Swing for the Fences 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.
Illustration by Eddie Guy
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)
The place is a miracle of contrivance, a Rube Goldberg—esque wonder of moving platforms, roller-coaster conveyors, pirouetting robots, and banks of electronic controls that Henry Ford could never have imagined. I am standing in the whirring, clanking heart of General Motors’ Arlington assembly plant, a 3.75-million-square-foot facility whose sole job is to make full-sized sport-utility vehicles—Chevrolet Suburbans and Tahoes, GMC Yukons, and Cadillac Escalades. Enormous and immaculate, they advance down the assembly line at the pace of a wedding procession. They come in colors like Black Ice, Sheer Silver, and Red Jewel. Thirty-five years ago this plant produced the Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, at the time the best-selling car in America. Today’s glittering monsters—with hybrid battery power systems, fuel-switching engines, cylinder deactivation, and rearview cameras—make the Cutlass Supreme look like something from the dawn of the Industrial Age.
The plant has two 10-hour shifts and recently increased production to more than a thousand vehicles a day. It employs 2,400 people, who earn $29 an hour, and many put in 60 hours a week, logging more overtime than workers can remember. The wages reflect the plant’s profitability. GM earns as much as $10,000 on every SUV sold, seven times the profit margin for ordinary passenger vehicles. Business is very good.
For those readers who are scratching their heads: You are not in a time warp; this is not supposed to be happening. In the recession-shocked year of 2010, workers were not expected to be logging overtime to produce gigantic, expensive, gas-chugging SUVs. In June 2009 GM declared bankruptcy, having lost $88 billion in the previous five years. The company survived only because of a massive government rescue and huge infusions of capital and loans. Along the way it shut down fourteen plants, displaced 20,000 workers, and announced plans to end relationships with 1,300 dealerships across the country.
Moreover, these SUVs, which had once redefined the American car industry, had also suffered a devastating fall from grace. In 2003 sales of full-sized SUVs peaked at 773,000; last year that number nose-dived to a mere 217,098. Even more disastrous, their decline in sales was nearly twice as bad as that of cars and light trucks. But consumers didn’t abandon big SUVs simply because of their price tags, which can run more than $40,000. The vehicles had become cultural pariahs as well. Suddenly the behemoths seemed to be responsible for everything that was wrong with America: our outsized lust for material wealth, our dependence on foreign oil, our abuse of the environment, our disregard for safety, and even our involvement in the war in Iraq. If any product seemed marked for death in this imploding empire, it was the full-sized SUV. Many people thought the hulking vehicles would be left to die—along with entire brands, like Oldsmobile, Pontiac, and Saturn. And as the Suburban and Tahoe disappeared, it seemed that GM would vanish as well.
What happened instead will provide MBA students with case studies for years to come. The company emerged from bankruptcy last year and then paid off a $6.7 billion government loan in April. It has returned to the black, and it is planning a stock offering that will reduce the government’s ownership stake, which is currently 61 percent. After years of making dreary, second-rate cars, GM’s Cadillacs, Buicks, and Chevrolets are once again competitive with products from Japanese companies like Toyota, which is still reeling from the worst safety scandal in its history. Last year workers feared that the Arlington plant might close its doors forever. Now it looks more like a symbol of GM’s resurgence.
“There was a lot of worry,” said plant manager Paul Graham, who started his career building Suburbans 29 years ago in Flint, Michigan. “We are not out of the woods yet, but we’re back to full production. I think we’re getting our confidence back.” As part of its cutbacks, GM mothballed two facilities outside Texas that made large SUVs. But the Arlington plant survived, making it the only place in the world that builds Suburbans, Tahoes, Yukons, and Escalades. If it once appeared that these venerable brands, which had become so closely linked to our culture and our way of life, might vanish, Arlington has emerged as the site of the Suburban’s last stand. That is fitting, given that Texas not only remains the largest market for full-sized SUVs but also embraced them long before anyone else. By adopting the old Suburban in the seventies and eighties, Texas launched one of the most successful product categories of the past century.
It’s two o’clock on a beautiful Tuesday afternoon. I am cruising from Austin to Dallas along Interstate 35. The traffic is light, my radio is on, and the Blackland Prairie is sliding by my window in a blur of greens and browns. It would be just another routine trip, one that I’ve driven more than a hundred times, except for a single conspicuous fact: I own the road. Encased in 5,600 pounds of steel, leather, rubber, and more high-tech gadgetry than you can shake a stability control system at, I am sitting behind the wheel of a $55,000 Chevrolet Tahoe with a six-liter Vortec V-8 engine that cranks out 332 horsepower and 367 pound-feet of torque and can accelerate from 0 to 60 in about eight seconds. Sitting high above the poor saps in their puny sedans, whom I look down upon with pity and compassion as I pass them, I finally understand the phrase “high, wide, and handsome.”
You have probably guessed that I don’t drive a large SUV. This one is a brand-new loaner from GM. I have owned a series of Ford Explorers for the past eighteen years, but they lag far behind the Tahoe in all the categories that count: size, power, and a certain aura of invincibility that guarantees no one is going to mess with you. When I drive my daughter’s Honda Civic, I am constantly amazed at the number of thirtysomething guys with facial hair driving Ford F-150s who will actually bully the little car by roaring up behind me and showing their displeasure at my size, speed, and national heritage. But nobody disses a Tahoe.
Texans understand these feelings of power and security deep in the cortex of our brains, and that is why we buy more of these vehicles than people in any other state: one out of every five large SUVs and approximately 22 percent of the Tahoes sold in America. To live in Texas is to understand why there is a market for them. They manage to do what no other vehicle does, which is to be a status symbol for both the middle and upper classes. They are both practical and showy. Texans love them irrationally and exuberantly and in spite of shortcomings, from price to fuel efficiency to handling. Take Bruce Quernemoen, for example, a sixty-year-old executive from McKinney who is on his fourth Tahoe, a vehicle that is nearly identical to a Suburban, except that, at 16 feet 10 inches, it is 20 inches shorter. He bought his first one after his wife complained that she no longer felt safe on the highway. “If I need to pass, I want to be able to pass,” said Quernemoen, who likes to load up his grandchildren and take them for rides. “This Tahoe is like a sports car when you want to pass. It just takes off.”
Though Quernemoen admits that he hated to pay nearly $70 to fill up his gas tank two years ago—and that he flirted traitorously with the idea of buying a Chevy Traverse crossover—he is sticking with his brand. The extra five miles per gallon were not worth it, he said. So last year he bought another Tahoe, for just under $50,000. He took his obsession even further: He traveled to Arlington to videotape the car’s assembly and proudly posted it on YouTube.
These obsessions know no age limits. “I’ve wanted a Tahoe ever since I was fifteen,” said Jennifer Euwer, a single, 24-year-old labor-and-delivery nurse from Galveston. “That’s what everyone wanted when I was that age.” Euwer liked the styling, but mainly she enjoyed the sheer size of the thing. Her mother drove a Suburban, and her father owned a full-sized pickup. They also wanted her to drive something big, out of concern for her safety. Her first car was a used Ford Explorer, followed by a Jeep Liberty. But she found them confining and inferior. “I always knew that the second I could afford a Tahoe, that is what I was going to get,” she said. Last year she bought a loaded gray Tahoe for $42,000, putting $9,500 down and paying $658 a month. Now she uses it to take her friends and her dog to the beach or to go bowling. When asked if owning such a megaride makes her stand out among her friends, she replied, “When the majority of my friends got jobs, they bought Tahoes too. But I’m the only one who paid for it myself.”
In August 1986 TEXAS MONTHLY ran a cover story about the Suburban titled “The National Car of Texas.” Written by Paul Burka, it celebrated what would turn out to be a historic shift in the American car market. Texas had adopted the unlikeliest of vehicles, an ungainly-looking passenger wagon that had been bolted onto the frame of GM’s basic pickup. The result was an enormous, four-door, trucklike contraption that could seat nine people and tow a 25-foot boat or a three-horse trailer without breaking a sweat. The Suburban inhaled gasoline, averaging between ten and twelve miles per gallon in the city, and had, in Burka’s words, “a turning radius that wouldn’t fit in the Astrodome.” Texans, who routinely traveled long distances in their cars and whose culture was still deeply rooted in the practical realities of farm and ranch life, loved them. Houston and Dallas became the biggest markets in the nation for the cars, with San Antonio and Fort Worth not far behind.
While the rest of the country insisted on seeing the Suburban as a sort of juiced-up delivery vehicle, Texans embraced it as an über-station wagon. It transcended mere popularity and became a status symbol, driven by famous Texans, including Treasury Secretary James Baker, Senator Lloyd Bentsen, Southwest Airlines CEO Herb Kelleher, and Hall of Fame quarterback Roger Staubach. At the Capitol the vehicles were known as “lobby wagons,” because lobbyists liked to load them up with legislators and go to lunch. Society loved them too. In Dallas they jammed the pick-up lanes at the Hockaday School and St. Mark’s School of Texas, and they became the preferred vehicle of the Houston Junior League.
FACEBOOK
RSS
TUMBLR
TM
Read Later