If you were to focus a magic viewscreen on the American Highway, circa 1977, at first you might spend a few minutes laughing at some of the period designs. Personally, I loved the AMC Pacer – though that may have more to do with the cute girl at my school who drove one, rather than the beauty of a design often referred to as the "pregnant egg." But once you stopped snickering, it wouldn't take you long to notice something more than the Barney Miller-era aesthetics. Yes, there are a more station wagons than you see on the road today – and there will be, right up until the new car-based minivans start cannibalizing wagon sales in 1984. There are even a good number of foreign-built vehicles around – including the beautiful little Fiat X 1/9 from which I will learned the joy of driving a light, agile, mid-engine car (and I learned how to replace a carburetor float, how to solder snapped electrical lines, how to replace a fuel pump, how to replace a fuel pump, how to replace another damn fuel pump, how to weld structural members – including an axle that snapped while traveling at speed, and how to curse in Italian).
There are two big differences between what you'd see then, and what you see now. First off, there's a difference in sheer numbers. Not only has the population climbed, but the number of cars per family has climbed even more steeply. And of course, in the 1970s, there are very few SUVs.
We often think of the 1970s as the Jurassic Age of autos, where herds of giant American sedans grazed the asphalt plains, and in truth a full-size Eldorado or Old 98 (a car I remember as having roughly the same interior space as the Grand Canyon) weighed between four and five thousand pounds. At least 500 lbs on the Olds was probably in the shag carpet and vinyl roof. Thing is, some modern sedans (I'm looking at your slab sides, Chrysler 300) also come in above four thousand. A mid-sized SUV can top that by a ton, and for the largest of the utility sauropods, you can double that.
There are, of course, SUVs back there on the other side of the magic mirror. But you didn't find "Soccer moms" (or Little League Moms) driving them. For the most part, you didn't find them driving station wagons, either. While wagons sold better then than they do now, they were a much smaller percentage of the market than SUVs are today. And, just as with vans, many were sold for delivery vehicles rather than personal use. SUVs back then accounted for less than 2% of vehicles sold, and more than 90% of those were sold to businesses. Most of those were pretty rough beasts -- hay-haulers where even the passenger seat was an option.
Oh, yeah, there's one other thing I forgot to mention about the 1970s -- we were in the midst of an oil crisis. OPEC had flexed its muscles, demonstrating that the United States (where domestic production peaked at the beginning of the decade) was already dangerously dependant on imported oil. Gas prices had quadrupled, the CAFE standards were freshly formulated, and the "muscle cars" that had been the rage five years earlier were giving way to more modest transportation.
So here's the mystery: how did we go from a situation where we knew that oil was becoming more scarce, where government was actively pressuring the market to produce more efficient vehicles, and were SUVs were a tiny fragment of vehicles sold, to a world where I spend most of my daily commute studying the bumper designs of behemoths?
It wasn't because people need SUVs. If SUVs were required to squire families to their daily obligations, then why should they increase so sharply while average size of families has fallen? If SUVs were the answers to either hauling goods to some distant Ponderosa, why have they increased greatly even as the number of people living in rural locations has dropped?
The sharp growth of SUVs didn't come from necessity, it came from conscious decisions. The auto makers saw moving these vehicles from a utility role, into the standard issue for suburban dwellers, as a platform on which they could plaster high margins and pricey options. They also saw that, by moving people out of cars and into trucks, they could dodge the effects of even the 1975 CAFE standards. To that end, literally billions of dollars were invested, selling the idea that rough-riding, bad-handling, top-heavy trucks designed to take people and goods across dry creeks and up ragged dirt paths, were actually the height of luxury.
And consumers bought it. Bought it big time. Even though consumers, like the auto companies, were fully aware that the percentage of imported oil was growing year over year, even though they had plenty of reason to worry that the oil shocks of the mid-70s could reoccur at any moment, they switched over to lower mileage vehicle in such numbers that 1985 was the high point for auto sales. Almost eleven million passenger cars were sold in 1985. By 1990, that number was down to a bit over nine million. By 2005, the total number of passenger cars sold was down to 7.6 million. I'm not talking domestic sales, I'm talking total cars sold. In fact, import cars have seen the same slide as domestics, with fewer sold now than twenty years ago. How can that be, when there are so many more consumers today and so many more vehicles per family? People stopped buying cars and started buying trucks.
Make fun of the sideburns, disco suits, and big hair all you want, but if you told someone from the 1970s that what they needed to be really cool was a $50,000 version of the Chevy Blazer or Ford Bronco, they'd have laughed at you. And they'd be right. The plague of SUVs was not something forced on us by our lifestyles or something the auto makers had to do to survive. It was a conscious decision on both sides. Together we created the idea that driving a monster truck down the highway wasn't ridiculous, it was cool, tough, and intrinsically American.
It's too late now to speculate where we would be if the billions spent convincing us that niche utility vehicles were really what we needed for daily commute would have instead been spent lifting small cars out of the "starter car" ghetto. The idea that Americans won't buy a higher priced small vehicle has been repeated so often, that it's forgotten that convincing people to drive trucks didn't happen overnight or without huge investment. We can't wind back the tape and see where the auto industry might be today if it had made decisions to invest more in creating smart, efficient vehicles rather than resurrecting muscle cars, selling mass as safety, and grafting the word "hemi" onto ever vehicle.
All we can do now is try to not turn the next thirty years into a repeat of the last thirty.
That doesn't mean tossing domestic auto manufacturers an anchor and waving "bye." It does mean instituting both the regulations and the incentives that should have been there from the first moment we realized that our supply of transportation fuel was both limited and out of our control. It would be nice to assume that the "invisible hand" of the market would be enough to steer consumers along the best course, but the 1980s and 90s are nothing if not a demonstration that consumer pricing doesn't take into account future rarity – and that advertising can trump common sense.
Rather than giving tax breaks that lure people into driving trucks over 6,000 pounds (an incentive that's now been used by millions), we should reward people for driving vehicles that help to reduce the demand for oil. Energize America has from its inception included incentives for buying vehicles that use less than the average oil consumption – an idea that's technology neutral and rewards "good" behavior. Recently, both the provinces of Ontario and British Columbia have instituted policies that reward those buying fuel-efficient vehicles and penalize those buying gas guzzlers. The incentives have come under criticism from some in the auto industry who have claimed that consumers won't be swayed by a rebate, but will react to changing fuel prices. Of course – because if there's anything we've learned over the last thirty years, it's that people ignore the immediate bottom line in favor of long term consequences.
The Ontario plan has already been successful to the degree that it's brought auto makers to find ways to bring their models below the cutoffs in the plan. It's also been self-funding in that the taxes collected on the high mileage vehicles pay for the rebates on the low mileage vehicle. If it hasn't yet made a big dent in the overall purchasing patterns, people should not be surprise. It took us thirty years to get into this mess, and people aren't going to wash that "self worth measured in bulk tons" mentality from between their ears overnight.
I'd amend the Ontario plan in only one important way before importing it into the US. I want to give any left over funds to the car companies. Not to research, but straight back to the people who were our partners in this environmental, economic, and national security deathgrip.
That may seem counterintuitive, but I'm hopeful that it might help keep the automakers from spending millions to defeat the plan becoming law in the US as they did when there were recent proposed changes to the CAFE standards. Truthfully, I'm not all that hopeful, since the US auto industry seems to react to any proposed change like a rector defending sacred text. But even if they fight, I'm still willing to give them the money. Because I'm still betting it will be cheaper to fund them now, than pay the price for the inevitable failure if we wait for market forces to sort this out for us.
End the current plan for hybrid incentives that run out for the models that are most successful. Tighten up the tax incentives on delivery vehicles to be sure that they're being used on actual delivery vehicles, and not $80,000 personal blimps. Use the Ontario plan as a model for a system that rewards low oil consumption and penalizes high consumption based on simple, easily understood and applied rules.
None of those should be radical proposals. Oh, and those silly leisure suit people from the 1970s? They passed the CAFE standards and Clean Air Act under a Republican president at a time when Americans were not dying in the desert to protect the flow of oil. They passed them when the evidence of global warming was still far from public knowledge. They took much more drastic measures in a situation much less dire than that we face today. And this year, we failed to get even modest changes to those standards through a Democratic congress. So which looks sillier, then or now?
I wonder if I can get shag carpet in a Prius.
(This is the first in a series I'm writing for Sunday Kos. So go ahead and wag your finger about my failure to mention rail transport and community zoning if you like, but I'm getting there. I've also broken with blogging tradition and not filled this with links. That's because I wanted it to read more like what it is – an editorial essay – than a research paper. In case you're interested, most of the actual data came from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. The rest came from my fevered mind. If you stayed with me all the way to this point, you have my thanks.)