Thread by @mateosfo

The truth about SUVs: They’re a marketing scam, like any other.

Back in the day when we lived way up in the mountains above 9,000 feet at the end of a windy dirt mountain road, we drove pickup trucks with 4-wheel drive. But most of the time they were 2-wheel and you had to ...

... get out and lock the hubs before you could switch the transfer case into 4x4. We had competitions to see who could go the longest in winter driving with just 2 wheel drive (when the drifts got over 4-6 feet it became mandatory). But if you put a couple 50 pound sand bags ...

... in the bed of the truck over the wells you could do pretty good on pretty bad roads.

Thing is these old trucks were utility vehicles in *true* sense of the word: These weren’t sexy or luxe vehicles but beasts we’d beat the crap out of, loaded up with firewood, bricks ...

... and all manner of oversized construction materials, or fleets of skiers or cyclists or climbers. You don’t really care what happens in the back of your pickup truck because it’s a fucking pickup truck.

Which is to say: Not a mass market vehicle.

Around this time ...

... the first SUVs started showing up and it was obvious who they were for: People who didn’t actually need a pickup or even 4x4 beyond the capability of a Suby, but wanted the vibe of rough-and-tumble - not the stone mason with a Dodge Ram but the Realtor with a Landcruiser ...

The car industry did this whole thing where they convinced mostly middle-aged men at the time that they, too could have pickup truck vibes without that nasty messy part of the work that goes along with a work truck. It was the original tough guy cosplay machine.

And more:

Around the same time the auto industry was convincing the EPA that SUVs were, in fact, trucks and so shouldn’t be subjected to the same air pollution standards as cars. This in spite of the fact that an SUV is essentially a car body on a truck chassis:

It was a scam.

And it gets even better! It costs roughly the same amount of money to build an SUV as a sedan, but the toughness brand conveys a premium of at least $10k per vehicle. So the incentives for automakers to pump and dump SUVs was and remains massive.

And that’s the story of why ...

... we’re getting slaughtered in the streets and destroying the climate, because some auto marketers figured out that some men have low self esteem and could be sold a machine that made them feel tough. This eventually pivoted over to women of course, for other reasons but ...

... this is why we can’t have nice things.