Not long after Ford stopped production of the super-sized SUV Excursion, it plans to replace it with another huge one - the Everest. To do this over increasing production of the hybrid Escape is definitely rant-worthy.

CNN/Money Story



Hummer. Escalade. Suburban. Everest next.

According to Keith Bradshier's book The High & Mighty, Detroit deliberately builds these vehicles for the kind of people that are most likely to drive them: self-centered, insensitive, status-seeking jerks. This article has a harsher description, but an excellent excerpt from The High & Mighty. (In advance, I'm not saying everyone that drives a Suburban is a bad person, but they have a lot of company that is. Might want to consider a trade-in anyway...)

What I like about Keith Bradshier is he is very factual and informative - no hate-talk, although it will definitely not endear you to Hummers, Escalades, Suburbans....

 

I think they do this just to p-off us hybrid folks. The more hybrids they sell, the more BAV (big ***'d vehicles) they can sell because of the fed pollution trade-off's. Let's see how much ad time they give it on prime time. BTW, I think I can only remember seeing one hybrid commercial, think it was for a HCH..maybe. Then there's the Nissan Titan??? Big V8 dino guzzler akin to the T-rex. I can see having one if I owned a 40' Sea Ray or something like that to haul it in/out with. But paying 75 sheckles a week for fuel just to drive around town is not my idea of "status". (;-)

 

In The High & Mighty, Bradshier devotes a lot of time to the research in designing SUV's/Power Trucks and the marketing that goes with it. A Frenchman came over to Detroit and had a lot of say in the design of these vehicles. He deliberately made them look...reptilian (that's how the book put it). The Dodge Dakota was deliberatly made to look as beastly as possible.

Can't recall the Frenchman's name, but one of his fondess sights was seeing a Sherman tank liberating him from the ****'s....even though the US is not occupied by a totalitarian regime, he has calculated many Americans feel the need to feel secure from threats by driving something approaching a tank. Some of his ideas about what people drive:

• Women in convertables are asking to be raped
• Mini-vans are very un-masculine (research indicates people that drive them are far more likely to do charity work, attend church, help others, than large SUV owners. Mini-vans are also more fuel-efficient - maybe this means marketers have concluded masculinity/toughness is measured by how much gas a vehicle consumes - sigh
• SUV's were designed to be "tough" on the exterior (for men), but "homey" on the inside to appeal to the women.
• Most pickup trucks have an overkill of headroom so Texans could drive with their Stetsons on - honest.
• Need to find the book for more stuff, but the point is clear

I wish ads for the huge SUV's/Power Trucks were required to be blunt and use the tasteless content of the male-enhancement spam I'm constantly deleting. They are esstentially the "Marboro Man" ads of today.

 

I wonder if anyone involved in some kind of collision litigation with an SUV driver, has ever made a case that a person driving a large (read; 4000 lb vehicle) is recklessly endangering those in most other vehicles?

Isn't it odd that the people that drive vehicles that require more skill (due to size, viewing angles, etc.) usually (almost always) lack that skill to a terrible degree?

I'm not anti-SUV, I'm anti-bad-driver.

 

Good point, biotech_chris.

Bradshier points out that older SUV's will probably be handed down to teenagers. Deadly mix:

• older SUV's in less than perfect working order
• teens that statistically cause the most accidents
• vehicles that are least suited to racing or sudden stops

 

The Frenchman you are writing about is Clotaire Rapaille.
His ideas reached the populace in this PBS interview

 

Thank you, EricGo!

 

Another way of describing the article: In Star Trek, Kirk would respond to the Spock's logic. In the real world, the American driving public rarely acts logically.

 

I hope they sell about 5 the first year and have to cancel it due to lack of interest. I can't believe they would do this, after all their recent Hybrid talk. Idiotic.

 

"It's hard to wean yourself off of them," Langley was quoted as saying. "They're the crack of the American auto industry."

would that be the BUTT CRACK??? fer pete's sake

"SUV's were designed to be "tough" on the exterior (for men), but "homey" on the inside to appeal to the women."

i don't care how homey they are, they still do not appeal to me in any way, shape or form.....and that's sexist on top of it.

we have that saying "if you build it they will come". how about adapting that to the car business? "if you don't build it, maybe they will learn to drive something smaller?"