Peak SUV?

History often repeats, hence the saying.

About 50 years ago, gas became scarce and expensive. Average people found – very suddenly – they could no longer afford to drive the huge, V8-powered cars that were once the typical car driven by average Americans. If you weren’t there to see it, you might not believe it. Try to imagine a world in which owning a car larger – much larger – than a current Mercedes S-Class that had a V8 much larger than the little six the current S-Class comes standard with – was not just possible for working class Americans but also common. Just as it was common, once, for working class people to live in single family homes.

They – the large cars – were everywhere. It was a world in which the guy in the Mercedes just had a more expensive car – as opposed to the world today, in which every car is expensive.

Anyhow, what happened to the large cars that were once as common as sneakers, almost? Well, gas got scarce and expensive. There were gas lines – and gas shortages. Those large cars with their big V8s got maybe 15 MPG – so the need for expensive gas was constant as well as expensive. It very quickly became too expensive for working and middle class Americans to afford to drive their large cars and so they traded them in for smaller cars – typically imports from Japan. The traded-in large cars sat on used car lots; it was very difficult to sell them at any price because no matter how cheaply they could be bought, there was no getting around what it cost to fuel them. The new car market for large cars with V8s collapsed. This happened very quickly and the change in the new car landscape from circa 1974 to circa 1984 was dramatic. By the early ’80s, there were just a relative handful of large cars with V8s that were mass-market cars. Most had been replaced by much smaller cars with V6 and even four cylinder engines. The handful of larger cars with V8s that remained were smaller than their analogs of just a few years prior and they came with much smaller V8s.

Today, such cars are essentially extinct – unless you have more than $100,000 to spend on one. They have become For The Rich Only.

Will SUVs soon be the same?

Arguably, they already are – since it takes around $50,000 on the low end to get into one (crossovers are available for less, but they are basically medium-small cars styled to look like SUVs). That’s for one of the smaller ones – a Toyota 4Runner, for instance. The ones that are equivalent in size to the large cars ordinary Americans used to commonly drive – and that have V8 engines like those large cars had – are closer to $60k to start. That alone has been causing ordinary Americans to shy away from them. But it is the cost of fueling them that may well mean the end of them – as other than For The Rich Only vehicles.

Like an atomic blast, it takes awhile for the shock wave to be felt. It is only about four months into this stupid, evil war that Trump decided to launch and it is only about two months since gas prices got not just uncomfortably high but unsustainably high. It is annoying to have to pay 50 cents more for a gallon of gas because a reckless, arrogant man decided to launch a war for no good reason. It is unsustainable when it costs twice as much to fill up – and we’re now very close to that point. The cost of gas averaged about $2.80 around Christmas – just a little more than four months ago. It is currently – as of May 19 – about $4.50 per gallon.

A little more than four months ago, it only cost about $60 to put 22 gallons of regular unleaded in a large, V8-powered SUV such as a Chevy Tahoe. It currently costs about $100 to fill the same tank. If we have not arrived at the point of unsustainability, we’re surely close to it. Its too early to know exactly how soon the bottom will fall out but it is inevitable that it’s going to fall out. The used car lots will fill up with large SUVs with V8 engines – the fire-sale prices notwithstanding because (again) even if it is affordable to buy one, most people still won;t be able to (or want to) feed one.

Then the market for new ones will collapse – and when it does, it will probably result in the collapse of several vehicle manufacturers that have become completely dependent on the profits made selling large SUVs (as well as large trucks).

There is another historical aspect to all of this – an ironic one. The main reason SUVs became mass-market vehicles was due to the extinction of the large cars caused not just be gas shortages and gas lines but also by the gas mileage regs imposed by the federal government in response to those gas lines and gas shortages. These accelerated the transition from large cars with V8 engines to small cars with four cylinder engines but they also triggered the rise of the SUV, because the regs were different for SUVs. They were unpunished (via less onerous “gas guzzler” fines) than large cars were, so the manufacturers started building SUVs as mass market vehicles beginning in the early-mid 1990s, by which time gas prices had gone down again. So people could afford to drive “gas hogs” again.

Just differently styled.

Anyhow, here we are – again. What will arise from the ashes? Probably nothing – because that’s been the long-term goal all along.

This article was originally published on Eric Peters Autos.

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