Sport Utility Vehicles

by Marko Peric

I always used to like SUVs, even back before they were called SUVs. In those days they were generally referred to as 'jeeps' (in total disregard for the fact that a Jeep is one particular vehicle, and a brand owned by DaimlerChrysler AG). Since then sport utility vehicles have poured into the North American automotive market as if Lee Iacocca held a party for all the carmakers and the featured attraction was a piñata filled with SUVs. But as twisted as that image might be, it's not far from being accurate. Everyone is making some sort of quasi offroad vehicle these days, most companies more than one. General Motors makes 15 different models (16 if you count the Aztek, which sorta looks like a really ugly SUV gone horribly wrong designed by morons who can't spell, but that's another rant for another time) and that's only what's available in Canada.

Now I used to like SUVs. Or at least I used to. They combine the power and towing capability of a truck with the passenger capacity of a car, and most importantly, they aren't minivans. I've never liked minivans, but I digress. SUVs used to be cool, but now that they are ubiquitous the novelty has worn off. Everywhere you look there's an SUV blocking your view of oncoming traffic. The things have gotten bigger over time, and now many of them are monstrosities that sit way too high and made it a problem for those of us in cars to see around them. How frustrating is it to sit at a red light and trying to turn right, but the Suburban to your left makes it impossible to see if anyone is coming?

That's far from my only issue with SUVs. They are gas guzzlers. When you drive a big vehicle with a large engine your fuel bill is going to be a lot larger than if you drove a compact car with a 2.0 litre engine. With the prices of gas today, one wonders why people flock to purchase machines that suck back fossil fuels faster than college students on spring back consume beer. Wasting all this gas isn't exactly good for the planet, either. More fuel burned of course results in more pollution, and we hardly need more greenhouse gasses and smog. Global warming has already started, if you don't believe that look at the weather we've had for the last couple of years. We can't blame it on El Nino any more. I'm not an environmentalist by any stretch of anyone's imagination, but I don't exactly like watching the planet go down the tubes, either. Also, we have a limited supply of oil, and every 4.0 litre Jeep Grand Cherokee Detroit pumps out drains the supply a little more. Unless there's a big supply of dinosaurs stashed somewhere and someone has a way to speed up the process of making them into fossil fuels we are eventually going to run out of gasoline.

The rampant overuse of petrochemical resources wouldn't be nearly as disquieting if the people driving SUVs had some actual need for this sort of vehicle. Ostensibly SUVs are built for off-road use, but how many people are going to take their Lincoln Navigator anywhere near a mud bog? For the vast majority of people driving SUVs the closest they will come to off-roading is parking on the grass at the kid's soccer game.

So why do so many people buy expensive vehicles with capabilities they will never use? Here's an analogy. In the early 90s I discovered a British comedy called Mr. Bean, which at the time was largely unheard of in North America. It was hilarious, and I laughed a lot, and I told my friends to watch Mr. Bean, and they all did, and loved it. But soon everyone was watching Mr. Bean, and it became trendy, and saturated, and stale. The same thing is happening with Sport Utility Vehicles. People are buying them because SUVs are cool and trendy. But when SUVs are everywhere, they cease to be cool and trendy, and become merely monstrous metal machines. Here's hoping this trend dies before someone decides to build an SUV bigger than the Canyonaro.