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Automotive News & Views Are you happy you didn't sell your SUV?
122 messages, Last post on Apr 15, 2009 at 5:57 AM
You are in the Automotive News & Views Forum. Your Hosts are steve_ & claires
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Replying to: explorerx4 (Jan 05, 2009 3:56 pm) The minivan is quite long (204 inches) but we love the space inside! With 2 very active children and one in a car seat, even a three row SUV wouldn't give us the same flexibility. Also the minivan is cheaper.
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Replying to: dtownfb (Jan 06, 2009 10:21 am) I've tried out SUVs either just for a demo or renting one and I just don't see the appeal. Obviously other folks do.
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Replying to: fezo (Jan 06, 2009 11:54 am) the original intent of this thread to get people to post about swapping there suv for something they now regret. for me there are times when i don't care what the cost of gas is or how much i use, i just want to get home. usually getting to work is not a problem. |
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Replying to: explorerx4 (Jan 06, 2009 3:19 pm)  It's been odd to see what kind of decisions people are making. I can't think of many scenarios where even at $4 gas that swapping out vehicles for better mileage made any sense. By my nature I've always hunted cars that got at least decent mileage (which used to mean at least 20 mpg years ago and is now in the low 30s...) but whatever I land on that's what it will be. The thought of losing thousands of bucks to improve economy is pretty odd. |
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Replying to: explorerx4 (Jan 06, 2009 3:19 pm) I don't think we've had a single poster stating that they dumped their SUV for a more economical ride. Maybe we should rename it "Are you happy you didn't sell your SUV?" |
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Replying to: steve_ (Jan 06, 2009 3:47 pm)  However, I do wonder if there were any that KEPT their SUV but bought something cheap and easy on gas to run their errands in while gas prices were so high.
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Replying to: nippononly (Jan 06, 2009 4:23 pm) To tell the truth when I bought my Celica part of what made it seem almost logical is how much cheaper it is to run than my van. That's not why I bought it though. I bought it because the top goes down. Right now that's not much of concern here but better days are ahead. |
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Replying to: steve_ (Jan 06, 2009 3:47 pm) not only did i keep my suv(v8 with trailer towing package), i swapped out my 4cyl stick car for a 6cyl auto, last spring. 
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Replying to: explorerx4 (Jan 06, 2009 5:05 pm) 
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How the S.U.V. ran over automotive safety According to Bradsher, internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills. Ford's S.U.V. designers took their cues from seeing "fashionably dressed women wearing hiking boots or even work boots while walking through expensive malls. " Toyota's top marketing executive in the United States, Bradsher writes, loves to tell the story of how at a focus group in Los Angeles "an elegant woman in the group said that she needed her full-sized Lexus LX 470 to drive up over the curb and onto lawns to park at large parties in Beverly Hills. " One of Ford's senior marketing executives was even blunter: "The only time those S.U.V.s are going to be off-road is when they miss the driveway at 3 a. m. " n a thirty-five m.p.h. crash test, for instance, the driver of a Cadillac Escalade—the G.M. counterpart to the Lincoln Navigator—has a sixteen-per-cent chance of a life-threatening head injury, a twenty-per-cent chance of a life-threatening chest injury, and a thirty-five-per-cent chance of a leg injury. The same numbers in a Ford Windstar minivan—a vehicle engineered from the ground up, as opposed to simply being bolted onto a pickup-truck frame—are, respectively, two per cent, four per cent, and one per cent. ) But this desire for safety wasn't a rational calculation. It was a feeling. Over the past decade, a number of major automakers in America have relied on the services of a French-born cultural anthropologist, G. Clotaire Rapaille, whose speciality is getting beyond the rational—what he calls "cortex"—impressions of consumers and tapping into their deeper, "reptilian" responses. And what Rapaille concluded from countless, intensive sessions with car buyers was that when S.U.V. buyers thought about safety they were thinking about something that reached into their deepest unconscious. "The No. 1 feeling is that everything surrounding you should be round and soft, and should give," Rapaille told me. "There should be air bags everywhere. Then there's this notion that you need to be up high. That's a contradiction, because the people who buy these S.U.V.s know at the cortex level that if you are high there is more chance of a rollover. But at the reptilian level they think that if I am bigger and taller I'm safer. You feel secure because you are higher and dominate and look down. That you can look down is psychologically a very powerful notion. And what was the key element of safety when you were a child? It was that your mother fed you, and there was warm liquid. That's why cupholders are absolutely crucial for safety. If there is a car that has no cupholder, it is not safe. If I can put my coffee there, if I can have my food, if everything is round, if it's soft, and if I'm high, then I feel safe. It's amazing that intelligent, educated women will look at a car and the first thing they will look at is how many cupholders it has. " During the design of Chrysler's PT Cruiser, one of the things Rapaille learned was that car buyers felt unsafe when they thought that an outsider could easily see inside their vehicles. So Chrysler made the back window of the PT Cruiser smaller. Of course, making windows smaller—and thereby reducing visibility—makes driving more dangerous, not less so. But that's the puzzle of what has happened to the automobile world: feeling safe has become more important than actually being safe.
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