Left: 2006 Hummer. Right: 2006 Rav 4.
GREENVILLE, S.C.:
THE MARKET for sport-utility vehicles is alive and doing reasonably well.
Understandably, you may be shocked by that assertion. For nearly a year, you have been listening to the media's requiem for SUVs. It goes something like this:
Gas prices are rising. SUV sales are falling. Sales of car-based crossover vehicles are rising. SUV sales are falling. Car sales are gaining. SUV sales are falling. General Motors Corp. is ending production of its seven-passenger Chevrolet TrailBlazer EXT and GMC Envoy EXL. This looks like the end of the SUV.
There is some truth to those declarations. SUV sales are falling. They've been falling for the last five years, largely because many vehicle owners have been moving out of them into crossover models such as the Subaru Forester, Toyota RAV4 and Chrysler Pacifica.
Crossover models look like SUVs. But they are the functional equivalents of station wagons. Many people who are dumping traditional truck-based SUVs for crossovers and similar models really never wanted SUVs in the first place. They were urbanites buying the motorized versions of cowboy boots.
GASOLENE PRICES
Rising gasolene prices are shaking more of those folks out of their Hummers and Explorers. The result, of course, has been a big drop in SUV sales and lots of concomitant media hoopla about the 'end of the SUV.'
It's baloney.
Even the people at greener-than-thou Toyota Motor Corp. will tell you that much, except they did not quite put it that way. They said:
Here is our new 2007-model Toyota FJ Cruiser off-road sport-utility vehicle. It effectively fills a gap in the Toyota lineup that was once our core heritage--capable, affordable and durable vehicles that are youthful, fun to drive, aggressive and tough.''
Under the rules of the game of automotive product previews, I am not allowed, at the moment, to share more details about the FJ Cruiser. But it's enough to say it's designed to go after the Hummer H3 and, perhaps, the new Jeep Commander.
In other words, instead of preparing the SUV for interment, the world's biggest car companies are getting their game on in pursuit of core-buyer SUV sales. Core-buyers are people who need SUV capacity, and who actually enjoy the adventure of taking them off-road.
Toyota believes that there are enough core-buyers in America to sustain sales of 46,000 FJ Cruisers annually. But Toyota officials privately concede that they are likely to sell many more than that.
Executives at General Motors Corp. agree. While news organizations were busy trumpeting declining SUV sales, GM was hauling in the cash on sales of its Hummers, led by the new Hummer H3. According to the Automotive News Data Centre, Hummer sales were up 122.5 per cent in November.
Land Rover sales, led by the new Land Rover Sport, rose 18 per cent last month. Why? Attractive SUVs, like attractive cars, sell well.
In fact, all over the automotive landscape, there is ample evidence that the people at General Motors Corp. are not crazy for planning the 2006 rollout of a bevy of new, full-size SUVs, such as the completely reworked Chevrolet Tahoe. GM believes that the U.S. market can support sales of 750,000 full-size SUVs annually. A similar conviction exists at DaimlerChrysler Corp., which is bringing out a revised version of its humongous G Wagon, and at Nissan Motor Co., which plans to continue pushing sales of its relatively new Armada SUV.
In short, the SUV market isn't fading. It's simply changing. The new models all will be more fuel-efficient than their predecessors. But they all will be just as powerful as those older vehicles.
So, forget the SUV requiem. Attractive new products are keeping it alive and jumping. It's just getting interesting.
The Washington Post
