The rising cost of gasoline is one of the usual suspects in explaining the demise of the American luxo-cruiser. And certainly, the Arab oil embargo woke a lot of us up to considerations of fuel economy. But when we peek beneath the surface of this issue, things begin to look different from what we're used to hearing.
Consider the ongoing and fundamental shift at the upper end of the price spectrum away from traditional big Cadillacs and Lincolns, and toward more nimbly proportioned BMWs and Mercedes and Lexus. On a strictly practical level, the people in the upper income brackets who can afford such cars tend to spend a smaller overall percentage of their money on gasoline, and thus tend to feel the bite of rising fuel costs less acutely than the rest of us. In other words, thirstier cars are not really all that economically unfeasible for them.
Moreover, as the price of even the most routine servicing at a luxury import dealership attests, people who buy the top-priced imports are not all that daunted by high operating expense in general. To attribute upper income brackets' shift away from big American cars to concerns about gasoline prices thus misses the mark by quite a bit.
What's more telling is that many of the rest of us have also drifted during the past few years into a tremendous lack of concern about the cost of a fillup--and yet we haven't gone back to more traditional Detroit iron, either.
From a marketing standpoint, today's hottest trendsetters are the "sport utility vehicles." Their phenomenal popularity entails a great deal more than a few yuppies getting around in Jeep Grand Cherokees. From Blazers to Explorers to Pathfinders to Rodeos and more, the sport-utilities are being snapped up by Americans of all incomes, and in record numbers.
What kind of gas mileage do these vehicles get? Last time I shopped, they averaged about 15 MPG in the city, 19 on the highway. They're gas guzzlers! If we've fallen in love with them, something is clearly more important to us than fuel efficiency.
