The Throbber has a CX9 - best fucking snow car EVER. AWD, throw some studs on that bad boy...like a snow leopard chasing down its prey.
Mazda's are criminally underrated. For some reason, they are the least expensive of the Japanese line-up. Toyota and Honda (their luxury analogues) carry a higher sticker and get away with it. I haven't owned one but every person I know who has loves their Mazdas and swears by then. Subaru is like that too.
Just perused Mazda's website and came away a little disappointed. Seems their fuel economy has dropped nearly 10 mpg across the board. My brother's 3 gets 40 mpg. Nothing they make gets over 31 combined now. I still think they have one of if not the best design aesthetics for any car you can buy under $60K (maybe higher), and they're dead-nuts reliable, but I commute 70 miles round trip, so I look for cars that are easy on the fuel.
I'm excited to see more ~$40K long range electrics hitting the market. Many Luddites still shit on electric, but to them I say, "Don't knock it 'till you've tried it." Quiet, torque for days, way fewer expensive parts to break or expensive maintenance to do, brakes last forever, and never having to stop at the gas station. Here in my corner of Washington, at 10 cents per kWh, it's like driving for free. In somewhere like Wenatchee, where it's under 3 cents? What idiot with a commute doesn't have one?
I used to be a "car guy." I went full fast strategy and bought a 3-Series new first thing after getting hired at my current job. It was my first new vehicle. Why did I get it? Rear wheel drive (steering input at both ends of the car), inline six (natural first and second order balance), manual transmission, back seat, under $40K. Thanks to broadening my horizons to include other expensive hobbies like home-ownership, I've stopped giving a fuck about any of that shit, and all I care about is lowest TCO. Even the cheapest, shittiest cars on the market today have creature comforts that parallel the most expensive car I've owned. For me, car purchases are a spreadsheet exercise: Purchase price minus depreciated value plus expected maintenance plus consumables over predicted length of ownership. Lowest wins. A $40K electric stacks up surprisingly well against all but the cheapest and most efficient gas car--IF it's from a manufacture that still qualifies for the tax rebate (to bring things back to my original post).
Whoever posted the picture of the Mustang Mach-E above is onto something. If you have to have a car that "looks like" an SUV (because, let's face it, only @Swaye actually uses his SUV for S and/or U...), you could do a lot worse. $36K after rebate for a luxury-adjacent car that will drive your eyes into the back of your skull on acceleration, pretty much run for free as long as you own it, and allow you to never have to stop at a gas station again. And, thanks to the tax rebate, you're calculating resale depreciation from a price $7500 above what you paid (IOW, six or seven years down the road, I'd rather be selling what started as a $40K long range electric than what started as a $25K Corolla).
/woman in Japanese board meeting
I don’t rock crawl per se but have used the shit out of my SUV over the years. Plenty of clearance situations in snow or off road. But yes you’re pretty much on the money.
I think most people would be surprised what modern studless winter tires can do. (@PurpleThrobber: Ditch the studs. They tear up roads, flatten and become pointless quickly, and don't really give you that much more traction these days. People run studless in the Michigan UP just fine.) I've been up to the Baker ski resort sledding hill in January in a sport package RWD 3-series (4" ground clearance) with no chains. Ditto two different minivans. I rarely encounter roads I need to drive on that aren't plowed, but I guess there are times where simply ground clearance over the snow is the difference between moving or not. Those are times it's probably best to stay home anyway.
There's this misconception that you're fucked in the snow without AWD. The reality is that, although AWD is useful for getting started and getting up hills, it does fuck all for helping you stop. That's where proper tires come in. Now, proper tires and AWD? Even better. ATBSJBS, I've driven about a half million miles, and a lack of AWD has prevented me from getting where I wanted to go... once I can recall.
That's just my situation, though. I'm sure if I had a long, steep driveway, I'd feel differently about it.
It's not that vans, can't be kewl. I live in a town where the Mercedes Sprinter Van is ubiquitous and a status symbol and they are practical as hell for outdoor recreating. The VW vans have a cult following too. But the product that Honda, Chrysler, Toyota, etc, put out are these vapid, blobs which have no character. Mind you, I feel the same way about most of the crossover segment as well.
The only minivan my family had which had some degree of tuffness was an AWD 1992 Chevy Astrovan. I used to drive that fucker up rough dirt roads in Utah with 6 to 10" of snow on them. I amazed I never go it stuck but it had a solid AWD system and decent clearance.
Off all the current minivans, only the Sienna has AWD and its ugly as sin.
Chrysler Pacifica has AWD. I shouldn't really know that...
The Throbber has a CX9 - best fucking snow car EVER. AWD, throw some studs on that bad boy...like a snow leopard chasing down its prey.
Mazda's are criminally underrated. For some reason, they are the least expensive of the Japanese line-up. Toyota and Honda (their luxury analogues) carry a higher sticker and get away with it. I haven't owned one but every person I know who has loves their Mazdas and swears by then. Subaru is like that too.
Just perused Mazda's website and came away a little disappointed. Seems their fuel economy has dropped nearly 10 mpg across the board. My brother's 3 gets 40 mpg. Nothing they make gets over 31 combined now. I still think they have one of if not the best design aesthetics for any car you can buy under $60K (maybe higher), and they're dead-nuts reliable, but I commute 70 miles round trip, so I look for cars that are easy on the fuel.
I'm excited to see more ~$40K long range electrics hitting the market. Many Luddites still shit on electric, but to them I say, "Don't knock it 'till you've tried it." Quiet, torque for days, way fewer expensive parts to break or expensive maintenance to do, brakes last forever, and never having to stop at the gas station. Here in my corner of Washington, at 10 cents per kWh, it's like driving for free. In somewhere like Wenatchee, where it's under 3 cents? What idiot with a commute doesn't have one?
I used to be a "car guy." I went full fast strategy and bought a 3-Series new first thing after getting hired at my current job. It was my first new vehicle. Why did I get it? Rear wheel drive (steering input at both ends of the car), inline six (natural first and second order balance), manual transmission, back seat, under $40K. Thanks to broadening my horizons to include other expensive hobbies like home-ownership, I've stopped giving a fuck about any of that shit, and all I care about is lowest TCO. Even the cheapest, shittiest cars on the market today have creature comforts that parallel the most expensive car I've owned. For me, car purchases are a spreadsheet exercise: Purchase price minus depreciated value plus expected maintenance plus consumables over predicted length of ownership. Lowest wins. A $40K electric stacks up surprisingly well against all but the cheapest and most efficient gas car--IF it's from a manufacture that still qualifies for the tax rebate (to bring things back to my original post).
Whoever posted the picture of the Mustang Mach-E above is onto something. If you have to have a car that "looks like" an SUV (because, let's face it, only @Swaye actually uses his SUV for S and/or U...), you could do a lot worse. $36K after rebate for a luxury-adjacent car that will drive your eyes into the back of your skull on acceleration, pretty much run for free as long as you own it, and allow you to never have to stop at a gas station again. And, thanks to the tax rebate, you're calculating resale depreciation from a price $7500 above what you paid (IOW, six or seven years down the road, I'd rather be selling what started as a $40K long range electric than what started as a $25K Corolla).
/woman in Japanese board meeting
I don’t rock crawl per se but have used the shit out of my SUV over the years. Plenty of clearance situations in snow or off road. But yes you’re pretty much on the money.
I think most people would be surprised what modern studless winter tires can do. (@PurpleThrobber: Ditch the studs. They tear up roads, flatten and become pointless quickly, and don't really give you that much more traction these days. People run studless in the Michigan UP just fine.) I've been up to the Baker ski resort sledding hill in January in a sport package RWD 3-series (4" ground clearance) with no chains. Ditto two different minivans. I rarely encounter roads I need to drive on that aren't plowed, but I guess there are times where simply ground clearance over the snow is the difference between moving or not. Those are times it's probably best to stay home anyway.
There's this misconception that you're fucked in the snow without AWD. The reality is that, although AWD is useful for getting started and getting up hills, it does fuck all for helping you stop. That's where proper tires come in. Now, proper tires and AWD? Even better. ATBSJBS, I've driven about a half million miles, and a lack of AWD has prevented me from getting where I wanted to go... once I can recall.
That's just my situation, though. I'm sure if I had a long, steep driveway, I'd feel differently about it.
It's not that vans, can't be kewl. I live in a town where the Mercedes Sprinter Van is ubiquitous and a status symbol and they are practical as hell for outdoor recreating. The VW vans have a cult following too. But the product that Honda, Chrysler, Toyota, etc, put out are these vapid, blobs which have no character. Mind you, I feel the same way about most of the crossover segment as well.
The only minivan my family had which had some degree of tuffness was an AWD 1992 Chevy Astrovan. I used to drive that fucker up rough dirt roads in Utah with 6 to 10" of snow on them. I amazed I never go it stuck but it had a solid AWD system and decent clearance.
Off all the current minivans, only the Sienna has AWD and its ugly as sin.
Chrysler Pacifica has AWD. I shouldn't really know that...
They must have brought it back.
This year. Only in gas, though, and not hybrid. There's a PHEV Pacifica sitting in my driveway. My Odyssey got high-19 mpg over the six years we owned it. This one has averaged over 40, makes more power, and does pretty much everything better. Plus Uncle Sam gave us $7500 to buy it, so it was the cheapest well-appointed van on the market.
When I mention "logical vs. emotional" purchase, I'd like to clarify that I'm not saying that as a dig. For most people, a vehicle is no different than a shirt or shoes or watch or whatever, and they want to use it to project an image of themselves to the outside world. "Attractiveness" isn't a shopping criteria that's wrong.
That being said, I'm going to disagree on your choice of the word "toughness." That's different. That's marketing. Must have been at least a decade ago, I read an article by Malcom Gladwell in the New Yorker. It's difficult to find nowadays, but, weirdly, Rutgers is hanging onto it. For the purpose of this discussion, I would ignore everything past the first numbered section of the article (which I'll paste below), as his conclusion that large trucks and SUVs are unsafe are almost certainly correct but supported by questionable statistics ("Oh really, the F150, best-selling vehicle in America for like 20 years running, causes the most traffic deaths? Do tell...").
That first section, though, is awfully interesting. It discusses the early days of the explosion of SUVs--primarily the Explorer and then the Expedition. The interesting tidbits are that the Expedition may to this day still be the most profitable vehicle of all time, their engineers and executives expected it to be a very niche product because it made no sense, and the manufacturers' own internal research to explain why the phenomenon exploded (and the future marketing that resulted from such) really holds the consumer in contempt.
Again, this is not to shit on SUV owners: You (@YellowSnow) prove that there is a niche for whom this product makes sense (frequent deep snow, skis on top, etc.). But a "niche" is all it was ever supposed to be, then marketers ran with it, and the automakers got rich (then took it in the fucking shorts when gas shot up to $5 per gallon and nobody wanted to buy their big cash cows for a while).
At any rate, to me, your use of the word "toughness" is at the heart of the problem. Climbing a hill in deep snow isn't tough, that's practical. That's making a rational purchase decision. Looking like you can climb a hill in deep snow when you live in Los Angeles and never leave asphalt is the purchasing rationale for the majority.
How does this relate to minivans? Things that have been in the back of mine:
Bags of concrete and mortar. Ten-foot sticks of PVC and EMT conduit Ten-foot sticks of unistrut (still a hole in the headliner from that one...) Dimensional lumber of all kinds of sizes 4x8 sheets of plywood Small dirt bikes, a large dog crate, the wife and two kids, and a weekend's worth of camping gear. An entire former college basketball team now turned Army Rangers*
Meanwhile, the doors slide open and completely out of the way for easy loading, the back door pops open and completely out of the way for easy loading, the seats fold into the floor or pop back up in less than 30 seconds for turning it right back into a family hauler. All at 40mpg average and 100+ for short trips around town. A lot of that is also just practical. But I like to think at least some of it is "tuff."
Anyway, for those who haven't already left the board meeting due to my womanly rambling, I'll copypasta the first section of that article in the next post (character limit).
In the summer of 1996, the Ford Motor Company began building the Expedition, its new, full-sized S.U.V., at the Michigan Truck Plant, in the Detroit suburb of Wayne. The Expedition was essentially the F-150 pickup truck with an extra set of doors and two more rows of --and the fact that it was a truck was critical. Cars have to meet stringent fuel-efficiency regulations. Trucks don't. The handling and suspension and braking of cars have to be built to the demanding standards of drivers and passengers. Trucks only have to handle like, well, trucks. Cars are built with what is called unit-body construction. To be light enough to meet fuel standards and safe enough to meet safety standards, they have expensive and elaborately engineered steel skeletons, with built-in crumple zones to absorb the impact of a crash. Making a truck is a lot more rudimentary. You build a rectangular steel frame. The engine gets bolted to the front. The seats get bolted to the middle. The body gets lowered over the top. The result is heavy and rigid and not particularly safe. But it's an awfully inexpensive way to build an automobile. Ford had planned to sell the Expedition for thirty-six thousand dollars, and its best estimate was that it could build one for twenty-four thousand--which, in the automotive industry, is a terrifically high profit margin. Sales, the company predicted, weren't going to be huge. After all, how many Americans could reasonably be expected to pay a twelve-thousand-dollar premium for what was essentially a dressed-up truck? But Ford executives decided that the Expedition would be a highly profitable niche product. They were half right. The "highly profitable" part turned out to be true. Yet, almost from the moment Ford's big new S.U.V.s rolled off the assembly line in Wayne, there was nothing "niche" about the Expedition.
Ford had intended to split the assembly line at the Michigan Truck Plant between the Expedition and the Ford F-150 pickup. But, when the first flood of orders started coming in for the Expedition, the factory was entirely given over to S.U.V.s. The orders kept mounting. Assembly-line workers were put on sixty- and seventy-hour weeks. Another night shift was added. The plant was now running twenty-four hours a day, six days a week. Ford executives decided to build a luxury version of the Expedition, the Lincoln Navigator. They bolted a new grille on the Expedition, changed a few body panels, added some sound insulation, took a deep breath, and charged forty-five thousand dollars--and soon Navigators were flying out the door nearly as fast as Expeditions. Before long, the Michigan Truck Plant was the most profitable of Ford's fifty-three assembly plants. By the late nineteen-nineties, it had become the most profitable factory of any industry in the world. In 1998, the Michigan Truck Plant grossed eleven billion dollars, almost as much as McDonald's made that year. Profits were $3.7 billion. Some factory workers, with overtime, were making two hundred thousand dollars a year. The demand for Expeditions and Navigators was so insatiable that even when a blizzard hit the Detroit region in January of 1999--burying the city in snow, paralyzing the airport, and stranding hundreds of cars on the freeway--Ford officials got on their radios and commandeered parts bound for other factories so that the Michigan Truck Plant assembly line wouldn't slow for a moment. The factory that had begun as just another assembly plant had become the company's crown jewel.
In the history of the automotive industry, few things have been quite as unexpected as the rise of the S.U.V. Detroit is a town of engineers, and engineers like to believe that there is some connection between the success of a vehicle and its technical merits. But the S.U.V. boom was like Apple's bringing back the Macintosh, dressing it up in colorful plastic, and suddenly creating a new market. It made no sense to them. Consumers said they liked four-wheel drive. But the overwhelming majority of consumers don't need four-wheel drive. S.U.V. buyers said they liked the elevated driving position. But when, in focus groups, industry marketers probed further, they heard things that left them rolling their eyes. As Keith Bradsher writes in "High and Mighty"--perhaps the most important book about Detroit since Ralph Nader's "Unsafe at Any --what consumers said was "If the vehicle is up high, it's easier to see if something is hiding underneath or lurking behind it." Bradsher brilliantly captures the mixture of bafflement and contempt that many auto executives feel toward the customers who buy their S.U.V.s. Fred J. Schaafsma, a top engineer for General Motors, says, "Sport-utility owners tend to be more like 'I wonder how people view me,' and are more willing to trade off flexibility or functionality to get that." 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."
The truth, underneath all the rationalizations, seemed to be that S.U.V. buyers thought of big, heavy vehicles as safe: they found comfort in being surrounded by so much rubber and steel. To the engineers, of course, that didn't make any sense, either: if consumers really wanted something that was big and heavy and comforting, they ought to buy minivans, since minivans, with their unit-body construction, do much better in accidents than S.U.V.s. (In 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.
In the summer of 1996, the Ford Motor Company began building the Expedition, its new, full-sized S.U.V., at the Michigan Truck Plant, in the Detroit suburb of Wayne. The Expedition was essentially the F-150 pickup truck with an extra set of doors and two more rows of --and the fact that it was a truck was critical. Cars have to meet stringent fuel-efficiency regulations. Trucks don't. The handling and suspension and braking of cars have to be built to the demanding standards of drivers and passengers. Trucks only have to handle like, well, trucks. Cars are built with what is called unit-body construction. To be light enough to meet fuel standards and safe enough to meet safety standards, they have expensive and elaborately engineered steel skeletons, with built-in crumple zones to absorb the impact of a crash. Making a truck is a lot more rudimentary. You build a rectangular steel frame. The engine gets bolted to the front. The seats get bolted to the middle. The body gets lowered over the top. The result is heavy and rigid and not particularly safe. But it's an awfully inexpensive way to build an automobile. Ford had planned to sell the Expedition for thirty-six thousand dollars, and its best estimate was that it could build one for twenty-four thousand--which, in the automotive industry, is a terrifically high profit margin. Sales, the company predicted, weren't going to be huge. After all, how many Americans could reasonably be expected to pay a twelve-thousand-dollar premium for what was essentially a dressed-up truck? But Ford executives decided that the Expedition would be a highly profitable niche product. They were half right. The "highly profitable" part turned out to be true. Yet, almost from the moment Ford's big new S.U.V.s rolled off the assembly line in Wayne, there was nothing "niche" about the Expedition.
Ford had intended to split the assembly line at the Michigan Truck Plant between the Expedition and the Ford F-150 pickup. But, when the first flood of orders started coming in for the Expedition, the factory was entirely given over to S.U.V.s. The orders kept mounting. Assembly-line workers were put on sixty- and seventy-hour weeks. Another night shift was added. The plant was now running twenty-four hours a day, six days a week. Ford executives decided to build a luxury version of the Expedition, the Lincoln Navigator. They bolted a new grille on the Expedition, changed a few body panels, added some sound insulation, took a deep breath, and charged forty-five thousand dollars--and soon Navigators were flying out the door nearly as fast as Expeditions. Before long, the Michigan Truck Plant was the most profitable of Ford's fifty-three assembly plants. By the late nineteen-nineties, it had become the most profitable factory of any industry in the world. In 1998, the Michigan Truck Plant grossed eleven billion dollars, almost as much as McDonald's made that year. Profits were $3.7 billion. Some factory workers, with overtime, were making two hundred thousand dollars a year. The demand for Expeditions and Navigators was so insatiable that even when a blizzard hit the Detroit region in January of 1999--burying the city in snow, paralyzing the airport, and stranding hundreds of cars on the freeway--Ford officials got on their radios and commandeered parts bound for other factories so that the Michigan Truck Plant assembly line wouldn't slow for a moment. The factory that had begun as just another assembly plant had become the company's crown jewel.
In the history of the automotive industry, few things have been quite as unexpected as the rise of the S.U.V. Detroit is a town of engineers, and engineers like to believe that there is some connection between the success of a vehicle and its technical merits. But the S.U.V. boom was like Apple's bringing back the Macintosh, dressing it up in colorful plastic, and suddenly creating a new market. It made no sense to them. Consumers said they liked four-wheel drive. But the overwhelming majority of consumers don't need four-wheel drive. S.U.V. buyers said they liked the elevated driving position. But when, in focus groups, industry marketers probed further, they heard things that left them rolling their eyes. As Keith Bradsher writes in "High and Mighty"--perhaps the most important book about Detroit since Ralph Nader's "Unsafe at Any --what consumers said was "If the vehicle is up high, it's easier to see if something is hiding underneath or lurking behind it." Bradsher brilliantly captures the mixture of bafflement and contempt that many auto executives feel toward the customers who buy their S.U.V.s. Fred J. Schaafsma, a top engineer for General Motors, says, "Sport-utility owners tend to be more like 'I wonder how people view me,' and are more willing to trade off flexibility or functionality to get that." 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."
The truth, underneath all the rationalizations, seemed to be that S.U.V. buyers thought of big, heavy vehicles as safe: they found comfort in being surrounded by so much rubber and steel. To the engineers, of course, that didn't make any sense, either: if consumers really wanted something that was big and heavy and comforting, they ought to buy minivans, since minivans, with their unit-body construction, do much better in accidents than S.U.V.s. (In 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.
One more thing I forgot to address from your post: Many people would win the Powerball and immediately buy some hypercar or something. I would buy a LWB Hi-roof Sprinter. *sploosh*
One more thing I forgot to address from your post: Many people would win the Powerball and immediately buy some hypercar or something. I would buy a LWB Hi-roof Sprinter. *sploosh*
One of my best frens bought that same Sprinter a couple of years back. They've camped 60 days in it after some very simple mods with plywood and 2 x 4 lumber.
One more thing I forgot to address from your post: Many people would win the Powerball and immediately buy some hypercar or something. I would buy a LWB Hi-roof Sprinter. *sploosh*
One of my best frens bought that same Sprinter a couple of years back. They've camped 60 days in it after some very simple mods with plywood and 2 x 4 lumber.
For me, it would just be about being able to ditch the trailer and haul a bike or two plus the kids to the track or trail, fully enclosed.
One more thing I forgot to address from your post: Many people would win the Powerball and immediately buy some hypercar or something. I would buy a LWB Hi-roof Sprinter. *sploosh*
One of my best frens bought that same Sprinter a couple of years back. They've camped 60 days in it after some very simple mods with plywood and 2 x 4 lumber.
For me, it would just be about being able to ditch the trailer and haul a bike or two plus the kids to the track or trail, fully enclosed.
I get it. I live in the sprinter van capital of the free world.
I bought a used Corvette, in the mid-90’s, and it was nothing but a money pit. Sold it for what I paid for it, a year a half later, minus the $4000.00 in unscheduled maintenance. I will never buy American again. Now I’m all in on the Asian manufacturers. I’ve owned Mazda, Toyota, Infinity, Nissan and Hyundai, and have had no issues other than normal wear and tear.. Korean cars are taking a bite out of the Japanese market, and are priced competitively, as they are still fighting for market share. If you’re looking for a professional car I’d look to the Kia Optima hybrid. If you want something a little sportier then the Hyundai Veloster might be a better choice (although you might be a little old for it).
I bought a used Corvette, in the mid-90’s, and it was nothing but a money pit. Sold it for what I paid for it, a year a half later, minus the $4000.00 in unscheduled maintenance. I will never buy American again. Now I’m all in on the Asian manufacturers. I’ve owned Mazda, Toyota, Infinity, Nissan and Hyundai, and have had no issues other than normal wear and tear.. Korean cars are taking a bite out of the Japanese market, and are priced competitively, as they are still fighting for market share. If you’re looking for a professional car I’d look to the Kia Optima hybrid. If you want something a little sportier then the Hyundai Veloster might be a better choice (although you might be a little old for it).
I gotta agree with you here @USMChawk . I've owned 3 cars in my life - 2 American and 1 Japanese. Both the Chevy and the Ford always had crap breaking. No issues in 12 years with the Japanese vehicle.
I bought a used Corvette, in the mid-90’s, and it was nothing but a money pit. Sold it for what I paid for it, a year a half later, minus the $4000.00 in unscheduled maintenance. I will never buy American again. Now I’m all in on the Asian manufacturers. I’ve owned Mazda, Toyota, Infinity, Nissan and Hyundai, and have had no issues other than normal wear and tear.. Korean cars are taking a bite out of the Japanese market, and are priced competitively, as they are still fighting for market share. If you’re looking for a professional car I’d look to the Kia Optima hybrid. If you want something a little sportier then the Hyundai Veloster might be a better choice (although you might be a little old for it).
I bought a used Corvette, in the mid-90’s, and it was nothing but a money pit. Sold it for what I paid for it, a year a half later, minus the $4000.00 in unscheduled maintenance. I will never buy American again. Now I’m all in on the Asian manufacturers. I’ve owned Mazda, Toyota, Infinity, Nissan and Hyundai, and have had no issues other than normal wear and tear.. Korean cars are taking a bite out of the Japanese market, and are priced competitively, as they are still fighting for market share. If you’re looking for a professional car I’d look to the Kia Optima hybrid. If you want something a little sportier then the Hyundai Veloster might be a better choice (although you might be a little old for it).
I'm with you 100. Japanese all the way.
My Chevy Dealer, WW2 vet grandfather would roll over in his grave. My dad was a Chevy dealer too. Now he has a 4 runner and my mom drives an Outback.
I bought a used Corvette, in the mid-90’s, and it was nothing but a money pit. Sold it for what I paid for it, a year a half later, minus the $4000.00 in unscheduled maintenance. I will never buy American again. Now I’m all in on the Asian manufacturers. I’ve owned Mazda, Toyota, Infinity, Nissan and Hyundai, and have had no issues other than normal wear and tear.. Korean cars are taking a bite out of the Japanese market, and are priced competitively, as they are still fighting for market share. If you’re looking for a professional car I’d look to the Kia Optima hybrid. If you want something a little sportier then the Hyundai Veloster might be a better choice (although you might be a little old for it).
I'm with you 100. Japanese all the way.
My Chevy Dealer, WW2 vet grandfather would roll over in his grave. My dad was a Chevy dealer too. Now he has a 4 runner and my mom drives an Outback.
Banzai!!!
The Japanese did two wonderful things for this clean country: they gave us quality cars at affordable prices; and they helped the American auto industry right its shit and compete.
People other than Racebannon forget the K car. I actually got a ride home from practice in a new'ish K car that had not been in a wreck that had a door that didn't shut easily because the lines/fit were off. The fucking door didn't clear the jam without putting your upper leg into it. I remember my friend's dad was like, "they don't build 'em like they used to," and I remember even at that age wondering how you would tolerate a car so shitty off the production line that the door didn't close correctly.
That's what isolating yourself from the rest of the world and shielding your industries will do to you. Japan woke the US auto industry the fuck up.
I bought a used Corvette, in the mid-90’s, and it was nothing but a money pit. Sold it for what I paid for it, a year a half later, minus the $4000.00 in unscheduled maintenance. I will never buy American again. Now I’m all in on the Asian manufacturers. I’ve owned Mazda, Toyota, Infinity, Nissan and Hyundai, and have had no issues other than normal wear and tear.. Korean cars are taking a bite out of the Japanese market, and are priced competitively, as they are still fighting for market share. If you’re looking for a professional car I’d look to the Kia Optima hybrid. If you want something a little sportier then the Hyundai Veloster might be a better choice (although you might be a little old for it).
I gotta agree with you here @USMChawk . I've owned 3 cars in my life - 2 American and 1 Japanese. Both the Chevy and the Ford always had crap breaking. No issues in 12 years with the Japanese vehicle.
I’ve had one Ford I got when I was 16 and it’s lasted 16 years. Most expensive repair was a fuel pump replacement for $600. Everything else was basic maintenance. Guess it’s just the luck of the draw/dependent on the model
I bought a used Corvette, in the mid-90’s, and it was nothing but a money pit. Sold it for what I paid for it, a year a half later, minus the $4000.00 in unscheduled maintenance. I will never buy American again. Now I’m all in on the Asian manufacturers. I’ve owned Mazda, Toyota, Infinity, Nissan and Hyundai, and have had no issues other than normal wear and tear.. Korean cars are taking a bite out of the Japanese market, and are priced competitively, as they are still fighting for market share. If you’re looking for a professional car I’d look to the Kia Optima hybrid. If you want something a little sportier then the Hyundai Veloster might be a better choice (although you might be a little old for it).
I gotta agree with you here @USMChawk . I've owned 3 cars in my life - 2 American and 1 Japanese. Both the Chevy and the Ford always had crap breaking. No issues in 12 years with the Japanese vehicle.
I’ve had one Ford I got when I was 16 and it’s lasted 16 years. Most expensive repair was a fuel pump replacement for $600. Everything else was basic maintenance. Guess it’s just the luck of the draw/dependent on the model
American cars have improved 100%. Still, as recently as a '96 or '97 GMC Yukon I had was a fucking nightmare to own. I finally gave up and bought the legendary Sequoia and remembered why it had taken so long to go to an American car.
I bought a used Corvette, in the mid-90’s, and it was nothing but a money pit. Sold it for what I paid for it, a year a half later, minus the $4000.00 in unscheduled maintenance. I will never buy American again. Now I’m all in on the Asian manufacturers. I’ve owned Mazda, Toyota, Infinity, Nissan and Hyundai, and have had no issues other than normal wear and tear.. Korean cars are taking a bite out of the Japanese market, and are priced competitively, as they are still fighting for market share. If you’re looking for a professional car I’d look to the Kia Optima hybrid. If you want something a little sportier then the Hyundai Veloster might be a better choice (although you might be a little old for it).
I gotta agree with you here @USMChawk . I've owned 3 cars in my life - 2 American and 1 Japanese. Both the Chevy and the Ford always had crap breaking. No issues in 12 years with the Japanese vehicle.
I’ve had one Ford I got when I was 16 and it’s lasted 16 years. Most expensive repair was a fuel pump replacement for $600. Everything else was basic maintenance. Guess it’s just the luck of the draw/dependent on the model
Hard to say.
Me: 1992 Full Size k 1500 Chevy Blazer then 2000 Ford Ranger 4 x 4. It’s not like either was a total lemon but way more parts needed replacing on those 2 than my Toyota.
Comments
When I mention "logical vs. emotional" purchase, I'd like to clarify that I'm not saying that as a dig. For most people, a vehicle is no different than a shirt or shoes or watch or whatever, and they want to use it to project an image of themselves to the outside world. "Attractiveness" isn't a shopping criteria that's wrong.
That being said, I'm going to disagree on your choice of the word "toughness." That's different. That's marketing. Must have been at least a decade ago, I read an article by Malcom Gladwell in the New Yorker. It's difficult to find nowadays, but, weirdly, Rutgers is hanging onto it. For the purpose of this discussion, I would ignore everything past the first numbered section of the article (which I'll paste below), as his conclusion that large trucks and SUVs are unsafe are almost certainly correct but supported by questionable statistics ("Oh really, the F150, best-selling vehicle in America for like 20 years running, causes the most traffic deaths? Do tell...").
That first section, though, is awfully interesting. It discusses the early days of the explosion of SUVs--primarily the Explorer and then the Expedition. The interesting tidbits are that the Expedition may to this day still be the most profitable vehicle of all time, their engineers and executives expected it to be a very niche product because it made no sense, and the manufacturers' own internal research to explain why the phenomenon exploded (and the future marketing that resulted from such) really holds the consumer in contempt.
Again, this is not to shit on SUV owners: You (@YellowSnow) prove that there is a niche for whom this product makes sense (frequent deep snow, skis on top, etc.). But a "niche" is all it was ever supposed to be, then marketers ran with it, and the automakers got rich (then took it in the fucking shorts when gas shot up to $5 per gallon and nobody wanted to buy their big cash cows for a while).
At any rate, to me, your use of the word "toughness" is at the heart of the problem. Climbing a hill in deep snow isn't tough, that's practical. That's making a rational purchase decision. Looking like you can climb a hill in deep snow when you live in Los Angeles and never leave asphalt is the purchasing rationale for the majority.
How does this relate to minivans? Things that have been in the back of mine:
Bags of concrete and mortar.
Ten-foot sticks of PVC and EMT conduit
Ten-foot sticks of unistrut (still a hole in the headliner from that one...)
Dimensional lumber of all kinds of sizes
4x8 sheets of plywood
Small dirt bikes, a large dog crate, the wife and two kids, and a weekend's worth of camping gear.
An entire former college basketball team now turned Army Rangers*
Meanwhile, the doors slide open and completely out of the way for easy loading, the back door pops open and completely out of the way for easy loading, the seats fold into the floor or pop back up in less than 30 seconds for turning it right back into a family hauler. All at 40mpg average and 100+ for short trips around town. A lot of that is also just practical. But I like to think at least some of it is "tuff."
Anyway, for those who haven't already left the board meeting due to my womanly rambling, I'll copypasta the first section of that article in the next post (character limit).
*May or may not be true.
Ford had intended to split the assembly line at the Michigan Truck Plant between the Expedition and the Ford F-150 pickup. But, when the first flood of orders started coming in for the Expedition, the factory was entirely given over to S.U.V.s. The orders kept mounting. Assembly-line workers were put on sixty- and seventy-hour weeks. Another night shift was added. The plant was now running twenty-four hours a day, six days a week. Ford executives decided to build a luxury version of the Expedition, the Lincoln Navigator. They bolted a new grille on the Expedition, changed a few body panels, added some sound insulation, took a deep breath, and charged forty-five thousand dollars--and soon Navigators were flying out the door nearly as fast as Expeditions. Before long, the Michigan Truck Plant was the most profitable of Ford's fifty-three assembly plants. By the late nineteen-nineties, it had become the most profitable factory of any industry in the world. In 1998, the Michigan Truck Plant grossed eleven billion dollars, almost as much as McDonald's made that year. Profits were $3.7 billion. Some factory workers, with overtime, were making two hundred thousand dollars a year. The demand for Expeditions and Navigators was so insatiable that even when a blizzard hit the Detroit region in January of 1999--burying the city in snow, paralyzing the airport, and stranding hundreds of cars on the freeway--Ford officials got on their radios and commandeered parts bound for other factories so that the Michigan Truck Plant assembly line wouldn't slow for a moment. The factory that had begun as just another assembly plant had become the company's crown jewel.
In the history of the automotive industry, few things have been quite as unexpected as the rise of the S.U.V. Detroit is a town of engineers, and engineers like to believe that there is some connection between the success of a vehicle and its technical merits. But the S.U.V. boom was like Apple's bringing back the Macintosh, dressing it up in colorful plastic, and suddenly creating a new market. It made no sense to them. Consumers said they liked four-wheel drive. But the overwhelming majority of consumers don't need four-wheel drive. S.U.V. buyers said they liked the elevated driving position. But when, in focus groups, industry marketers probed further, they heard things that left them rolling their eyes. As Keith Bradsher writes in "High and Mighty"--perhaps the most important book about Detroit since Ralph Nader's "Unsafe at Any --what consumers said was "If the vehicle is up high, it's easier to see if something is hiding underneath or lurking behind it." Bradsher brilliantly captures the mixture of bafflement and contempt that many auto executives feel toward the customers who buy their S.U.V.s. Fred J. Schaafsma, a top engineer for General Motors, says, "Sport-utility owners tend to be more like 'I wonder how people view me,' and are more willing to trade off flexibility or functionality to get that." 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."
The truth, underneath all the rationalizations, seemed to be that S.U.V. buyers thought of big, heavy vehicles as safe: they found comfort in being surrounded by so much rubber and steel. To the engineers, of course, that didn't make any sense, either: if consumers really wanted something that was big and heavy and comforting, they ought to buy minivans, since minivans, with their unit-body construction, do much better in accidents than S.U.V.s. (In 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.
Banzai!!!
People other than Racebannon forget the K car. I actually got a ride home from practice in a new'ish K car that had not been in a wreck that had a door that didn't shut easily because the lines/fit were off. The fucking door didn't clear the jam without putting your upper leg into it. I remember my friend's dad was like, "they don't build 'em like they used to," and I remember even at that age wondering how you would tolerate a car so shitty off the production line that the door didn't close correctly.
That's what isolating yourself from the rest of the world and shielding your industries will do to you. Japan woke the US auto industry the fuck up.
Me: 1992 Full Size k 1500 Chevy Blazer then 2000 Ford Ranger 4 x 4. It’s not like either was a total lemon but way more parts needed replacing on those 2 than my Toyota.