bumper-height standards. This non-standard height tends to cause unnecessary damage to other vehicles, leading to additional injuries and deaths among those struck by SUV’s. Some smart lawyer should be able to turn this into megabucks for themselves and the victims of these “urban assault vehicles”.

  11. Follow-up: I’ve owned SUV’s that I’ve liked. There was an ’80 Blazer that was fun to run on the beaches of South Padre Island and points south. It wasn’t much larger or more powerful than my bastardized flat-fendered Jeep, but it was much more expendable. Then there was the ’78 Suburban and ’68 GMC crummies that I banged off of half of the stumps along the West Coast.
    This highlights my problem with current SUV’s: they’re expensive, delicate, pretentious, boring, and completely lacking in fun.
    Safer or otherwise, I wouldn’t be caught dead in one.

  12. Coming from always having next-gen luxury cars (front wheel drive, sleek cars, like the Buick Park Avenue and Cadillac Seville) I wasn’t all that into having an SUV. My first was a 2000 Olds Bravada. Although very small (black interior didnt help) it got horrible gas mileage…for a V-6. Since then Ive had a Cadillac Escalade and now have settled on a Lincoln Navigator. This is the most versitile car Ive ever owned…or dreamed of owning for that matter. With 4 captains chairs and a large (with plenty of head and leg room) third seat, I can take business associates to lunch or golf, with plenty of room for us, and golf bags, cooler, etc. I can take my whole family in it and go camping with canoe on the roof, towing my 32 foot travel trailer. (Show me a minivan or sedan that can do that!) Granted, Im still not happy with an average of 13 mpg (leadfoot guilty) but I didnt buy this vehicle for gas mileage. I can do ANYTHING with this vehicle, including run over some jerk-wad in a Geo telling me about my ‘horrible’ SUV. The part about my Navigator I like best is the black paint and factory deep tint windows….when you put a George W. Bush in 2004 bumper sticker on the window….it REALLY shows up!

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