SUV: Stuck Until this Vehicle dies

Used car dealers are discovering what many drivers are already discovering: SUVs (which make sense to own if you live on a farm in a rural area, but little sense if you live in an urban area and are just driving to the mall) are gas guzzlers that few seem to want anymore. It seems that SUV owners who want to downgrade to a smaller vehicle are finding that they can't trade in their SUVs for any money -- dealers can't sell them so they don't want to buy them. That chuckling noise you hear in the background is our gas sipping Honda Civic, which we bought way back in the day when gas was hovering around a $1 a gallon and the dealer had a glut of those cars because people were buying SUVs.

In all seriousness, I feel a little sympathy for the SUV owners. With a growing family, we're finding our passenger cars (we also own a Mitsubishi Gallant) getting a little snug. It doesn't help our youngest is still in a car seat, meaning we can only fit two in the backseat of the Civic (a small child can fit in the Gallant's backseat fine). Take away the front passenger seat due to airbag dangers and we find we can offer very little in car pooling tradeoffs (on the plus side, we're never volunteered to be the carpooler), which is what I suspect led to, in part, parents buying SUVs. Back in the 1970s my parents had boats on wheels that could sit 4-6 kids easily. Of course, we didn't have to worry about airbags in that old Ford or Oldsmobile so the front seat was an option. It also helped that we weren't burdened with seatbelts, which didn't help my sister when our mother's 2 door Ford Falcon was rear ended and I went flying into the seatback and pushed it down onto my sister. My cousins had a huge station wagon that could easily cram 4 adults and 6 children into it for our trips to the city so my dad and my mother's cousin could take us in and out of various haunts in Chinatown (what is it with Jews and Chinese food anyway?), ignoring any place that had menus in English or, worse, took credit cards. Anyway, those boats got horrible gas mileage; my dad was happy if that old Ford got 10 MPG (he did a lot of city driving) and was thrilled when/if it got 17 MPG when we drove down to Florida each summer.

Rising gas prices and newer fuel economy standards put an end to those cars and, by the mid 80s, you'd be hard pressed to find a family sedan that fit more than 5 people comfortably (fortunately, by then, full family trips were rare so when my dad was finally forced to get a smaller car it didn't bother us too much) so parents started buying minivans and then the much cooler SUVs, which, thanks to their being trucks, didn't count towards a car manufacturer's gas mileage totals. However, lost in this mix, was the good old family station wagon. Those cars were great if you owned a house and had a family. Not only could you haul your kids around, but you had plenty of room for sports equipment and could even haul cargo back from the stores. Try finding a big one now.

Oh they've come back now and then, and I know where I can find then, but there are still nowhere near as many as they were, especially the larger, family sized ones. Unless we buy a crossover vehicle in a few years, when our cars both pass the decade mark and the ability to haul 2 growing children and their gear around, we will be looking for a wagon to last us until around 2020, at which point our oldest will be in college and our youngest will not want to have anything to do with us anyway. Hopefully, with rising prices a few of the manufacturers will realize that some of us want a wagon (I wouldn't mind my Gallant as a wagon), a vehicle that drives like a car but has the room families need. I suppose that, and the end of our wasteful polluting habits is one of the benefits of increased fuel prices, though I'd have rather seen all that extra money go to building better roads and mass transit instead of into the oil companies pockets.

For those who bought their SUVs just a few years ago and can't afford to get another new car, it's going to be a rough few years. But it looks as if high gas prices are here to stay for awhile for various reasons (falling dollar, commodities market, supply and demand with other countries, greed) and there is not much to do aside from using less gas; proposals to lower or eliminate fuel taxes would haunt us pretty quick, as anyone who drove on NYC's deferred maintenance roads (or rode the subways) during the 1970s could attest to, so remeber to get that small loan from the bank before you fill up. In the meantime, I can just hope that station wagons/family sized sedans are getting gas mileage similar to our Civic in a few years or I suspect I'm going to be hearing a lot of complaining about lack of room from the backseat in a few years.