The Road to Hell Is Unpaved
And so the sophisticates keep taking their potshots at the national affection for four-wheel-drive vehicles. It certainly is not difficult to lampoon city dwellers and suburbanites who choose to rumble across flat, dry, well-paved roads in truck-cars designed for safaris and cattle roundups. It shouldn’t take an “Explorer” or “Pathfinder” or “Blazer” to make the trek to Ralphs.
The popularity of so-called sports utility vehicles--with sales up 15% again this year--often is linked to a groping for “image.” As Dr. Joyce Brothers told the Associated Press, “you are your car,” and who wants to be a station wagon? An auto trend researcher put it this way: “Most people who own a Ford Explorer don’t drive it, they wear it.”
The novelist Richard Ford, reflecting on the craze in the New York Times, cited “millennial anxiety” and a confusion between “want” and “need.” There also are conspiracy theorists who see Big Oil behind the boom in four-by-four gas hogs.
My own view is that the unspeakable agony of installing chains in the snow goes a long way toward explaining the trend. The emergence of freeways as free-fire combat zones also cannot be discounted. In California, however, there is another, little-mentioned possibility. Let’s call it the Apocalypse Vehicle Theory.
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A classified ad in the Eureka Times-Standard introduced me to the concept. Newspapers often run their most enlightening material in agate type. In this case, somebody wanted to sell a four-wheel-drive Trooper. The ad contained familiar boilerplate--”lo miles, looks sharp”--but ended with an unusual kicker: “Great earthquake vehicle.”
Well, of course.
Surely I am not the only Californian who, in the long, dark hours of interrupted sleep, will conjure up images of The End. In these waking nightmares, I imagine post-quake tsunamis breaking across Los Angeles skyscrapers, wildfires encircling the neighborhood, valleys buried under torrents unleashed through a crack in the dam.
Whatever the scenario, the roads always are knocked out. The only chance for escape is to scramble into a car and bounce willy-nilly across open land, over hills and through valleys, all the way to Idaho. Obviously, in such imaginings, there is no place for a common sedan, which probably explains best my ownership of a four-wheel-drive GMC. When I poll neighbors who drive sports utility vehicles, they often offer similar explanations, albeit in vaguer language: “It’s nice to have,” they will say of their four-wheel-drive, “just in case . . . . “
The main weakness in the Apocalypse Vehicle Theory is that it doesn’t explain the rest of America. While more four-wheel-drive vehicles are sold in California, this is a function of mathematics as much as taste. More of everything is sold here, because there simply are more of us. In fact, the per capita rate of sports utility vehicle ownership in California pretty much matches that of the nation as a whole, including New York. I have no idea why anyone would drive a bush vehicle in New York, but I am not paid to understand New York.
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Like most trends, this one is bound to reverse itself in time. While the market share commanded by sports utility vehicles is still climbing, the pace of growth slackened a tick this year. Detroit, in the view of some industry analysts, seems determined to follow form and once again overdo a good thing--cranking out bigger and bigger models, that cost more and more. Count on this: Right after every production line has been converted to crank out nothing but tank-sized, outback vehicles, America will rediscover the motor scooter.
As it is, consumer advocates already are on the case, complaining that the four-wheel-drive hulks are a menace to occupants of smaller cars: Speed kills, but so can sheer mass. Environmentalists, too, have expressed their displeasure with vehicles that devour oil, contribute to global warming and are promoted for their ability to chew up the wilderness.
Not that most Explorer-Pathfinder-Blazer-Troopers leave pavement. In surveys only about one in three owners of four-wheel-drive vehicles say they’ve ever ventured off-road, and who knows how many of these are fibbing? In my experience, people who pay dearly to drive a vehicle made for scaling rocks don’t care to admit they never have any reason to put the brute to the test.
The embarrassment is almost enough to make them start rooting for the Big One. Deliver us, they pray, from life’s banal highways. Roll out a tsunami or two, crumple the interstate. Give us the disaster we all know we deserve, and then stand back and see what this big iron baby can do. Meanwhile, it’s off to Ralphs.
