Posted on 05/09/2005 6:52:14 AM PDT by MississippiMasterpiece
It's a Saturday morning on San Leandro's Marina Boulevard auto row, and the big SUVs have been sitting on the lots, waiting for someone to come in and start that dealer dollar dance that ends up with the customer slightly bewildered but paying a lot less for that vehicle than he thought he was going to.
Once in a while, there are takers, although the dealer has to discount the SUV heavily just to get it moving.
Salvador Sotello, for example, recently paid F.H. Dailey Chevrolet in San Leandro $41,000 for a new Chevy Tahoe LT (yes, with leather) SUV that had a sticker price of $58,000. The sale was an anomaly in what is otherwise a pretty dismal selling season. "It's been pretty quiet," saleswoman Crystal Gonzalez said the other day. "Been pretty slow."
At Broadway Ford in Oakland, the grilles of the Mustangs, SUVs and the lone Thunderbird smile at the passing traffic, but the showroom is empty, it appears, of customers; several salesmen are in sight. Up at Albany Ford-Subaru, salesman Myers Howard, sitting a few feet away from a big Ford pickup truck, says things on the Ford side of the showroom "are slow." That might be the understatement of the day.
Just this past week, General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. underwent the humiliation of seeing their credit ratings reduced by Standard & Poor's Ratings Services to the status of junk. The reasons are becoming clear -- the two big companies can't sell much of what they produce.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
If it were up to me, the license - much like the plate and the insurance - would be specific to the vehicle.
VERY HEAVY CARS, powered by VERY HEAVY ENGINES. They hold the road like glued down bricks, even at high rates of speed on really tight turns.
What about it lacks merit?
First let me comment on post #311 where you said passenger cars were on the road first.
I live 2 miles off of the NAFTA highway (IH 35) in Texas. Truly every 4th vehicle is a 75 foot 18 wheeler. Even SUV's are no match for these guys. Any claim that roads are for cars is laughable.
But on to the many WRONG points made in #309:
......By buying an SUV you double the crash risk of everyone else on the road.... If this is true, then why is it not true for these 18 whelers, which I love to hate? Look at any study you want, OTR drivers have the best safety record of all drivers. So it's not the SUV, but the nut behind the wheel.
Karl Marx would be proud of this statement: .......one should be able to state clearly exactly what those effects are before ever being permitted to have a SUV......
So OK, I want to by an SUV... who should I report to? Who should I answer to? You want I should have to apply for an SUV permit? The Soup Nazi was funny. They SUV Nazi is not so funny. Next I should apply to the State for permission to buy a bigger house?
You get where I'm going. Slippery slope.
You should read/hear what the auto manufacturers think of the people who buy SUVs. Lizard-brained is one description that springs to mind. Three guesses why.
Gonna buy another one soon.
And I care what they think because?
They care what you think....
And in many cases they're right.
Oh?
And what do I think?
In your humble, fascist opinion . . . .
[…] Internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills. Ford’s S.U.V. designers took their cues from seeing “fashionably dressed women wearing hiking boots or even work boots while walking through expensive malls.” Toyota’s top marketing executive in the United States, Bradsher writes, loves to tell the story of how at a focus group in Los Angeles “an elegant woman in the group said that she needed her full-sized Lexus LX 470 to drive up over the curb and onto lawns to park at large parties in Beverly Hills.”
[…] Over the past decade, a number of major automakers in America have relied on the services of a French-born cultural anthropologist, G. Clotaire Rapaille, whose speciality is getting beyond the rational—what he calls “cortex”—impressions of consumers and tapping into their deeper, “reptilian” responses. And what Rapaille concluded from countless, intensive sessions with car buyers was that when S.U.V. buyers thought about safety they were thinking about something that reached into their deepest unconscious. “The No. 1 feeling is that everything surrounding you should be round and soft, and should give,” Rapaille told me. “There should be air bags everywhere. Then there’s this notion that you need to be up high. That’s a contradiction, because the people who buy these S.U.V.s know at the cortex level that if you are high there is more chance of a rollover. But at the reptilian level they think that if I am bigger and taller I’m safer. You feel secure because you are higher and dominate and look down. That you can look down is psychologically a very powerful notion. And what was the key element of safety when you were a child? It was that your mother fed you, and there was warm liquid. That’s why cupholders are absolutely crucial for safety. If there is a car that has no cupholder, it is not safe. If I can put my coffee there, if I can have my food, if everything is round, if it’s soft, and if I’m high, then I feel safe. It’s amazing that intelligent, educated women will look at a car and the first thing they will look at is how many cupholders it has.”
If the shoe fits...
And why would I trust the word of a New Yorker writer who thinks unibody is safer than body-on-frame? Please, you're embarrassing yourself.
Good grief. You're credibility is twisting in the wind.
Here you are again balling all around about SUV,s. What is the difference? If I own a SUV or a F-250 Pickup truck or a Kenworth? Why do you care? If I own a SUV and get 10 miles per gallon and drive 200 miles a week or I drive a Toyota Prius(sp) and get 50 miles per gallon and drive 1000 miles a week there is no difference, we both used the same amount. So what.
So?
I find people who tell other people how to live or what to do or what to drive offensive.
Your absolutely right. Those asses in small cars doing 80 MPH cut you off on the exit ramp or passing zone. All those little cars should be outlawed or have mandatory governors set at 35 MPH.
If you buy any gasoline at all you are supporting tham.
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