Peter M. DeLorenzo is an automotive industry consultant who also writes a weekly column at the Autoextremist. He pulls no punches, despite the fact that some of his livelihood comes from the companies he criticizes in the column.
Anyway, this week’s column (it’ll be replaced by Sept. 14, and the archives don’t seem to be online) is all about the effects of the post-Katrina gas crunch on the SUV market. It’s not a pretty picture, and DeLorenzo savages the auto industry for its mega-reliance on these cars:
Detroit marketers in particular created “the need” and “the want” here, folks – and don’t for a minute be misled into thinking otherwise. Detroit single-handedly pushed an egregiously callous marketing strategy that revolved around launching more and more variations of larger SUVs into this market and creating the demand for vehicles that were a dismal combination of laughable space utilization, miserable handling dynamics and piss-poor fuel economy – wasteful mastodons that made little sense even under the most wildly optimistic scenarios. Not only did they push bigger and bigger SUVs and “urbanized” pickup trucks, they made these vehicles drive like cars so that people would realistically consider them as benign alternatives for their transportation needs – even if they were woefully inappropriate choices in every respect.
He doesn’t have high hopes for the industry this fall.