by Tim Falconer
Other automakers soon created their own versions, and the competition led to many improvements such as more (and more flexible) seating and even entertainment systems for the kids in the back. For carpooling soccer moms, the minivan was a completely practical solution, but not a fun one. Many women who stayed at home with the kids had to suffer the family vehicle while the husband drove solo to work in a more exciting set of wheels. So consumers eventually turned on minivans too. By early 2007, Chrysler was the only American automaker still producing them, as SUVs and crossovers dominated the market. “The rapid growth in SUVs actually would have been slower if it were not for the minivan,” said David MacDonald of Environics. “The minivan became the station wagon of the seventies, and it was actually the women who wanted out of the minivan just as they wanted out of the station wagon.” Ford dealer Mike Shanahan has heard plenty of his customers say never again to minivans. “They are wonderful when people have little kids and they’re going to hockey,” he said. “But some people are so tired of driving them they don’t ever want to drive another minivan. They don’t want to see another one.” Instead, they hanker for a sportutility vehicle.
While our identification with our cars may not be as strong as it was in the past, the success of the SUV is an example of how the industry still manages to create demand out of our expectations and fantasies. SUVs are rugged-looking all-wheel-drive vehicles that have particular appeal to men. But women with children also like them because they offer a big, safe-looking and stylish way to move the family around. Despite the presence of the word “utility” in the name of these light trucks, few of their drivers ever go off-road, and many could get by with a two-door compact; indeed, according to High and Mighty: The Dangerous Rise of the SUV, by Keith Bradsher, the sport ute has “a cushy suspension and other features that may even compromise some of its appeal to serious off-road drivers.”
The roots of the SUV can be found in the Chevrolet Suburban, which first came out in 1935, and the Jeeps that Willys-Overland started making for the military during the Second World War. The 1963 Jeep Wagoneer didn’t sell well but led to vehicles such as the Ford Bronco and the Chevrolet Blazer, big two-door truck-cars that tended to be driven by people who lived in rural areas or actually used them for work. In the mid-1980s, Chrysler’s successful introduction of the four-door Jeep Cherokee—which MacDonald considers one of the milestone cars of automotive history—helped people see the SUV differently. And following the release of the Ford Explorer in 1990, these vehicles became a North American obsession. Today, SUV sales outnumber those of sedans, and even Porsche, the high-end sports car manufacturer, makes them.
But if the minivan became boring, the SUV became increasingly controversial. As early as 1999, an episode of The Simpsons, called “Marge Simpson in: ‘Screaming Yellow Honkers,’” took a run at the behemoths. Homer buys a Canyonero that is, as the jingle promises, “twelve yards long and two lanes wide, sixty-five tons of American pride.” Unfortunately, he soon discovers that he bought the model that is “strong enough for a man, but made for a woman”—it even has a lipstick holder instead of a cigarette lighter. So he hotwires Marge’s station wagon and takes off in it, leaving his wife with the Canyonero. Initially reluctant, she’s sucked in by the SUV’s evil charms and soon develops road rage.
Less satirically, Americans for Fuel Efficient Cars, an environmental group dedicated to decreasing the country’s reliance on foreign oil co-founded by columnist Arianna Huffington, created a hard-hitting 2003 commercial that intercut among different people saying they did things such as help blow up a nightclub, finance a terrorist training camp and teach children in other countries to hate America. Then, as “What is your SUV doing to our national security? Detroit, America needs hybrid cars now” appears on the screen, a man says, “I don’t even know how many miles it gets to the gallon.”
Perhaps the most trenchant attack on these machines can be found in Bradsher’s High and Mighty. In a 2004 article on the dangers of SUVs, New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell called it “perhaps the most important book about Detroit since Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed.” Bradsher’s argument is that SUVs are a looming safety, oil-dependency and environmental hazard for North America.
Although most drivers use them as big cars, SUVs are light trucks as far as regulators are concerned, because they are built on pickup truck underbodies. That distinction means little to most people—except that light trucks don’t have to meet the safety, fuel-efficiency and emissions standards that cars must. Worse, the size, the height and the four-wheel-drive capability of these well-insulated cocoons give drivers a false sense of safety, a misconception that car companies and their ad agencies have been only too happy to encourage. The truth is that SUVs don’t handle as well as cars, so avoiding collisions is more difficult, and they often take longer to stop, especially in slippery conditions; while four-wheel drive improves tracking, it is overrated as a safety feature and makes no difference when braking; the vehicle’s weight and the stiffness of the truck chassis mean SUVs do poorly in crash tests; and the high centre of gravity makes them more prone to rollovers. “Sport utility vehicle occupants are at least as likely as car occupants to die in a crash,” writes Bradsher, “and SUVs are much more likely than cars to kill the other driver in a vehicle-to-vehicle collision.” Despite all these dangers, the sport ute practically taunts its driver to be over-confident.
Most provocatively, Bradsher describes SUV drivers this way: “They tend to be people who are insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors or communities.” The former Detroit bureau chief for The New York Times then attributes that profile to “the auto industry’s own market researchers and executives.”
MacDonald, who does social values research, doesn’t agree. When he separates the male SUV drivers from the female ones, he sees some of what Bradsher is saying, but it’s no different from the conclusions he’d make about men in general. As an SUV owner himself, he admits these machines are not as green as minivans but argues they are still sensible vehicles. “For me, the packaging works. It’s not because I’m insecure in my marriage and a tyrannical driver; it’s because it’s comfortable, I fit and it doesn’t get stuck in the snow,” he said. “Look at SUVs and look who’s in the driver’s seat—a lot of soccer moms and middle age guys with greying hair, not exactly the people you need to be afraid of. And even in the States the profile is not as bleak as he made it out to be. This is quite a sensationalized statement of these drivers.”
Bradsher’s warnings aren’t without merit, though. SUVs are prone to “tripping,” a rollover caused when they collide with low obstacles such as curbs and guardrails. And when an SUV collides with a car, the people in the bigger machine usually come off okay, while people in the smaller vehicle are far more likely to be injured or killed than if they’d been hit by another car. Worse, the real danger will come later. People who buy cars and SUVs new are usually fairly sedate drivers, but when neglected, worn-out fifteenyear-old models become three-thousand-dollar “beaters” for teenaged males, we could see a repeat of what once happened with aging muscle cars. “In the seventies, when those cars became cheap wheels for the subsequent generation of teens, it was just mayhem,” MacDonald said. “A vehicle that’s heavier in mass, easier to trip—laws of physics are laws of physics—and an inexperienced driver or danger-prone driver is something to be concerned about.” Already we’re seeing SUV resale prices dropping rapidly as gas prices climb. “Nobody wants them because of the fuel economy. Then they become cheap wheels for whoever wants them, and what kind of person wants a cheap big car? An eighteen-year-old guy!”
Many of the people selling their old SUVs are switching to crossovers. Built on car chassis, they are safer and more fuelefficient, and the lower centre of gravity means they’re
less prone to rollover and easier to control when doing emergency manoeuvres. The crossover is a blend of the minivan, the SUV and the station wagon. To some people, that’s just the least of all worlds, but to others it’s the best because it offers the better driving dynamics and safety of a passenger car, the height and comfort of a minivan and the all-weather traction of an SUV.
While environmentalists would like to see all these big gas hogs disappear, MacDonald doesn’t see that happening, especially with the aging population. “Older people have trouble bending down low. My wife’s car when we got married was a ’91 Toyota Tercel, and after we had children I had to drive around in that and it was agony doubling myself over and bending in that little tiny egg. After that, I swore I would never have a small car again,” he said. “As the average age in Canada and the United States creeps up into the mid-forties and beyond, and as people want to keep their mobility, I think we’re actually going to see more elevated vehicles.”
If he’s right, that’s good news for the domestic automakers, because they have never had much trouble building big cars that appeal to Americans. It’s the other end of the market that seems to confound these companies. Neither Ford nor Chrysler, for instance, makes a subcompact along the lines of increasingly popular (though admittedly less lucrative) models such as the Toyota Yaris, Honda Fit or Hyundai Accent (GM does offer the uninspiring Chevrolet Aveo in this class). The problem for Detroit is that the foreign companies can now also make big cars that Americans want while still being able to make the small cars that, with higher gas prices and greater environmental worries, they will need.
AMERICANS HAVE A CURIOUS RELATIONSHIP with the past. They’re quick to revel in their history—and yet they’re constantly in search of the next new thing. In the 1950s, people wanted a new car long before their old one broke down, so they bought big, powerful cars and traded them in every few years. Needless to say, Detroit executives were fine with that. “If you bought a Cadillac in this country, it didn’t mean you were going to keep it for ten years. It meant by God when the models changed, the year after next, you were going to buy another one,” said Dressel, which reminded me of the old joke about Caddy owners trading in their rides once the ashtrays were full. “But, boy, in the 1950s in Germany, if you bought a Mercedes, you were scrupulous about the maintenance and you kept it and you kept it and you kept it. Everything about them said, ‘We’re doing this so it will last a long time and you can fix it when it breaks.’” The lack of emphasis on quality, durability and reliability would soon come back to haunt the Detroit automakers as the Japanese Big Three became household names in America.
Toronto Toyota dealer Ken Shaw’s father, who had owned a gas station since 1958, started selling Renaults in 1963. One day, five years after that, Shaw came home from school and his dad showed him a new car.
“What’s a Toyota?” wondered the boy.
“Renault is going down and this looks better,” his father told him.
Today, Shaw praises his late dad for making the switch, but early on it didn’t seem like such a great decision. “In the seventies, it was terrible. I lost friendships over selling friends a Toyota,” he admitted, adding that some of the cars even had trouble starting in the rain. “There was a time when ‘Made in Japan’ was a joke. But in the eighties we moved from poor quality to average quality, and I would say in the last ten or fifteen years we’ve put together a reputation for quality.”
That reputation has made life a lot better for Shaw, and when I met him he was in a buoyant mood about the cars he sells. During the 1990s, the majority of his business came from repeat customers, and he wasn’t attracting many people away from other brands. But that started changing five or six years ago. Now, more than half of his customers are first-time Toyota buyers. That’s not good news for the Detroit automakers, who’ve disappointed many customers. “How are they going to get them back? Zero percent financing isn’t going to do it forever; cash back isn’t going to do it forever. If you’ve been unhappy with your car and now you’re happy with your Honda, why are you going to go back?” he said. “I’ve never seen anybody pull up to the intersection and say, ‘That’s a nice deal you’re driving.’ It’s the car, it’s the quality and it’s the ownership experience, it’s not all about the price.”
In an effort to make the dealership experience as pleasant as possible, Shaw and his brother Paul host “second delivery” orientation sessions every month. They’ve found that when people first drive away in a new car, they’re too excited to take in much information. At the start of the session I attended, there were about thirty-five people—most clutching owner’s manuals—sitting in seven rows of wooden chairs set up in the customer lounge in a corner of the showroom. Shaw, who has an easy manner and relaxed sense of humour and wore a name tag pinned to a grey golf shirt with the dealership logo on it, stood behind a laptop on a podium with a screen off to his right. He asked how many in the crowd were first-time Toyota owners. Only ten or so people put their hands up. He asked about second-time owners and so on until he finally said, “Anybody own more than four?” A man sitting in the front row put his hand up and Shaw asked, “All from us?”
“Yes.”
Shaw just laughed and revealed, “Bruce and I play on the same hockey team.”
That may have been a bit of a cheat, but the fact remained that the room was full of people who liked Toyotas enough to keep buying them.
Shaw explained that this was an information night and an opportunity for people to ask questions. “We’re not here to sell you anything,” he assured them, “so I hope everybody left their wallet at home.” (Later, he admitted to me that they were in fact selling something: the integrity of the dealership.) Then his brother led a tour of the service department and body shop. Like his older brother’s, Paul Shaw’s hair was thinning, but he was shorter, had a thicker moustache and longer hair and wore his name tag on a white button-down-collar shirt. Back in the showroom, he answered a question about the roadside assistance program—which Ken had earlier confessed to needing after running out of gas on the highway—by explaining that a version lasting seventy-two months was available.
An older woman raised her hand. “I’ve had four Toyotas. They last forever. Six years isn’t long enough,” she said. “Can you extend it?”
A ripple of chuckles swept across the crowd, which had grown to about forty-five people. “I’m serious,” she insisted.
“I know you are,” Shaw said, producing more laughs.
“My Lexus is sixteen years old—my husband is now driving it—there’s nothing really wrong with it.”
That’s an exchange that hasn’t played out in enough North American dealerships that sell domestic cars. Though the Detroit automakers have improved the quality of their vehicles in the past few years, they didn’t earn their reputation for mediocrity overnight—and they won’t shake it overnight either.
AFTER FIRE DESTROYED his workshop in 1901, Ransom Olds turned to outside suppliers so he could keep his automobile business going. He quickly discovered that along with getting his parts more quickly and cheaply than he could make them himself, the standardized components simplified the process of building his cars. In 1913, Henry Ford refined the idea by adding an assembly line to his Highland Park plant: workers performed the same task again and again as the vehicles moved past them. The efficiency of the system pumped up production levels while reducing costs, and although automakers have introduced many enhancements over the past century, including computers and robots, the classic moving assembly line remains a fixture at most auto factories. But not at the GM Powertrain Performance Build Center in Wixom, thirty-three miles northeast of Detroit. The road into the modern building goes past ponds with fountains—perhaps the first clue that it isn’t like other plants. “This is not anywhere near what anyone would ever think about General Motors,” admitted plant manager Tim Schag. “Traditionally, people see General Motors as the big ship, and we’re fifty-three people out here
in the woods of Wixom, Michigan.”
Assembling fifty specialty engines a day inside a powertrain factory that churns out thousands every shift would have been more of a distraction than anything else. So the company created this hundred-thousand-square-foot facility, where thirty-two men and three women hand-build 505-horsepower engines for Corvettes and 469-horsepower engines for Cadillacs, which add about twenty thousand dollars to the cost of a car. While there has been some drop-off in demand for the Caddy engines, the plant hasn’t been able to meet orders from Vette lovers. The waiting list has been as long as a year and, at the time I was there, the employees were cranking them out at a rate of more than two hundred a week, about 30 percent over the designed capacity of the facility. “Typically on niche products, you have heavy demand in the beginning and then it cools off,” said Schag, who noted that people were also paying about fifteen thousand dollars to buy so-called crate engines to put in old models. “This has no signs of that—it appears like it’s going on forever.”
A friendly, slightly nervous man, Schag is tall and thin with big hands and long fingers and is a manufacturing engineer by trade. He started his career in a Cadillac factory and today, drives a Cadillac SRX, but was thrilled that “in sixty-three days” he was going to get a Velocity Yellow Vette. “I’m a Corvette guy, I love Corvette,” he said of the all-American sports car that’s been drooled over by kids of all ages since 1953 and has never lost its reputation as a cool ride. “But my heart belongs to Cadillac. There’s no ifs, ands or buts.” In fact, once he retires, his project car is going to be a 1967 Eldorado. “The styling on them is so magnificent.” He was equally enthusiastic about his job, and after twenty-nine years with GM, he couldn’t believe his luck in getting it, saying, “I’m going to ride it out into the sunset.”
