The National Car of Texas
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Then there’s the danger of obsolescence, created by the manufacturer’s occasional self-doubts. Back in 1969 Chevrolet brought out the Blazer, which is a Suburban that has been amputated—two side doors instead of four, five seats instead of nine—with the idea of phasing out the Suburban. When the price of oil was at its peak, Chevrolet joined the downsizing frenzy and brought out a smaller version of the Blazer that became the most popular four-wheel-drive vehicle on the market, but it didn’t diminish the Suburban’s sales. More recently, Chevrolet announced that it will make a four-door Blazer, setting off more rumors that the Suburban’s days are numbered. Last spring, however, Chevrolet assured anxious Texas dealers that the Suburban would remain unchanged until at least 1990.
Exactly why Chevrolet would tamper with the Suburban is something of a mystery. You may have noticed that while it is next to impossible to escape advertisements for Chevy cars and pickups, you seldom hear a pitch for a Suburban. It would be as superfluous as advertising to sell dollars in Mexico: the market already absorbs everything there is to sell. The factory produces at capacity and sells out. (General Motors’ GMC trucks division also makes Suburbans, identical to the Chevrolet version in everything except cosmetics, and accounts for 18 per cent of the market.)
Now for the Suburban’s more substantive shortcomings:
- Parallel parking. Forget it. Fortunately, the shopping mall has made parallel parking as obsolete as the hand calculator has made the multiplication table. If, however, you find yourself on an errand that requires this vestigial skill, here’s a tip. Ignore every parking place on a block except the first and last. They give you the necessary room to establish your approach and glide path. If you want better odds, stick to one-way streets, which offer not two but four eligible places.
- Gas. The window sticker claims that Suburbans get 17 miles per gallon on the highway, 13 in town. Sure. I’ve done as well as 15 mpg on the highway (no AC) and as poorly as 10 mpg in town (both ACs blasting); 12 mpg is typical. Back in the days when oil was $35 a barrel and gas was $1.30 a gallon, the Suburban’s thirst for fuel was too much even for Texans. Following the 1979 oil price increase, from 52,000 to 19,000 in two years. But as soon as the price of oil began to fall, sales began to rise. Besides, don’t think about how much it costs to fill your tank. Think abut how you’re helping Texas by increasing the demand for oil.
- Automatic car washes. Discrimination, that’s what it is. Trucks can’t use those free thirty-second car washes that are supposed to make you forget that service stations don’t have service any more. Anything taller than a station wagon is banned, and the Suburban towers over the big Chevy wagon by a foot and a half. Instead, you have to pay to use a self-service stall equipped with a hose and, if you’re lucky, a brush. Separate but unequal. The timer eats quarters faster than a slot machine, and the surface area of the Suburban is so big that if you could flatten it out, all you’d need for tennis would be a net. It takes me nine quarter to finish—when I’m in training.
- Drive-up machines. Getting out of a parking garage or making a drive-in bank deposit in a Suburban requires the maneuvering skills of a tugboat captain. The machines that bar the way squat low to the ground as if they were designed exclusively for Japanese cars. Unless you press your tires right to the curb, the machine’s slots and buttons will be so far below the driver’s seat that you’ll need Akeem’s reach to transact business.
- Backing up. I’ve seen so many Suburbans with a rear-end dent that I’m beginning to think it’s original equipment. The problem is the combination of a high rear window and low obstacles. I learned this the hard way after overshooting a friend’s house by a few feet. Backing up, I checked the rear window. All clear. Then, crunch! It seems that I had deviated slightly from a track parallel to the curb. My wheels were still in the street, but there is so much Suburban behind the wheels that the rear end was well over the lawn. Indeed, it was in the space that had only moments earlier been occupied by a curbside mailbox set in a stand of bricks.
- Overconfidence. As Motor Trend magazine puts it, “the Suburban is so rockstable, surefooted, and easy to maneuver” that you tend to forget that “this is a big machine.” Trying to bring one to a stop will remind you in a hurry.
THE NATIONAL CAR OF TEXAS
A few days after we bought the Suburban, I called an old friend in Houston to try to set up a lunch. In answer to the usual whatcha-been-upta question, I said that I’d bought a new car. I didn’t say what kind. He is a staid Harvard graduate, a partner in one of the big Houston law firms, and, I recalled, a man who drove a BMW to the opera. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he had never heard of a Suburban.
He pressed on: “What did you get?”
I confessed.
“My car!” he exclaimed excitedly.
Why, I asked, did he have a Suburban?
“Sometimes,” he said, “you’ve just got to rhino.”
With that conversation, I dispensed with any residual doubts I had about the wisdom of buying a Suburban. I had chosen a Suburban partly because it seemed to be the perfect car for a Texan. So had he. And it is. I stopped thinking of the Suburban as a truck and began thinking of it as the national car of Texas.
Even my two-year-old son is swept up in the Suburban mystique. His infatuation is total. Joel is one of those two-year-olds who sleeps surrounded by piles of cars so vast that they violate the city junkyard ordinance. The only thing he likes better than cars is trucks. Coaxing him to leave the Suburban under his own power would test the persuasive powers of Racehorse Haynes. When at last he surrenders to superior force, he constantly inquired of its whereabouts the moment it is out of sight. Hence, the crisis:
We were on an after-dinner outing at a neighborhood Little League game. Momentarily distracted by the promise of popcorn, Joel suddenly remembered the object of his affection. “Daddy,” he shouted in a voice that pierced the air, “where’s the ‘Burban?”
In the stands, forty heads swiveled. Eighty eyes left the game and fixed themselves on me.
“It’s what we drive, not what we drink,” I explained.
Since then there have been numerous “Burban incidents. There was the time at nursery school when he told his teacher, “Like the ‘Burban.” And the time at the restaurant when I tried to forestall embarrassment by sitting near a window where we could keep an eye on the you-know-what, only to have him tell the waiter, “The “Burban is outside.” Now, I have conceded to him. In our family, “Burban it shall forever be.
The ‘Burban has changed our lives in other ways as well. We have rediscovered driving as a family pastime. We have taken a “Burbanful of friends and kids to the San Antonio Zoo with enough strollers in the back to open our own rental stand. We have picked up burgers and parked near the airport for a family tailgate party while jets whooshed nearby.
With a ‘Burban there are no limits to one’s ambition. In 1984 two Canadians set the world north-south driving record by traveling from South Africa to Norway in a Suburban, overcoming attacks by bandits in Kenya and guerrillas in Ethiopia. And that was nothing compared with what I did after owning the ‘Burban for two weeks. We found ourselves in Abilene visiting friends for what promised to be a long weekend. Instead, on Saturday morning, our host and I gathered his four-year-old son and my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter and set out to drive to the nearest interesting place. Try finding an interesting place near Abilene. We ended up at Carlsbad Caverns, toured the cave for three hours, and returned in the same day—a 628-mile round trip with two toddlers. I know people who would rather be attacked by bandits in Kenya.
It was a cinch. First we put the two kids in the third seat—our family name for it is the “way-back,” concocted in the hope of establishing a special allure for the children. (In the way-back, they’re a car length behind you, and the combination of distance and fan noise from the rear AC absorbs all sounds except extraordinary conflict.) We stocked the area with boxes of animal crackers, bags of chips, and cartons of juice. Whenever the noise reached audible levels, we flipped vanilla wafers over our shoulders to restore peace. Despite stops for potty, lunch, and gas, we covered the 314 miles in 315 minutes, mainly by setting the cruise control on bleeped-five for 200 miles across the empty oilfield roads.
What does this have to do with why the Suburban is the national car of Texas? Everything. The Suburban makes driving fun again. It restores a Texan’s birthright to the open road. Remember the days when the speedometers had buzzers to warn that you were going over the speed limit? You don’t need buzzers any more. The modern car shakes and quakes like an out-of-balance washing machine at speeds above 65 mph. But the Suburban hasn’t even reached cruising speed.
It’s Texan too in that it’s the perfect car for xenophobes. Here is one American vehicle that the Japanese don’t even try to compete against. The Suburban’s generic category, light trucks, is an area where the imports are actually losing ground—down 16 per cent in the first nine months of 1985, even though the total light truck market has more than doubled in five years.
The Suburban brings us back to our roots. It is so good for ranching that the King Ranch bought a fleet. Country roads present no obstacle; the ‘Burban is as efficient on a cattle guard as on a freeway. Yet it is a more accurate reflection of modern Texas than the pickup: it’s country, but it isn’t rural. And it’s the right car for the times. If you can’t afford a ranch, buy a Suburban, and maybe folks will think you have one anyway.
All these feelings that the Suburban inspires have one thing in common. They speak of better days, in the past and in the future. What more could Texas ask of its national car for the eighties?
