It seems to me, with the gas prices going up ,up, up, your so called sports utility vechicles are dieing out in sales. I visited the Chicago Auto Show this month and saw the prices of the SUV’s ranging from 25k to as much as 85 k. You can buy yourself a house for that kind of cash. You hear more and more about these 4 wheel drive monsters losing popularity. Yeah Da you have to sell your house or at least get a second mortgage to own one.
I saw at the Auto Show more compact cars then you would ever beleive. I think with the gas prices soaring everyday the small cars are going to make a big come back. Then what does your auto makers do with their cadillac escalade’s, lincoln navagator’s, and lets not forget the hummer’s not even naming the imports. More and more you see cars going to natural gas, electric, and finally they are actually resembling a car, not a space ship. Sure the cheap smaller SUV’s will still sell in the range of 25k to 40k, but if they raise the prices on the smaller types like mazda and toyota for example, people aren’t going to be able to afford them.
So i say to all the auto manufactures, you better lower the prices on those big monsters, because the lil guys look like they are back in business.
I caught some of the Chicago Auto Show on cable recently. The bigger GM models get 9 miles to the gallon! Uh, guys, this isn’t the fifties, you know; the era of 50¢ gasoline is long gone.
Hey, we haven’t had a good ol’-fashioned SUV rant in a while!
Sorry, mistergto, but SUVs won’t be “dieing” out anytime soon. Detroit tends to have a very close eye on the pulse of the American consumer (maybe that should be “finger”). The car makers know what the public want, and will deliver it.
For 2002 and 2001, fully half of the top-selling car models have been SUVs or trucks. According to Automotive News (PDF), 50% more trucks have been produced so far this year than cars.
Gas prices may be going “up, up, up” but people who can afford to plunk down the cash for a Hummer can also afford to gas it up. Gas-electric hybrids haven’t been delivering on the promises of astronomic gas mileage, and you have to drive them for a while to offset the substantial initial cost difference.
Hemispherically shaped piston chambers or something like that.
Basically they were monster engines 20 or thirty years ago, but died out as emission standards tightened up. They now have an updated wimpy version for the sole purpose of tricking old fat guys who are trying to recapture their youth into buying their cars.
Gas prices fluctuate. It wasn’t that long ago that they’d reached record lows. Small periodic swings aren’t going to fundamentally change an enormous, plodding auto industry.
On the other hand, the local Chevy “superstore” is running TV ads offering something like $11,000 off the price of any new Suburban. And it’s not even the end of the model year. Sounds to me like they’ve got way too many on their hands, perhaps because demand really is slacking off.
Maybe the mild (as far as I’m concerned, I’m no meteorologist) winter is a contributing factor also.
Because you never know when you’ll need to plod a quarter mile in a dusty coating of snow for a pack of cigarettes.
Nah, just wait 10 years until everyone notices the oil is running out faster than anyone thought possible, and then SUVs will die.
Unless some corporate puppet realizes that the hydrogen economy will never work, and diverts research into ethanol, and then the beasts will continue to crush innocent bystanders in traffic accidents.
av8rmike, GM and Ford and Chrysler may have an idea of what people want when it comes to trucks, but the cars they are building sure aren’t exactly what people want. If it were true, Toyota and Honda wouldn’t be selling all the damn cars that they are. Toyota was well on its way to being the No2 car company in America.
If it weren’t for trucks, GM and Ford would be long one. And now that Toyota and Nissan are building real, full-size trucks, I’d bet market share will be sliding soon on trucks.
I suppose by saying “Detroit,” I was being too restrictive. All the car companies that do business in the U.S. know who their customers are and what they want. Why else would Toyota manufacture 5 different kinds of SUV for the U.S. market?
And I don’t recall the OP foretelling the end of the American SUV only, but all of them.
There are short term swings and long term swings. The most recent rise is due to our Really Good Buddies The Saudis realizing that the dollar is falling and they aren’t getting as much for their oil as they were last year. So they jacked up prices to compensate. Ergo, the US trade deficit will soon hit yet another all time high. Ergo, the dollar falls again, our RGBTS raise prices again (or just switch to Euros for base price), etc. The US economy has reached its tipping poing. Huge Federal ($7 trillion!) and trade deficits, jobs being sent overseas, falling dollar, etc.
We are in for one loooong swing.
Gas hogs will be taking up a lot of space in used car lots in a couple years. Most will probably be shipped overseas where people can afford them.
The SUV has been dying for years. See they were cool till rappers started rapping about them. The only reason you see them is because uncool people buy them, parents, etc. Now they are going the way of the Air Force Ones.
Um, that’s not actually correct. The hemi is a hemishperically shaped piston chamber, iirc, but it was actually developed because it is more efficient at converting gas to horsepower than a normal engine. The guy who invented the Hemi is named Tom Hoover, he is an alumnus of my alma mater and came to our Physics Seminar class one time to give a talk. Really cool guy.
Don’t ask me about the technical details of the hemi tho, he didn’t give an in-depth explanation, the guy is a bit scatterbrained nowadays.
My only guess is that they needed to build a hemi into that engine to get the gas mileage up to 9mpg. sheesh!
Well, $0.50/gal in the fifties would be equivalent to a hell of a lot more than 1.629 (local price) today. It was a bit before my time, but I think fifties prices were typically something like 0.25 - 0.29/gal.
Even those are not all that cheap by today’s standards - my historical CPI index says the price multiplier should be around 6.5. IOW, in real dollars, there’s not a big difference between today’s prices and those of 45 years ago.
Actually, a Hemi is designed to maximize thermal efficiency, not fuel efficiency. The reason why the old Hemis were gas hogs was more a question of technology than design. The design is sound.
Here is a good explanation of the design and principles of a Hemi engine. With a Hemi you get more power from the same displacement with a negligible loss of fuel economy, if at all.
The V-10 used by the Viper and the Ram SRT-10 is not a Hemi. It’s an 8.3 L V-10 that puts out 550 horsepower and 500 lb/ft of torque. It’s a wildly impractical engine, and anyone who can afford one is without a doubt wildly impractical as well.
