A Heavy Load of You Know What
With gas prices rising and sales declining, automakers continue their aimless quest for a relevant strategy in this new era of resource constraints and climate change. The American auto companies, of course, operate behind the curve, chasing the innovation of Toyota and Honda in often perverse ways. The most absurd form of misdirected copycatting is the insistence on salvaging their hulking SUVs with hybrid technology. Chrysler is the latest company to try to justify its increasingly impractical vehicles by slapping on the hybrid label. Beginning in 2008, Chrysler will offer a hybrid option for its Hemi-powered V-8 Durango and Aspen SUVs. It seems to me that if you wanted to improve fuel economy performance on an SUV, you’d get rid of the V-8 engine first. According to Chrysler’s head of hybrid programs, "We know that our customers really like the Hemi for providing them with the utility and capabilities they need in normal driving." Normal driving? Since 40% of all car trips are shorter than 2 miles, a car built for normal driving would look more like a golf cart than an SUV. Ford, on the other hand, is more worried about Toyota going after its monster truck sales, and has begun a campaign to discredit the Tundra’s safety record. That’s just what we need: the drivers of the biggest vehicles on the road even more impervious to crashes.
The news of across the board declines in auto sales in April is generating all kinds of analysis. The various purported causes range from rising gas prices to declining home equity to the loss of dealer incentives. Financial incentives, which allowed new car buyers to make unnecessary upgrades or add third vehicles, have certainly played a role in propping up new car sales over the past five years. Chrysler was the only company to post an increase in new car sales last month, and not coincidentally it still offers incentives. The rest of the industry has scaled back or discontinued the unprofitable discounts and rebates because they finally realize the incentives do little to promote the long term financial health of the industry. Even Toyota was affected, with an April decline in its otherwise torrid growth rate. With sales of all pick-ups and SUVs down, Toyota’s aggressive move into the monster truck segment may turn out to be one of its few bad bets.
I’m sure auto executives will scramble to come up with ways to boost sales again and once more put off the necessary soul searching that needs to be done. But soul searching is what’s needed because U.S. automakers remain convinced that the average American won’t make do with a smaller car. As with the Chrysler hybrid guru, Ford’s sustainability chief believes that every American owns a boat:
Research shows that Americans want more fuel-efficient cars, yet they don't want to drive smaller vehicles. And they still have a need to move people, haul things and tow boats and other loads. They'll say, “I want what I have today, but I want double the fuel economy of what I have today.” So we're saying, how do you really do that? It's going to be a challenge along that line.
The reason auto executives believe that every American needs heavy towing capacity is because they’ve run ad campaigns for the past 20 years telling everyone that they need heavy towing capacity. I’m not sure who these people are, since Census data confirms that most of the U.S. now lives in cities or suburbs. I would love to meet someone who actually needed to tow something other than a pop-up camper. We could make a Discovery Channel show out of it, like seeing an exotic bird in the wild.
The reality is that this is all a charade. The automakers have no interest in developing new fuel efficient vehicles, as demonstrated by their “business as usual” crying poor in opposition to Congressional efforts to raise fuel economy standards. All of the innovative thinking we’ve been desperately waiting for will once again be directed to seeking life-saving loopholes on Capitol Hill.