A week?
It usually takes me at least six weeks to sell a car. Sometimes 90 days.
I hope you don’t have to take the CarMax offer. They’re notoriously low.
As a Person Who Haul Tractors[sup]TM[/sup], Hubby tries to minimize the number of tractor-hauling trips. Mostly he just works a few more hours to pay for the diesel. Won’t be long until the rates have to go up, however. But he’s keeping his truck, trailers, and tractors.
I was planning on writing a clever reply but I couldn’t see my keyboard through the smug.
Man, business idea: Go around buying up all the SUVs on the market and open up an SUV rental company. Need to make a once-a-month trip to Costco, but your $500 worth of groceries won’t fit in your Prius? Rent an Expedition for a couple hours! Going down to the lake with your camper and want to impress your friends? Rent a Hummer for the weekend and spare your Civic!
The mascot can be SUVvie, Cookie Monster’s gas-guzzling brother. Motto: “SUVs are a Sometimes car!”
OK, let me see if I understand this.
Many people said they absolutely needed SUV’s. Many people are now selling SUV’s. All the people selling SUV’s must therefore be the people who claimed they absolutely needed them. It cannot possibly be any of the people who liked the flashy look when gas was $1.25 a gallon.
If the target of this fallacy were “liberals say X but now they’re doing Y” you guys would have taken it apart it like a blindfolded Marine with an M-16.
Don’t get me wrong, I get a good deal of Schadenfreude that there are a bunch of ding-a-lings in Escalades who are going broke due to daily 100-mile solo round-trip commutes. I just can’t get behind a pitting that commits a logical fallacy to mock someone else’s logical fallacy; it’s like the valedictorian of summer-school doing a fist-pump on the graduation stage.
And please make Bluetooth earpieces excruciatingly painful. A-MEN.
Does it occur to you that this is inexcusably rude? Would you like me to come to your place and start dissecting your property and grilling you on whether you need it all?
No one NEEDS a car. No one NEEDS a home. No one NEEDS to take vacations on jet airliners. You can ride a bicycle, live in dormitory housing or an 800 square foot apartment with your family of three (which would still be living better than most people on the planet), and spend your vacation at home tending a garden so you don’t need to buy food transported in.
If you don’t do these things, you might consider the hypocrisy of getting on your high horse and browbeating your friends who have SUVs.
And by the way, I know SUVs are the devil and all, but do you realize how little they actually add to the energy/global warming problem? Transportation makes up only 25% of energy use. Of that, light trucks make up about 35% of the fleet. Of all light trucks, SUVs make up less than half (the rest are pickup trucks, work vans, etc). That means only about 4% of the energy used in the U.S. goes into SUV’s. Now… The difference in CAFE standards between SUVs and cars is 21 mpg vs 27 mpg. So if you replaced every SUV in the country with a car, you’d change the amount of energy consumed by around 1%.
And of course, some of those SUVs truly are necessary. So you’d have to figure out what percentage of SUV owners don’t really ‘need’ them, and adjust the 1% figure downwards even more.
BTW, how many of you SUV haters take vacations by airplane? A typical jet burns 4.8L/100km. So if you decide to fly to Europe for a vacation instead of staying home (let’s say LA to London), you’ll personally be responsible for burning about 688 litres of fuel for your unnecessary trip. At a typical difference of about 2-3L per 100 Km between an average SUV and an average car, it will take the SUV driver more than a year of typical driving to burn that much extra gas.
So if you fly away for a vacation once a year and drive your Nissan Altima or Honda Accord when at home, you may be burning more fuel and hurting the environment more than the guy who drives a Ford Explorer and goes a couple of hundred miles for a camping trip in his SUV once a year instead of flying.
So get off your high horse.
I agree with you philosophically, Sam Stone, but it’s a bit unfair to put the entire emissions cost of the plane ride on just one of the many families upon it, which appears to be what your calculation has done. (I’m actually not sure exactly what calculation you did, since the numbers I get are a small, but noticeable, bit off. How many kilometers between LA and London did you take?)
Lemme guess, Sam… Escalade, right?
Five hundred dollars worth of groceries fit quite easily in a Prius.
So, since I don’t fly (I never have flown, even), and do most of my travelling in a compact car, am I still allowed to hate SUVs? 
As long as you hate people who fly as well.
Well, sure, if you get diamond-studded eggs.
Hell, I fit $300 worth of groceries from CostCo in my fucking backpack! Admittedly, it’s a big backpack and I routinely carry 100 lbs or more in the thing. It’s an external frame pack with a second soft-sided cooler pack mounted below the main pack to carry frozen stuff. When I pack it full, then strap a 36 roll pack of toilet paper to the top so I have to duck down to get through the bus door, I not only have a carbon footprint the size of an amoeba, but bring laughter and joy to the lives of the people on the bus.
Living in a city with excellent public transit, I’ve rarely felt the desire for any car, let alone an SUV.
Yup–I had someone tell me with a straight face that when the roads get icey, she’s ever so grateful for the 4 wheel drive in her Explorer. The fact that they tend to flip over didn’t deter her, nor did the fact that we live in suburbia and only rarely is she out and about before the salt trucks. :rolleyes: She must get her 3 boys to soccer, football and baseball in comfort and style!
I hate SUVs–I hate sharing the road with them; I hate the whole entitlement meme that comes with them (here, in the suburbs). You don’t need a Suburban (if ever there was a wrongly named car) out here in the wilds of strip malls and subdivisions. No, you don’t. The most humorous part of the story is that the woman with the Explorer above lives in a village that’s zoning is so strict, pick-ups and RVs etc are not allowed because they were deemed unsightly and unnecessary. I don’t know if they had to rewrite the village ordinances to allow SUVs.
And of course, now she bitches mightily about her fill up cost.
Everyone is entitled to make their choices as they see fit. What I tend to roll my eyes at is people making bad decisions and then expecting them to be lauded and then when it’s clear to all that it was a stupid choice, expect sympathy from those who made better choices all along. This works for sex partners as well…
I would love to have an SUV at this point. At least something that seats six.
Five out of the six of us in the home go to the same place each day. The fifth goes to daycare/kindergarten 1/2 mile away. Since we don’t have a vehicle that seats six, we take two cars: a 2002 Malibu and a 1986 Nissan. The Nissan is paid off; about $3500 is owed on the Malibu. If we had something that seats six, we could carpool. At least to us it makes more sense to drive something that gets 14 MPG then two cars that get under 28 MPG, right? Based on the children’s ages, it’s going to continue this way for another six years.
Suggestions?
No offense, but your life sucks.
Now that I’ve limited myself to driving only one or two times a week, I look at all the cars on the road and feel a certain amount of disgust.
Why are the words “no offense” almost always immediately followed by the most retarded opinion on the planet?
Do they still make those stations wagons with a seat in back? It doesn’t sound like you need 4WD.
I have a Ford Escape hyrbid and it gets around 32mpg. Depending on the size of said six people, there’s a good chance you’d all fit comfortably. The non-hybrid gets about 25mpg (I believe) and is about $8K less.
I am in the prime demographic for SUV hatred. I am a single woman with no children and drive an SUV. I used to have a Navigator, so I think I’m making progress. Yes, I could have purchased a Prius for the same money, but I like the SUV better.
I recycle, replaced all of my lightbulbs with Al Gore’s favorite, and will be investing quite a chunk of change before the end of the year to have solar panels installed at my house. There are dozens of little things I’ve done to help the environment, I’m going to hang on to my SUV at the risk of all the pooh-poohing.