Yes. No SUVs bossing people around on the road. The size of some these SUVs is staggering. Detroit knew that women (and some men) would never buy anything callled a truck. So they came up with the label 'Sport Utility Vehicle' which sounded cool. It worked. Look at all the sales. It's known that some women in the U.S. don't like football. Some day it might be renamed 'Sport Utility Pigskin' and everyone will like it. .
I wonder if people knew that all an SUV is, is a truck with a station wagon top would they still buy them?
i remember military surplus jeeps back in the 1950s. and 4by pickups and even vans. people didn't chrome them and polish them up and put big horsepower race car engines in them to try and impress each other though. they were work vehicules. people bought them to haul crap arround out in the boonies, or to go boonie crashing for fun. they weren't something you'd drive arround in the city to show off with though. they were considered 'hick' and 'funkey' like farm tractors or something. the first, what are now called s.u.v.'s i think, the first vehicule to be marketed as such, and i think even then most people who bought were honest boonie crashers and or actualy lived out in the boonies themselves, was the jeep wagoneer. i think they came out with that sometime arround 1959 or so. chevy/gmc offered the 'suburban', a gas guzzling station wagon/truck. heavy, wide, stable, could actualy haul a ton of stuff, but man did it chug the go juce. i don't remember what fnord or cripseler offered. oh yes i do. cripesler had something they called the dodge power wagon. when my dad first started driving, the year i graduated highschool in 66, we went boonie crasing with a 62 or something like that datsun pickup. cute little thing. looked like a kitbashed austin made into a pickup but built really stout underneath. then after that we had a nesan petrol for a while. that was a 4wd. then those 4wheel trail ride things started up. long distances on dirt back roads where the first ones there practicly had to build their own road to keep going. then after that there was the after market souping up of what had been up until that time thought of mostly as off road vehicules. then after the first gas crunch in the 70s, when all of a sudden people were more interested in compacts and saving money on gas, and the factory mussle cars were starting to be seen as the rediculous self serving farce that they were. well that led to the 80s and 'standards' and all that smog stuff. so then they came out with what the're calling suv's now. to sleaze arround the idea of having to not screw up the atmosphere. well whatever. i've always been the kind of nut who would rather drive a truck with big stick to stir the gears arround with and a granny low, but not a big super gofast engine, gobbling dead people from the middle east, and i still think football sucks, although that might be because it was something they made us have to do in highschool when p.e. was a required subject. i think austentaion is crap and a, if not the, cause of a lot of real idioticly self destructive problems that keep being romantacized, but i do like what 4wd was origionaly FOR, exploring back roads and dirt trails out in the boonies. i just think, now a days, i'd rather do it powered by batteries recharged by windmills and solar cells. and better yet, bring back the narrow gauge, but power it that way, so we wouldn't have to pave over the whole planet and kill of by destroying their habitat our four footed brethren, which is what i go out there to visit in the first place. that and the trees and rocks and twisty little trails. WITHOUT the noise to try and impress anyone to scare them away and disrupt their innocent carniverous lives. =^^= .../\...
When I was young, at some point my parents bought a GMC van. (I come from a family of 5 kids.) I liked the sliding side door. I thought it was cool. Any other car we had was a much smaller, 4-door 5-person car. SUV's seem to be the "in-between" size of car. More room for people and stuff compared to a 5-seater, but not as big as a full-size van. I don't think we really had any use for that. When we traveled, we were either on a family vacation or going to the grocery store, or someone was going to work. Basically, it was either all or nothing so to speak. (Fill up a really big car, or take a small car with the bare essentials.)
