The Fearmobile?
Careful, the car you drive may be your own.
Perhaps you already know. But just in case: Aston Martin has recently come out with its first SUV, a luxury crossover with 542 horsepower and a 0-62 mark of 4.5 seconds. Maybe they had to wait until the original James Bond passed from this Earth before bringing out such a model of swollen luxury. In any case, Mr. Connery is greatly missed. The question of whether we can anticipate a future Bond with a new look (Dwayne Johnson?) remains open.
Three decades ago, my wife and I moved from Boston to Seattle, into an area of the city considered a bit sketchy. Hopeless urbanites from the East, we felt that with parks, a greenbelt, and schools nearby, it was worth a bet that things would improve. They did, but without controls. The high-tech boom began, bringing prosperity, inequality, and, in our neighborhood, the driving out of diversity and affordable housing (the Mongolian family who lived across the alley and whose son was friends with ours, is today like a memory from an ancient city).
If the people have been updated, so have their vehicles. I discovered this with my feet and eyes. In 2008, we acquired a large dog whose breed (Rhodesian Ridgeback) demands much exercise, so I began walking several miles through our area once a day (I also took her to the greenbelt on another walk, just so you know). I was then teaching at the university and writing about energy, and an idea hit me. I started keeping a record of vehicle types I saw, specifically hybrid/EVs and SUVs. In the first few years, the data testified to a striking increase in the first group at the expense of the second.
This, I admit, was exciting. It spoke of a transformation underway, a tide coming in. By late 2015, EVs (electric vehicles) had a solid presence—Tesla’s Model S was a clear favorite, but Nissan’s Leaf, BMW’s i3, and Chevrolet’s Volt (only a partial EV) had also arrived. The signs were strong; resistance was futile; a revolution was at hand.
It never arrived. Since that time, growth in EVs has slowed and even (on many streets) retreated. In its place has come a new wave of SUVs and crossovers, nearly all gasoline fueled. The most current ratio, as of this writing, is 9:1 SUV-Cs to EVs.
This isn’t restricted to America, by any means. Nearly 40% of new cars sold in China, and a full third of those in Europe and India, were SUVs and crossovers by late 2019. The global surge has made this type of vehicle a huge source of CO2 emissions—larger than trucks and shipping combined, larger even than heavy industry worldwide. Nowhere is this more true than in the U.S., where these vehicles outsell everything else, including regular cars and pickups. “As the world burns, Americans buy bigger cars,” is one way it has been described.
The Why Question
I know I may not make new friends in what follows. My intent is not to cast aspersions or blame upon anyone, even the car companies (ok, maybe a little here). The tale of these vehicles, which gained their modern form in the 1990s, goes all the way back to the 1935 Chevvy Suburban Carryall. But the real inspiration was an era of very cheap oil (late 80s – early 2000s). It is also rooted in American cultural trends linked to the demand for more open, expansive domestic space, e.g. houses, apartments, yards, etc. compared to other advanced places like Europe and Japan.
While love of the SUV/crossover may be a near-universal trend for people of means, the motives behind such affection are probably more varied. Most accounts interpret the larger size, height, and roominess (a coinage of the US auto industry) as linked to status, signs of affluence, and feelings of personal enhancement in many non-western countries.
Doubtless some of this applies to the U.S. too. But there are other factors as well. Key are feelings of safety and security. SUV/crossovers are now too common to carry much status benefit even in a luxury brand. Not long ago, in a liberal town like Seattle, “SUV” was a four-letter word. Today, “crossover” acts as a protective euphemism. For those who would feel guilty in a Chevy Suburban or Ford Expedition, the crossover was invented as an SUV-lite. Rather than a hulking form, suggestive of military invasion, the SUV-lite has sporty lines (sign of youthfulness), better mileage (more environment-friendly), high-tech gadgetry (“with-it” factor), plus, compared to a sedan or compact car, greater width and elevated riding. Put them all together and they spell: security with “cool” and few splinters of guilt.
Crossovers have been the largest part of the total SUV market since the Great Recession. Their US sales especially exploded starting in 2007, slowed down in 2008-2012, and then surged once more. This indicates that people were responding to factors other than economics alone, since gasoline prices were rapidly growing in 2007 and remained especially high in 2011-2015, when oil prices were at alpine levels of $100 and above.
Car makers routinely have sensors in the emotional winds to exploit our hopes, desires, anxieties, and fantasies. Crossovers are a perfect example of this and an enormously successful one. Auto-mfrs have a discourse about these higher priced, high profit-making vehicles that goes something like this: “Consumers appreciate the greater overall utility, storage, comfort, and safety. They are also naturally drawn to the command seating and thus visibility, with room for a large family to go anywhere together, whether it be a camping trip or a journey to the mall. They are the perfect vehicle for handling the busy work and play lifestyle of today.”
But once we admit that Americans are all “busy,” are choosing smaller families, and are not off-road adventurers, this discourse largely boils down to notions of driving a haven in a heartless world.
Are these vehicles truly safer? In a crash with a car, yes. An SUV/crossover will “win” almost every time, as it is 20% - 40% heavier, carrying a good deal more steel. Of course, this means that the car will “lose.” Its inhabitants are many times more likely to die in such an event. Thus, a bad or drunk SUV driver is also considerably more dangerous. Riding higher, meanwhile, can actually decrease visibility for things lower down, like people. The rising rate of pedestrian fatalities caused by SUVs (more than crossovers) seems tragic evidence.
Does the world really need so many of these vehicles? In the context of emissions, air pollution, and lowering humanity’s impact on the natural world, these bigger, heavier, and more powerful options aren’t exactly a step forward. But then, if we are truly being honest, the world and climate don’t much need so many private vehicles of any kind, more than a billion, with twice this number by 2040 or so(!)
In the graph below, note that vehicle ownership begins to surge when GDP/capita reaches about $5,000. This is right where India sat in 2014, as shown, with China at around twice this level but still in their early stages of motorization. By 2018, China’s vehicles/1000 had risen to around 173, while India’s was 22. The lowest figure for EU countries, Latvia, was no less than 329. The suggestion, then, is that there could well be a huge rise in global vehicles over the next 2-3 decades as incomes grow in the two most populous nations.
The alternative? Well-planned, well-built, well-maintained public transport, in theory at least. In practice, politics, economics, and culture tend to get in the way of such rationality—or, more accurately, they bring other rationalities operating with other goals (taxes are evil; more cars means more jobs; I’d rather sit in my comfortable car, listening to ABBA, than flatten my tush on a cold plastic seat). Meantime, for an example of how a transport system can work wonderfully on a colossal urban scale, a trip to Tokyo would be in order. This system has 4,700 km (3,000 mi) of track serving 2,200 stations and 40 million passenger-rides a day. Even so, as the graph shows, there are more cars per 1000 people in Japan than in Germany or the UK.
Another question: why worry about SUV/crossovers when they will soon be EVs? Let’s hope this is accurate. But here’s the rub: even as EVs, these vehicles will use significantly more raw and refined materials, from metal ore to glass and plastic. They have a larger mining footprint, larger petroleum footprint, require more energy to manufacture, and more electricity to drive.
My Country, ‘Tis of Thee
I suggest the SUV, classic or lite, can be considered a fearmobile in the U.S. I understand it may seem unfair to burden a vehicle with the immense weight of the American Zeitgeist. At the same time, conceiving the car as a complex symbol or sign system, rich with personal and cultural meaning, has been a domain of advertising strategy and scholarly study for a century, from Thorsten Veblen to the present. Today, many of us are amused by vehicle models of the 1950s, with their Space Age baroque of fins and flaps, not reflecting perhaps that similar efforts to exploit cultural psychology have been employed to the present.
For the great majority of people, a car is the most costly and publicly displayed artifact they own. Their reasons for making a specific choice have more than a little to do with aspects of identity (real or desired) and imagined life enhancement, whatever practical factors might obtain. Again, to suggest that automakers are finely tuned to this and adjust their designs accordingly would be less than radical. To also propose that one such trend in the U.S. might have something to do with anxiety about the broken and threatened state of the country and its democracy would not seem such a stretch.
We could begin with such continuing (pre-pandemic) realities as immigration, economic uncertainty, climate impacts (extreme weather), and—an American specialty—healthcare worries. Raising these and other concerns to a far higher level, however, is the brutal truth that Americans have torn the country in pieces culturally, ethnically, religiously, and politically. By any measure, the U.S. entered an era of civil war in the 1990s, one that deepened thereafter, erupting into public view during the presidencies of Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president, and, still more, Donald Trump, whose reign of rage, threat, mendacity, and more have shattered families as well as states. Calling for unity, even if you’re Joe Biden, is still as useless as a bent key.
For 15 years, survey data has revealed the only major U.S. institution drawing public confidence has been the military. We might think about that for a moment. We might also point to the unchecked volumes of gun-buying in the past two decades, and the horrific spread of mass shootings from sea to shining sea. A recent book, Fear Itself: The Causes and Consequences of Fear in America, written by social scientists connected with Chapman University, lays out some of this. Chapman has been collecting data annually since the early 2010s. The top fears of 2019 (latest edition) are shown below: corrupt government (#1), pollution (#s 2,4), friends/family getting sick or dying (#s 3,5), climate change (#9), money worries about the future (#10). All of these were on the list in previous surveys, plus “high medical bills” and “terrorism.” All point to feelings of powerlessness, distrust, and fragility.
If Fear Sells, It Also Buys
It can’t be impossible that these trends have an effect on people’s choices of what they drive. If the psychology of vehicle buying is complex and multileveled, this doesn’t mean it defines one of the great mysteries of the universe. Bigger vehicles with sporty lines, enhanced electronics, and “command seating” can be said to have fairly evident attractions in a social atmosphere saturated with anxiety and uncertainty. Once we add in the law of peer partial pressure—the principle whereby the pressure to choose a certain kind of product rises in proportion to the volume of peers that have made that choice—it is no surprise that current preferences exist.
Cars are many things to different people, but there are large-scale patterns. Consumers are not wholly responsible for the situation in which they find themselves; their preferences are not entirely their own. In today’s universe of green=good/all others=bad, every choice of action or purchase is only too easily politicized and moralized. Meanwhile, according to marketing psychologists, people want choices that will not only satisfy utilitarian and self-image demands but will help alleviate stress and encourage positive emotional attachment through reassurance and putting one “at the controls.”
If I am right about all this, then we may need to adjust some expectations about the future. These vehicles have created a new global standard, implying that EVs could come with their own negative impacts. An ever-growing number of bigger vehicles everywhere may not be a desired side effect of eliminating most emissions from the transport sector.