The National Car of Texas
(Page 2 of 3)
The rest of the country just hasn’t caught on. Car and Driver magazine, published in New York, takes a thoroughly Yankee attitude toward the Suburban in its 1986 Buyers Guide. The Suburban’s powerful V-8 engine, it says, “should give some lucky deliveryman something to talk about.” If you’re looking for status, the magazine suggests Jeep’s Grand Wagoneer, noting that “from the high-stepping world of the civilized Jeeps, you look down on all those around you.” Exactly. And the Suburban is half a foot higher than the Grand Wagoneer.
SHOPPING AROUND
I wish that I had known about the honored place of the Suburban in Texas iconography before I set out to buy a car. It would have saved me a lot of time and trouble. But I’m one of those people who is not very observant about cars—I think the last one I could recognize instantly was the 1955 Chevy—and the only time I had really paid much attention to Suburbans was a few years ago in Colorado. I didn’t get to see much of Colorado, because my view kept getting blocked by one Suburban after another bearing Texas license plates. All I knew about Suburbans was that I didn’t want one.
It was too big. My wife comes from a small-car family (her dowry consisted of a Volkswagen Beetle), and I had known nothing but small cars since 1974. We were determined to find the smallest car that could comfortably accommodate the five of us.
Since I had a Buick, we started our search with the big Buicks. The biggest sedan was the LeSabre, but it was already a dinosaur, in its last year before being shrunk and converted to front-wheel drive. After driving it I could see the wisdom of the decision: the combination of rear-wheel drive and a six-cylinder engine was just too sluggish for so much car. We looked at the station wagon but never got beyond the sticker price: at $17,700 it was priced far beyond the cost of a minivan. The wagon also had an odd and awkward method of seating seven people. A two-seater bench unfolded in the cargo area to face backward. The driver could neither see nor hear what was going on back there—though I admit that where children are concerned, this layout could have its advantages at times.
Of course, we shouldn’t even have been thinking about seven seats. We were just five, right? But what about transporting baby-sitters or going out to dinner with relatives or carpooling? Without realizing it, we had lost the discipline that was keeping us and the Suburban apart.
But first there was Lee Iacocca’s ballyhooed minivan. It seated seven, still had a little room for luggage in the back, and looked as if it would not require us to replace the garage with an airplane hangar. I peered at the sticker price: $13,300. That sounded good. I said so.
“Did you see the other sticker?” the salesman asked. He pointed to apiece of paper about a quarter of the size of the familiar sticker. Under the heading of “Dealer Prep,” it listed a few things like paint protection, undercoating, and other things that I thought cars used to have as a matter of course. Those came to $795. It was the other line, though, that really got my attention. “AMV,” it read. “$895.”
What, I wanted to know, is AMV?
“Adjusted market value. It means that these are very popular.”
We drove it to a nearby highway. With every rotation of the wheel I worried that one of us was going to fall in love with the minivan and end up paying Lee Iacocca $895 for air. Then I turned onto the road well in front of an oncoming truck. I floored the accelerator. The four-cylinder engine labored mightily, but the truck quickly overtook us on the left with a great roar. The minivan shook. So did I.
Nissan was the next to be eliminated. Its Stanza wagon is a cross between a station wagon and a minivan. It seemed to have everything—right size, right price, right seating—until we took it out to FM Road 2222 west of Austin, a demanding, curving road that leads to Lake Travis and always seems to be banked the wrong way. Every time I brought the car broadside to the wind I felt as if I needed to raise the mainsail to get it back on course. Discouraged, we returned the car and went in search of a consolation hamburger. The place where we came to rest was one block from a Chevrolet dealer. “Say,” said my wife, “do you want to go check out the Suburban while we’re here?”
SOLD!
Our salesman had a unique line as he gave us the keys for a test drive. “Now, don’t you worry ‘bout getting’ in a wreck.” He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a Polaroid snapshot. A smiling woman was standing next to a mangled Suburban. “That’s my wife,” he said proudly. “Happened last year. A drunk in a pickup ran a red light. Totaled both cars, ‘bout totaled him too. She walked away without a scratch. I show this to all my customers. Safest car you can drive.”
I had a more immediate concern. What had begun as a mild February day had turned into a record-breaking scorcher that topped out at 97 degrees. Through the tinted glass, the interior of the suburban looked as hot and dark as a smokehouse. We climbed in, left the doors open to disperse some heat, and turned on the air conditioning. It seemed adequate to cool us in the front seat, but what about the Sahara behind us? Just then, our salesman reached in through the open door and flicked a button on the dash panel. A blue norther lashed the back of my neck. “That rear AC sure helps on a hot day,” he said, waving us on our way.
The rear air conditioner, like the Suburban itself, is a simple but powerful machine. It has no thermostat, just a switch for high and low fan speeds. The vents are located above the third row of seats, and on high speed they discharge air with sufficient velocity to stir the hair of the front-seat passengers. We were cool before we left the parking lot.
The exit opened onto a freeway frontage road, which was crowded with an endless stream of cars disgorged from a nearby interchange. My wife spotted a tiny opening in front of a blue Honda ad stepped on the accelerator. Instantly G-forces pressed us back into our seats as the V-8 propelled us into the vacancy. Of course, the Honda responsible for leaving the small gap didn’t seem eager to contest the issue.
We had just discovered the basic appeal of driving a Suburban: To you it seems like a car, but to them it seems like a truck. Hop in a Suburban, and the whole world acts as if it were in defensive driving class. Nobody honks at you, nobody cuts in front of you, nobody tailgates you. My wife said more cars pulled over to let her pass during that test drive than during the ten years she drove a Beetle. For the first time, I began to understand the mentality of the Houston freeway diver. High above the peons, in a Suburban or its cousins, from the Blazer to the pickup, the thought inevitably invades your mind: out of my way, bud.
Our test drive lasted an hour, and the more we drove, the better the Suburban looked. We drove onto the same twisting highway where the Nissan had fluttered like a flag in the wind. The heavier Suburban shoved its way through the breeze without a quiver. The Suburban clobbered the minivan. It carried more people more comfortably and still had far more cargo room in the rear. It was more powerful. It was safer. It seemed more natural to drive, with its steering wheel situated behind a full-fledged hood instead of right up front. And the price was in the ballpark with everything else we had looked at. We were driving a holdover from 1985, with a sticker price—just one sticker too—of $17,075 reduced to $15,150.
But most people do not buy cars for purely rational reasons, and I was no exception. I was smitten. The Suburban had awakened within me the primeval Texas instinct to drive as far as possible as fast as possible. Before the 55-mile-per-hour speed limit, $1-a-gallon gas, small cars, and Southwest Airlines, this unrestrained love for the open road used to be one of the things that set Texans apart. No one would have dreamed of disputing that speed and power were necessary elements of Texas driving; the distances were too great and the eighteen-wheelers too menacing. Old-timers in Texas politics tell the story of the time Governor Price Daniel invited 250 people to a traffic safety conference in Austin. Dozens were caught in a radar trap on the outskirts of town and cited for speeding A long-ago Dallas Morning News editorial explained that the state’s high ranking in traffic accidents resulted from “the same human qualities that made America great—willingness to risk, driving energy, rugged individualism”
Reluctantly, we returned the Suburban to the dealer. But not for long. The next day we drove it out again—this time as its owners. To celebrate, we headed promptly for a barbecue lunch in the country, just the way Texans used to do.
DOWNSIDES
As much as I love it, I have to concede that the Suburban isn’t perfect. Some of its problems, such as a turning radius that wouldn’t fit in the Astrodome, I expected. Others I did not. But before we get to those, let’s dispense with a couple of supposed drawbacks that aren’t really drawbacks at all.
There’s design, for instance. Or the lack of it: Suburbans don’t change from year to year. This is anathema to drivers who insist on owning a car that stands out as the latest version of its kind. Back when the Cadillac ruled the Texas roads, a Dallas dealer estimated that 20 per cent of his customers bought a new car every year. To cater to such vanity, manufacturers annually tinker with headlights, grills, chrome, and other minor features. But status-seekers of this sort are doomed to frustration where the Suburban is concerned. The current model has been around for an eternity in the ephemeral world of automobilia. Designed to provide more passenger amenities, it came out in 1972, a year before the oil embargo, and has survived two OPEC price hikes, the small-car trend, and several death sentences pronounced by Chevrolet itself. For that matter, the basic idea of the Suburban hasn’t changed much since the first version was introduced fifty years ago. The 1936 Suburban Carryall was a half-ton truck built to look like a station wagon, with removable seats to facilitate carrying large loads.
