The Ups And Downs And Ups of The National Car of Texas
Remember when $4-a-gallon gasoline, war in the Middle East, and hybrids that ran on vegetable oil all spelled doom for the Suburban? Instead of driving into the graveyard, those fuel-sucking monsters have come roaring back, along with the auto industry itself. And Texans who still love their large SUVs can thank a single factory in Arlington for their resurrection.
Ann Maxwell says: Excuse me, Texans who drive SUV’s are stupid? Give me a break! Whether you drive the curved two lane back roads of East Texas or the straight, never-ending roads of West Texas, I want a vehicle around me that is larger than a deer or cow that might wander into the middle of the road. I’m not irresponsible; I am safety conscious. I’ll pay more to feel secure in the larger vehicle. Thank God for your Arlington folks and for Tahoes and Surburbans. (July 31st, 2010 at 6:04pm)
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It was also during this time that the beloved old Chevy Suburban became the poster child for middle-class selfishness and indulgence. The early 2000’s saw the first wave of anti-SUV literature, bearing headlines and titles such as “Axle of Evil.” Anti-SUV activists like California’s Sue Thiemann started slapping hundreds of fake tickets on Suburbans (“Subhumans”), Excursions (“Extinctions”), and other large SUVs. “I hate them for environmental reasons,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I hate them for safety reasons. Most of all, I hate them for the self-centered, self-absorbed, moral-midget rudeness.” An evangelical group launched a “What Would Jesus Drive?” campaign on its website. An organization led by political journalist Arianna Huffington ran ads that equated SUV driving with supporting terrorism. “I helped hijack an airplane. I helped blow up a nightclub. So what if it gets eleven miles to the gallon . . . I helped teach kids around the world to hate America. I like to sit up high.” Perhaps the most sweeping condemnation was delivered by Bradsher, whose High and Mighty used Detroit’s own marketing research against it. He concluded that SUV buyers were “self-centered . . . less social, more sybaritic, and have a limited interest in doing volunteer work to help others.” The idea was that owners of big SUVs were more interested in self-assertion, aggression, and dominance. If this seems extreme—and most Texans accustomed to seeing middle-aged moms ferrying their kids about town in Suburbans would find it ridiculously extreme—it became the considered view of many people in America, particularly in the Northeast.
One of the biggest complaints involved safety. When I ask my friends why they drive Suburbans, they usually cite safety as a prime reason. Their response reduces to a basic law of physics. A GMC Yukon XL, for example, a vehicle that is bigger than most things on the road, simply wins in most collisions. You don’t have to be a scientist to understand that. Its high bumper—often well above the bumper of, say, a Ford Focus or Toyota Corolla—and enormous weight guarantee it. But this measure of safety, curiously, turns out to be misleading. It is undoubtedly true that a Suburban wins in a two-car crash with a small car. But there is more to safety than that. One of the main components is accident avoidance. A big SUV has never been prone to rolling over like its smaller cousins, but it is far less maneuverable than a car. And that weakness, it turns out, often offsets its passive ability to protect its occupants.
A 2002 study conducted by Tom Wenzel, a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Marc Ross, a physicist at the University of Michigan, examined driver deaths from 1995 to 1999 based on the type of vehicle. It examined fatalities per millions of cars sold for the drivers of the vehicles and for the drivers of other cars involved in the accident. The study’s conclusion was that SUVs were “not necessarily safer for drivers than cars and on average they are as risky as the average mid-size or large car and no safer than many of the most popular compact and subcompact cars.” The Toyota Camry recorded 41 driver deaths and 29 deaths of drivers in the other vehicle. The Honda Accord had 54 driver deaths and 27 deaths in other vehicles. Chevy’s Suburban, meanwhile, tallied 46 driver deaths and 59 other deaths. The Tahoe’s numbers were 68 and 74. While the big SUVs were not notably less risky for their drivers than these other brands, it was indisputably true that fewer drivers survived collisions with them. SUV drivers were not nearly as safe as they imagined, but they were themselves quite as deadly as they had imagined. That much, at least, was observably true. None of which helped their image with the people who already hated them.
But as sales of full-sized SUVs rose to record levels in 2003, this criticism seemed to have no effect on the market. People wanted the cars. Such information was a mere faint buzzing in their ears, a bit of white noise they did not need to pay attention to. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie drove their Suburban to McDonald’s with the kids. The mayor of Detroit cruised the city in a tricked-out Tahoe. Rapper Ludacris drove his Escalade onto the stage at the MTV Video Music Awards. Most of the players in the NFL and NBA seemed to drive some version of them. They were celebrity cars, yes, but they also looked great, even iconic, sitting in driveways—the perfect family car for the prosperous American family. American automakers were so confident in the market for them and for other SUVs that they had staked their future on them.
Then everything went wrong. It did not happen all at once, and it did not happen simply because gas prices rose to $4 a gallon in the spring of 2008 or because, a few months later, the subprime lending crisis knocked the world economy off its axis. The market for big SUVs actually faltered long before that. Their best year came in 2003, when they owned a record 4.6 percent share of the market in North America. The next year sales went flat. Then, in 2005, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast, causing a temporary spike in the price of gasoline. This certainly spooked drivers. But that alone could not account for the change in sales of Suburbans, Tahoes, Expeditions, Armadas, Sequoias, and the rest, which fell a whopping 25 percent when the rest of the auto business was enjoying a banner year. In Texas—the great bellwether of the market—sales were off nearly as much.
In 2005 consumers had already begun to switch to the more practical so-called crossover vehicles, like the Toyota Highlander, Chevy Equinox, and Nissan Murano. If you have not noticed, crossovers are the future of SUVs in general: They are built on car platforms instead of truck platforms and will soon replace most or all of the boxy, five-passenger Ford Explorer and Toyota 4Runner styles. They seat as many people as big SUVs but cost less and consume far less gas. The market dropped abruptly again in 2006 and 2007, and by 2008 it was in free fall as the recession gutted automobile sales around the world. Credit tightened and housing prices fell, meaning that people could no longer use their homes as piggy banks to buy $40,000 vehicles. Millions lost their jobs and thus the ability to afford car payments. GM, with its disproportionate portfolio of expensive, gas-guzzling trucks, suffered worse than anyone. By 2009 the damage was complete. The domestic market had plunged from nearly 17 million vehicles to 10 million. Of that, the big SUVs now owned merely 2 percent, a 54 percent drop in their share of the overall market in six years.
Extinction seemed imminent, and with all the talk of hybrids and cars that ran on water or vegetable oil, automakers braced for the worst. But in yet another twist, the Suburban and its cousins were saved by a core group of consumers who refused to let the vehicles go to the graveyard.
Sixteen miles from the Arlington assembly plant is Classic Chevrolet in Grapevine, the number one Chevy dealer in the nation. Touring the sprawling, six-building lot, where thousands of new cars stand gleaming in their ranks, one would never know that the car industry was in a grinding recession or that Classic’s supplier was a recently bankrupt ward of the U.S. government. Flags flutter and customers cruise the long lines of vehicles, kicking the tires, jawing with salesmen, and inspecting popular models like the Malibu, Traverse, Equinox, and Camaro. Here too are hundreds of Tahoes and Suburbans, ranged in their red, white, gold, silver, black, and gray colors, looking like so much candy in a box. Business is still way off for the big SUVs, but inventories and production have been adjusted, and Classic is selling all that the Arlington plant can give them. Chevy has even offered a deluxe “Diamond Edition” Suburban to celebrate the car’s 75 years of continuous production.
Considering the extent of the disaster, how did GM’s full-sized-SUV lines survive, particularly when the company had shown its willingness to let entire brands, like Olds, Pontiac, and Saturn, die? One answer is the loyal group of buyers—the largest concentration of which is in Texas—that is not going away in spite of the shift to crossovers and smaller vehicles, the iffy economy, or nervousness about gas prices. “What has happened is that we have gone back to more of a core buyer,” said Chevrolet’s Rick Scheidt. “We started out with people who needed towing capacity or just the ability to haul people. In the go-go years these full-sized SUVs became upscale products. People bought them because it said something about who they were. But the reality is that many of them did not need a vehicle that size. Now we are back to a core set of buyers that are family-oriented. They really need the size of the vehicle. We think that change has probably settled out. We don’t expect significant decreases in the numbers of vehicles.” Jeff Schuster, an executive director of automotive forecasting for J.D. Power and Associates, agreed with Scheidt’s optimism. “These vehicles are part of the portfolio,” he said. “Their market share will probably be in the range of 1.8 to 2 percent for the next four years. I don’t see a tremendous amount of change.”
Unless, of course, gas prices go up, in which case nothing is certain at all. Suburbans and other big SUVs have always been vulnerable to global swings in oil prices. Following the explosion of oil prices in 1979, for example, sales of the Suburban fell from 52,000 to 19,000. The price spikes after Katrina and Rita hurt too, and recession or no, $4 gas would likely have caused even more devastation in the marketplace. It is too soon to tell if the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf will affect oil prices, but curtailment in offshore drilling almost certainly will.
GM’s answer to gas prices is for sale on Classic’s lot too: the new Tahoe hybrids, vehicles that average 22 miles per gallon in the city, the same as a four-cylinder Toyota Camry. My loaner Tahoe was a hybrid as well, riding on mostly battery power at low speeds while giving the driver the option to kick the enormous gas-powered V-8 into action at will. Right now consumers are reluctant to pay the $4,000 premium for the hybrid option. Sustained higher gas prices would likely change their minds, and in any case the future of the full-sized SUV will feature lots of hybrids. The Arlington plant can switch production almost immediately if the demand exists.
For now, however, gas is $2.75 a gallon and cars are moving briskly off the lots in the Metroplex. “We’re doing much better,” said sales manager Ken Thompson with a confident smile. “We think we’re going to have a pretty good year.”
Read a Q&A with S. C. Gwynne.
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