I need my (compact) SUV whenever I have to tow a trailer. I needed it to haul heavy trailers full of stuff up from SoCal. Its 4WD capability has given me fun offroad, and has given me extra traction in the snow. Its long roof makes it quite handy for carrying my kayak. It has been a great vehicle.
But I’d prefer something small and efficient for everyday use, and just use the Cherokee on the weekends. (Incidentally, my fuel bill for it was less than $40 last month. I haven’t been driving much.)
Phew, you had me worried there for a moment. But since I’m not a parent, I guess I’m not automatically ‘un-cool’.
Now you have me curious. Just what does a cool person drive?
One of the more interesting things going on is that the manufacturers have noticed that the Canadian car market is diverging from the US. Canadians buy a larger proportion of small cars; Canada is therefore getting an increasing number of models that are different from those in the States.
Nissan is selling the X-trail, a small SUV, in Canada, and not in the States. GM offers several small sedans (the Epica and Optra) that it does not sell in the States; it offers the Aveo in both countries, but apparently Canada has a larger range of models than the US. Toyota offers the subcompact Echo in a hatchback (not a dirty word in Canada). Jaguar offers an X-type “estate” (wagon), that will not be sold in the States. And Mercedes will be selling the Smart car in Canada in the fall.
Many of these models are sold widely all over the world… except in the States.
When I started driving and dating in 1973 or so, gas had just hit $.50/gal.
I can recall my mother getting “a dollar’s worth” of gas, and receiving about five gallons in 1963 or so.
So '50s prices should have been in the mid-teens per gallon.
I don’t think rising gas prices, in themselves, are going to make much of a dent in SUV sales. In Italy, where I live, gasoline costs 3-4 times as much as in the USA. Nonetheless, SUVs are becoming more and more popular. Granted, they’re not necessarily the huge behemoths that find favor in America, but I think that’s more a function of the narrowness of Italian streets than of concerns about gasoline consumption.
Extrapolate that to today and it’s barely over a dollar. 50¢ around 1970 would about $2.25 today. Point is, gasoline is a bit more expensive than it was fifty years agom, the difference might not be much with inflation taken into account but it is there. I believe there was also hardly anyone living beyond their means, unlike today with ads for credit counselling services all over the place.
Rather than guessing and extrapolating, here’s a chart. To summarize, gas now isn’t much more than it was in the 50’s. Not high at all comapred to the early 80’s.
