Latte Liberals Dropping Their SUVs After 9/11

By Michelle Chihara, AlterNet. Posted November 28, 2001.

Sport utility vehicle sales are reaching record highs. With 21 million already on the road, projected sales this year will top 3.5 million. The Detroit auto makers are luring customers with flag-waving ads and zero percent APR financing plans, and the hard sell seems to be paying off.

Except for that pesky SUV guilt. With all eyes on the Middle East and Central Asia, many Americans have been reminded of our unsustainable dependence on foreign oil. In an act of guilty patriotism, some of them -- namely, some liberals -- are finally swapping their gas-guzzling behemoths and replacing their SUVs with eco-friendly cars.

"It's gone," says Christina Allen, vice president of politics at Working Assets, a progressive phone service and media company. "It was a 1999 Ford Explorer. I wanted to sell it before Sept. 11, but then, afterwards, it was just too much. I felt I was contributing to all of the problems we had, with oil imports, and everything."

Allen isn't alone. "SUVs, jeeps, anything that's guzzling gas, they're trading them in," says Mike Azcona of Dirito Brothers Volkswagen, which claims to be the second largest Volkswagen dealer in the country. According to their sales reports, Azcona says, "We've had roughly the same number of trade-ins [in the past 90 days, as last year], but we've had almost triple the amount of jeeps, double the amount of Explorers, about 50 percent more 4Runners..."

And while many light truck dealers say they haven't noticed a lot of SUVs coming in for trades, some do say the season has been slow. "It's been a dramatic slowdown," says Joseph Johnson, manager at a Ford dealership in Northern California. "We usually do 25 to 30 a month, and we've only sold 5 or 6 since last month."

At the head of this SUV-free charge is author Arianna "automotive fashionista" Huffington, with a recent column that rallies readers to "Support Our Troops, Dump That SUV" (she actually made the oft-quoted fashionista comment by saying she doesn't consider herself a trendy auto buyer). Reminding us that "SUVs consume over 6 miles per gallon more than a family station wagon," Huffington says:

"We can't go on consuming 25 percent of the world's oil while being only 5 percent of the global population. At least not if we want to get serious about putting the screws to any number of oil-rich and terrorist-friendly nations.... As well as giving up our SUVs -- or, even better, switching to hybrid gas-and-electric cars that currently get up to 64 mpg -- we can all make simple adjustments to wean our country from the foreign oil teat, even if our leaders are too dazed by the energy and auto industry lobbies to guide us."

Amen, sister Huffington.

Sentiments like these have finally prompted people like Working Assets' Allen to sell their guzzlers. But what was Allen, a progressive working for a progressive company, doing with an SUV in the first place? "When I bought it, it was sort of a safety issue," she says. "Definitely not based on a safety-test-related thing," she clarifies, "but as a single parent, driving that car, there was a certain sense of security, for some reason."

But the guilt eventually got her. "The ostentatiousness of it started getting to me," Allen confesses. "The irony was that driving it made me feel less secure -- how in-your-face it was. I wanted to be less profligate in how I lived my life."

The replacement was clear, for the reformed SUV-owner. "I bought a Volkswagen."

Of course, SUV guilt and fashionista pleas aside, SUVs still make up almost half of American car sales. The SUV Lovers (sorry) Owners Association is gaining press coverage and members (at www.suvoa.com), led by a charismatic South Korean vet. Ask your local truck dealer, and he'll probably deny any decline in SUV sales.

So maybe it's not a full-fledged, down-with-SUVs rebellion, just yet. But at least the tremors of guilt on the radar signify some progress in the image war, in the semiotic fight against the SUV. Because the struggle over the SUV is not one of facts, or even of principle. It is a war of symbols, of cool vs. fuel-efficient, of feeling tough vs. actually being safe, of bling-bling vs. the environment. We know that their center of gravity is ridiculously high, that they roll over faster than you can say "down, boy," that their bumpers ram straight into the passenger compartments of other cars during collisions. But secretly, in our darkest heart of hearts, we have always known that me-big-truck-crush-other-vehicles was part of the SUV appeal.

SUVs make the soccer mom feel tough and the working stiff feel active. For over a decade years now, that appeal has trumped activists and environmentalists alike -- from lone-gun activists to NPR's Car Talk and the Sierra Club -- in their efforts to educate us. That's because everyone already gets that the SUV is a gas-guzzling, smog-emitting, inefficient, expensive, hazardous, uber-yuppie icon. Everyone wants one anyway.

SUVs are "symbols of high social status in the city and suburbs" and "oversized phallic symbols," notes a representative of Harm Stryker, a "collective of autonomous direct action activists." And Stryker says improvement is slow.

"People are probably selling off their big trucks and luxury sedans for mini-vans and station wagons not because they fear global warming or care for their neighboring drivers, but because they fear that their insurance premiums and miles per gallon will cost too much during an expected recession," writes Harm Stryker via email. "As time passes and people realize that the U.S. economy is not in as much jeopardy as they thought, the spending will increase."

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