{"id":2803,"date":"2003-03-07T16:10:00","date_gmt":"2003-03-07T16:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/staging.armedliberal.com\/?p=562"},"modified":"2003-03-07T16:10:00","modified_gmt":"2003-03-07T16:10:00","slug":"suvs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2803","title":{"rendered":"SUV’s"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.
\nIn 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).
\nI’ve had BMW’s (including a M5), Saabs, and a variety of other cool vehicles…including a proto-SUV, a Toyota FJ60 Land Cruiser<\/a>.
\nI’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.
\nI love vehicles, and love good design and good engineering wherever I can find it.
\nAnd when I bought my Land Cruiser, I bought it for many of the reasons people buy SUV’s today.
\nI 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.
\nAnd 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.
\nThe 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.
\nAnd 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.
\nPeople got out of my way; at the time, vehicles that size were fairly unusual, and merging onto the 110 was suddenly much easier.
\nPlus Moby (it was white) was just damn cool. The FJ60 series had that hard-to-define elegance that good design always has.
\nIt 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’.
\nI 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.
\nDriving 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.
\nAnd 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.
\nAnd 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.
\nSo 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.
\nBut 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.
\nAnd over the following years, as I saw more and more people move to Suburbans, and Expeditions, and Excursions, I’d occasionally scratch my head.
\nMy 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.
\nAnd the front-wheel drive of the Taurus worked fine in the six inches of snow that we faced.
\nUltimately, 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.
\nI 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.
\nWhen 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.
\nSo my objection to SUV’s isn’t aesthetic, it isn’t moral, it’s functional.
\nIf 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.
\nAnd 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.
\nAnd for a true gearhead, the idea of buying image over function just doesn’t sit well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2803"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2803"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2803\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}