You’ve probably been through something like this: You leave a store, let’s say Target, with your bags of stuff, walk through the parking lot, get back into your normal-sized car, start the engine, put the car in reverse, get ready to back out of your parking space, and suddenly realize you can’t see a damned thing either way! There’s a Chevy Subhuman or Ford Explosion on one side and a friggin’ Hummer on the other. You back out of your parking space super-slowly, inching out, crawling, hoping to God that no one will slam into you. Finally, you’re out far enough to see around the automotive mountains on either side of you. You breathe a sigh of relief, shoot an evil look at the owners of the mobile McMansions if they happen to have returned during your ordeal, and soon you’re on your way home.
Luckily, there’s good news for those of us who own vehicles that aren’t SUVs, minivans or the giant pickup trucks that have mutated into the marketplace the past decade.
First, considering the price of gas, you can start laughing at owners of those giganto rides anytime you want. You might take the lead from a young guy I saw the other day near SouthPark. A Hummer had almost swerved into a Ford Focus in which he was a passenger, so the young guy hung out the window and yelled at the driver of the Hummer, now idling next to him at the stoplight, “Hey, how’s your gas bill these days, buddy?” and then laughed out loud. I thought it was hilarious. Was the kid rude? No, not really, especially considering that the driver he taunted was driving a goddamn Hummer, the most obnoxious, in-your-face arrogant, butt-ugly, gas-gulping, ridiculous, motorized penis substitute ever produced for sexually insecure would-be macho-men.
Here’s the other bit of good news: In a few years, at the most, you won’t see many SUVs on the road; the Attack of the Gargantuan Rides, the plague of the 1990s and 2000s, will be over. It’s not as if most SUV or pickup owners even need such a huge ride — a U.S. Department of Energy report showed that 40 percent of those behemoths are found in households of only one or two.
It’s well known that some people have more money than sense, so there’s no doubt that some diehards with enough dough to allow them to deny reality will keep their jumbo-mobiles, but in the end, those folks will be the equivalent of “classic car” owners, except without the good taste. I say good riddance to these monsters of the highway, as we begin to look forward to safer, less crowded roads (not to mention parking lots).
The end of the road for SUVs and their glandular-case kin is already in sight. Automakers recently announced that sales of SUVs and full-size pickups are in free-fall, having dropped around 50 percent in the past year due to high gas prices. For the first time in 17 years, the top selling vehicle model in the United States is an import car (Toyota Corolla), not Ford’s F-150 pickup. Toyota, seeing the writing on the wall, announced they were cutting out SUV and pickup production pronto and gearing up for more hybrid cars. One can only hope that U.S. car manufacturers will be able to retool quickly enough to keep up with the public’s increased demand for higher-gas mileage cars, and won’t suffer the same fate as their current stock of dinosaur vehicles. This column isn’t about why gas prices are high, or the politics involved in the whole move to better-mileage vehicles, but I daresay very few folks will cry when, as gas mileage increases, the rapacious oil companies suffer declining sales.
It will be a gradual process, but as wide-ass, 8-feet-tall vehicles go the way of the woolly mammoth, we’ll all enjoy better days on the road. Fewer greenhouse gases will be spewed into the atmosphere. Fewer drivers will be likely to die in a car wreck, as studies repeatedly show that 80 percent of fatalities in accidents involving SUVs and pickups occur in the smaller vehicle. Fewer drivers will have their vision blocked by road monsters, and fewer kids will be killed or injured in what are called “driveway backovers,” something many big vehicles, with their generally poor rear visibility, are infamous for. We’ll probably pay less on road construction, too, since large SUVs increase wear and tear on roads. There may even be less road rage. As AlterNet’s Stan Cox recently pointed out, one extensive study showed that in serious road rage flare-ups (those in which drivers “intentionally damaged another driver’s vehicle, and/or intentionally hurt someone in another vehicle”), it was SUV drivers who were most likely to be the attackers. Hey, so that’s why SUV owners often say they feel “safer” on the road!
Eventually, automakers may be forced, by either the market or the government, to roll out fully electric vehicles. Since such a development would seriously lower greenhouse gas emissions, I should welcome it’s coming. Instead, I find myself thinking, especially after I’ve had to risk my life backing out of a parking space because of the behemoths next to me, that electric cars could mean … oh no, dare I say it? … electric Hummers.
This article appears in Jul 23-29, 2008.
