Clan of the Van

What hath god wrought? I remember the days of the station wagon. If you lived in the burbs and had the standard 2.3 children your dad likely drove a wagon. And that was the only car in the driveway. You could fit the whole family, the dog, and the groceries in this beast. If mom was liberated she would drive dad to the train station so she’d have the family car during the day. Ah, life was good..

Then came the oil embargo of 1973. Wake up call! I worked at a filling station and saw it first hand. My folks were from the generation that knew sacrifice when times got tough. We had to tighten our belts and look for solutions. We bought a smaller car and drove less. Life was still good.

Little boxes, on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky
Little boxes all the same.

And then along with the ticky-tacky, there came a brilliant marketing term, the Minivan. There is nothing mini about the minivan, but the term worked. The station wagon concept was back but now it was even bigger. Eventually the family hauler became more like a living room on wheels. It can be had with all the amedities of home including the all important cup holder(s). You can drive the kids 5 blocks and they can watch a DVD movie so they don’t get bored at the 5 traffic lights. Ahh, life is good. Except for me. I can’t see around these monsters and the monsters are death traps.

But it gets worse. The van is so common that they are not cool anymore. But everybody seems to have one. The same marketing bozos that gave us the four wheeled living room came up with the answer. They took the simple pickup truck that would otherwise be laughed out of the PTA for being too rural, attached a shell and called it the SUV . This became the lifeblood of the American car business. Propaganda so insidious and absurd that it took the van’s utility and added caché to a level that still astounds my senses. High profit, high fuel consumption, heavy, and more dangerous than the van. Now the same ticky-tacky driveways have both a van and an suv. And maybe one or two more smallish cars. And none of them parked in the garage. They come in all flavours of stupid. I still can’t see around these beasts.

I don’t get it. These Urban Assault Vehicles are everywhere except in the outback countryside where they belong. And they get bigger and bigger and flashier and flashier. But I don’t want to debate the myths of their merits or total lack thereof. I can almost see their value in a place like Iceland where the roads beyond urbania are potentialy rough enough. But does the average folk do much back country driving?

Van/SUV truisms:

• The smaller the lady, the bigger the suv
• The smaller the penis, the bigger the suv
• More than two drops of rain = wheel spin at the intersection
• Most vehicles in the ditch are suvs
• Drive-thru lineups are filled with mostly large vehicles
• The bigger they are the further they move ahead of the line at the intersection, and I can’t see to my left.
• During high fuel price days the suv is still driving the fastest.
• The faster they go the more likely the driver is on the cell phone.

Icelandic joke modified for the western suburb: “What do you do if you’re lost in a suburban forest?
.. you stand up”