Anatomy of a Minivan

The ride into Bellevue (a city just east of Seattle) rattles my nerves. Downtown traffic is heavy for midmorning. Columns of cars hop from block to block, red light to red light, in a fury of racing engines and blaring horns. A pickup nearly rear-ends me. I clench the wheel of my little crimson compact, feeling vulnerable and on edge in the mass of moving steel, glass, and flesh. A half-hour later, the road looks very different. I'm riding high in the bucket seat of a Plymouth Grand Voyager minivan, back in the same traffic, but feeling blissfully removed from the tension and chaos. I've just cruised off the lot at Eastside Chrysler/Jeep in the largest motor vehicle I've ever driven -- big enough, I later read in Car and Driver, to carry 73 cases of beer, if I really wanted to. Snug on my perch in this bulky armored cocoon, I amble along with surprising grace in the right lane, ignoring the cars and trucks blowing past. Speed is fine when you're running scared. I have nothing to fear. I feel like I'm driving a Brinks truck. And I'm thinking: Holy headroom, I want a minivan!Problem is, I don't need a minivan. My wife and I don't have children. My job doesn't require me to lug around large equipment. We rent our house, so we avoid home-improvement projects. My car will never have to carry 2-by-4s or sheets of plywood. Yet, bounding about, I began to understand what I will gingerly call the minivan mystique. The instant I slipped behind the wheel of the Grand Voyager, I could sense there was a reason beyond mere convenience that minivans had become "an American icon," in the not-altogether hyperbolic words of a Chrysler sales-training film. There's something more than sheer kid-carrying capacity that has created the platoons of minivans on our nation's streets: American car dealers sold nearly 1.3 million of them last year. To put that figure in perspective, consider that the Dodge Caravan now outsells such perennially popular sedans as the Honda Civic, Toyota Corolla, and Nissan Sentra. Driving a minivan helped me understand its paradox. In a country where cars rank as one of our most obvious status symbols, somehow a vehicle that looks suspiciously like a lowly delivery van became a runaway success. But now, some 11 years into the minivan revolution, the troops are beginning to rebel. The very consumers who made them a hit -- suburban baby boomers -- have begun to turn away from the minivan in favor of a sexier and more stylish substitute (the sport-utility vehicle), scorning the boxy bus like an outdated, unflattering garment. "Someday," says one auto industry analyst, "we're going to look back at the '80s and '90s and see the minivan as the leisure suit of the age.'Jim Roper is bantering away in the passenger seat. A husky guy in his early twenties, he wears the uniform of today's car salesmen. Gone are the plaid blazers and white shoes. Jim is turned out in olive dress trousers, a crisp white shirt, necktie, and wing tips. I met Jim in the sales room at Eastside Chrysler/Jeep, which bears a red neon sign proclaiming it the "Minivan Store." Jim knew I wasn't a potential buyer, but offered to take me out for a test drive all the same. After unlocking a white Grand Voyager at the edge of the lot, he hands me the key, and walks around the rear to get in on the passenger side. As I settle into the driver's seat, I'm alone for a moment. I look behind me, at the two empty rear bench seats. For an instant, I imagine a group of my friends sitting there, dressed in REI duds, ready for a weekend of camping, smiling with anticipation. Which is remarkable, since I've never been camping, have no plans at present to start camping, and know that my friends would burst out laughing if I proposed leading a camping expedition. There's a cliche about the mild-mannered man who has a midlife crisis, buys a sports car, and discovers the road warrior within. Sitting at the wheel of a Grand Voyager, I uncover something very different: my inner scoutmaster. The image vanishes when Jim opens the passenger door and climbs in. We head north on 116th Avenue NE, also known as "Auto Row," the engine responding with a throaty purr when I test the accelerator. Jim suggests rights and lefts, away from downtown, through well-paved, broad suburban streets on what I assume to be a standard test-drive route. Jim starts describing some of the Voyager's features, but I barely hear him. Instead, I'm overcome by a pleasant, but odd, sensation. We aren't driving -- we're hovering. The Voyager is a bit more than 5 feet 8 inches high -- about a foot taller than the low-slung Geo I drive. The lofty perspective is exhilarating. Not only can you satisfy a voyeuristic impulse to look down and into other people's backseats, but you can see over other autos, too -- an advantage when somebody five cars ahead jams on the brakes.There's also a wider range of unobstructed vision. Chrysler boasts that it increased the size of the windshield on the newly remodeled Voyager by 32 percent. More glass to gaze through and less structural hardware to look at enhances the feeling that you're floating above freeway traffic. Manufacturers of minivans play upon the sense of flight with the names they give the vehicles. Voyager. Astro. Windstar. Aerostar. Quest. Odyssey. These names speak of cosmic possibility. They're meant to excite the space-travel fantasies of baby boomers weaned on Apollo moon landings, Star Trek, and Star Wars. There are exceptions to the space-cadet theme. Toyota calls its popular minivan Previa, who I think was one of the lesser-known Gabor sisters. But by largely relying on names that could have been borrowed from NASA, minivan-makers deliver a subtle message: Like an astronaut sealed tight in a space capsule, you can soar into the unknown, even if you're just running out to the video store. Automakers understand the appeal of the lofty perspective. When designing its 1996 line, Chrysler tested a prototype for a minivan that sat the driver lower, as though in a sedan. "People didn't like it," says Dick Winter, the general product manager for Chrysler's minivan division. "They like sitting up in the seat, they like that command-of-the-road feel, the security of being able to see what's going on around them." Note that word: security. Jim Roper tells me that minivan buyers frequently mention safety as a priority. They want anti-lock brakes, dual airbags, and side-impact beams, he says. But all those safety features are available in many new sedans. If anything, the minivan as a category might be less safe than the average sedan. They have a higher center of gravity, which means they can roll over more easily. And since minivans are classified as light trucks, they haven't had to meet the more rigorous safety standards required of passenger cars. I think what minivan buyers really mean when they talk about safety is that they want a sense of security. They want to feel like their family is as safe driving around town as it would be sitting in the living room. The minivan is automotive comfort food. It's the car of choice for people who, on some level, fear the streets. Polls consistently show that Americans believe crime is getting worse, even though some statistics suggest otherwise. Baby boomers have responded to the threat, real or imagined, most aggressively. According to American Demographics magazine, people ages 30 to 49 are "more likely than those younger or older to have installed special locks, to have a dog for protection, to have bought a gun, to carry a weapon, or to have a burglar alarm." And, perhaps, to have purchased a car that is essentially an extra room, a mobile addition to the home. Think about it. "ther than an actual mobile home, the minivan is the only passenger vehicle that lets you walk (if a bit crouched) from front to back. The interior of a Ford Windstar is more than twice as spacious as that of its top-selling economy car, the Escort. At roughly 150 cubic feet, the inside of a Windstar is about the size of modest bathroom.The Grand Voyager I drove with Jim was loaded with homey amenities. Reading lamps, in addition to the usual dome lights. Jacks in the backseat for plugging in portable TVs or computers. Air-conditioning powerful enough, Jim says, to cool a 1,500-square-foot house. And a dozen or so cup holders. Car manufacturers sell the idea of minivan-as-rolling-rumpus-room. The headline in a recent Plymouth Voyager ad is filled with references to domesticity: "Can you spot the tissue box, the pacifier, the baseball glove, Fido's chew toy, and the map of Colorado?" Yet the photo shows only a 35-ish mom and dad with their fair-haired daughter, standing beside an imposing purple minivan. All that kid and pet stuff is presumably inside, tucked away with the map, in a storage bin. Or maybe scattered all over the floor. Just like home.Maybe a little too reminiscent of home for some drivers. Like its spiritual predecessor, the station wagon, the minivan has become inextricably linked with the suburban milieu it serves so well. And like the station wagon before it, the minivan is beginning to take its knocks. Remember the station wagon? Big, homely sedan with a stretched-out rear end, ideal for lugging a lot of kids and groceries. Several companies still make them, but they've all been replaced by the minivan. In their peak year, 1959, one out of every six cars sold in the United States was a station wagon. By last year, according to Ward's Automotive News, station wagons made up a microscopic two-tenths of 1 percent of the US market, compared to minivans" 8.4 percent. Kids who grow up in Mercury Villagers today can look back in wonder at the Country Squires of their parents' youth.Rising petroleum prices in the 1970s contributed to the station wagon's demise, but gas guzzling wasn't their only problem. Baby boomers were starting families and rejected the standard kid carriers. "The station wagon was what their parents drove," says Cheryl Russell, author of Master Trend: How the Baby Boom Is Remaking America (Plenum, 1993). "Many boomers said they'd never live in the suburbs and never drive a station wagon. It's a rebellion." The minivan has other ancestors, though. Volkswagen started selling its minibus here in 1950. A more direct link, of course, is the full-sized van. Once used exclusively for making deliveries or carrying tools from job to job, vans enjoyed a brief spell as status symbols in the 1970s. To create the ultimate babe magnet, a suburban Lothario would buy a van, throw down some carpet in the back, and install a sofa bed. Then, to show his sensitivity, he'd have an arty friend air-brush a mystical scene on one of its exterior panels, perhaps a fog-shrouded mountain alongside a glimmering lake, cribbed from the cover of a favorite Styx album. It's hard to say whether these rolling boudoirs attracted or repelled more women, but Detroit must have found them irresistible. Desperate to find a successor for the increasingly unpopular station wagon, by the late 1970s Ford, Chrysler, and GM all had designs for down-sized vans on their drawing boards. After spending $600 million developing its version of the minivan, Chrysler introduced the Caravan and Voyager in 1984. Teetering on the edge of bankruptcy at the time, Chrysler and its chair, Lee Iacocca, took a huge gamble -- and it paid off. The minivan is largely credited with carrying the company through the 1980s. Although the other automakers are rapidly catching up, Chrysler still dominates the minivan market, with more than 4 million sold in just over a decade. But minivan-makers are scrambling. "The number of people in car-buying age who have kids is getting smaller," says Julie Ruth, assistant professor of marketing and international business, at the University of Washington. To keep drivers in minivans after the kids leave home, Chrysler is pushing its plush Town and Country, which starts at about $30,000, at upscale empty-nesters. Honda uses Keith Haring-ish drawings in its ads, a bid to lure sophisticates who might otherwise buy a Volvo wagon, and emphasizes that its Odyssey isn't just for parents, but pet owners, outdoor-sports lovers, and people who buy a lot of stuff. There's little doubt the auto industry is well aware of the minivan's image problem, nicely articulated by my sister Judy. The mother of three children under age 10, she drove a Ford Aerostar for several years. When she got rid of it recently, I asked why. "When I drove it," she said, "I felt like a hag." Apparently, many women feel the same way. Slightly less than half of all minivan drivers are female, according to J.D. Power and Associates, the auto industry marketing information firm. And a lot of them seem to be doing so behind gritted teeth. Jim Roper admits that he hears resistance from some wives when married couples arrive on the lot. "They don't want to be labeled a "minivan mom," he says. And women don't want to hear that they drive a "mothermobile," either. Like the station wagon before it, the minivan has become identified with the more mundane aspects of family life -- shopping, picking up the kids -- that women have spent the last generation or so trying to divvy up with their male partners. But about 40 percent of married women don't work outside the home, so it's a fair bet that moms are still doing most of the household chores. It's not surprising that many don't want to advertise that fact with the car they drive. There's a story that turned up in the news not long ago about a woman who refused to sign a prenuptial agreement until a clause was added stipulating that she would never be forced to drive a minivan. When I spoke with baby boom expert Russell, she said that some of her best friends drove minivans, but that she "wouldn't be caught dead driving one."Instead, Russell, like my sister, drives a sport-utility vehicle. While sales of minivans have leveled off and aren't expected to go beyond 9 percent of the American market, sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) are the fastest-growing segment in the industry. There's a myth that O.J. Simpson's absurd low-speed run from California police last summer created interest in SUVs; the accused murderer was in the back of his white Ford Bronco, driven by friend Al Cowlings at the time. In fact, SUVs took off when Ford introduced the Explorer in 1990, and have been outselling minivans in the United States since 1992. Today, one out of every 10 cars sold in America is an SUV. They're even more popular in the Pacific Northwest, where, according to Spring Mediamark Research, almost 14 percent of all adults drive a SUV -- about twice as many as in the South, where SUVs are least popular. When Jim and I return from our jaunt in the minivan, I wander over to the SUVs. I look at a lipstick-red Jeep Cherokee, with gold trim and matted black bumpers. There is something unmistakably prissy about it. It might be brawny enough to plow its way up a rutted mountain road. But I have a hunch that the only action in this Cherokee's future will be fighting for the next spot in the valet line at the yuppie market. Thad Malesh, an analyst for J.D. Power, guesses that no more than 10 percent to 15 percent of all SUVs sold, and likely far fewer, ever drive on anything but paved streets. "The only time a lot of sport-utility vehicles go off-road," says Malesh, "is when the owner accidentally drives over the curb trying to park the thing." The average "sport ute," as the trade press calls it, doesn't have as much storage space and can't fit as many passengers as the average minivan. But the minivan can't touch an SUV in terms of cache. "The sport-utility vehicle says, "I shop at Eddie Bauer and I'm into backpacking and I have a lot of time for leisure" -- whether you do or not -- "and this car expresses my ruggedness and independence," says Kevin Berger, co-author (with his brother, Todd) of Where the Road and the Sky Collide: America Through the Eyes of its Drivers (Holt, 1993). "The sport-utility vehicle is a minivan for elitists." A fitting statement, since the makers of automobiles for the elite are all leaping into the SUV market. Infiniti, Acura, Lexus, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Jaguar are all planning to unveil SUVs within the next few years. There's also talk, however, that several automakers are planning downscale versions of the SUV, to attract entry-level car buyers -- further siphoning from the minivan market. The minivan will be around for a while, but it's destined to join the Edsel, the Volkswagen Beetle, and the Ford Pinto, cars that linger in memory as somehow indicative of a generation past. When our children's children look back on the funny little trucks that were so popular in the late 20th century, the least we can hope is that they judge us fairly, and not simply as a bunch of old hags.SIDEBAR: Minivan MinifactsIf Dogs Could Drive . . . Minivan owners are nothing if not loyal: according to Chrysler, seven out of 10 consumers who buy one eventually buy another.Full Grain Ahead Although the minivan has replaced the station wagon, it did so with the help of a classic wagon feature: fake wood siding. Many of the earliest minivans came with the faux woody look, which marketing types call a "cue" -- a reminder for auto buyers that the little van is meant to be a family car. Dick Winter, a product manager at Chrysler, says he still receives calls from customers who are angry that the faux wood option has been abandoned.If at First You Succeed, Try, Try Again Since spending $600 million designing its minivan in the late 1970s, Chrysler has owned the market, selling 4 million units since rolling out the first Caravan and Voyager in 1984. This year, it introduced a completely overhauled line of minivans. Cost of redesign: $2.6 billion. Minipriorities Males and females in focus groups reacted positively to the prototype minivans, but for different reasons. Men liked them because they're small enough to fit into the average American garage (most full-size vans are too big); women appreciated the low floorboard height, which allowed them to climb in without hiking up their skirts.Why You Hardly Ever See Minivans in Spike Lee Movies According to Spring Mediamark Research, 91 percent of minivan owners are white. Just 4 percent are black. Why You See So Many Minivans at Yuppie Markets The annual household income for the largest segment of minivan owners is between $60,000 and $74,999.Tic, Tic, Tic Although Chrysler has long dominated the minivan market, Ford is catching up in a hurry. In Car and Driver magazine, John Phillips wrote that Ford's Windstar is giving Chrysler officials "facial tics similar to Bob Packwood's."--Timothy Gower