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posted by
martyb
on Wednesday December 19 2018, @04:34AM
from the now-they're-buying...trucks? dept.
from the now-they're-buying...trucks? dept.
General Motors has announced it's shuttering five production facilities and killing six vehicle platforms by the end of 2019 as it reallocates resources towards self-driving technologies and electric vehicles.
[...] North American car production hit 17.5 million vehicles in 2016, and dropped marginally to 17.2 million in 2017. Interesting, but perhaps not significant.
More telling are changes in driver behaviour. In North America, for example, fewer teens are getting driver's licences. In 1983, 92 per cent of teens were licensed, while by 2014, that number had dropped to 77 per cent. In Germany, the number of new licences issued to drivers aged 17 to 25 has dropped by 300,000 over the last 10 years.
Are we over our love affair with cars?
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @05:49AM (10 children)
Actually his point is correct.
GM said that they were killing of the car line up. Concentrating on more profitable trucks - this include large SUV. To me a compact - 6'7" there is nothing else that fits.
Electric vehicals make since, since large frames allow for more bus type of travel. So if GM becomes or sells to LYFT. They vechical can handle the added weight of processing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @06:04AM (8 children)
The demand for SUV will be sustained by farmers - they cannot take a city car across a field. In winter a 4x4 is a must, as farm roads are cleaned by Sun in the spring - or by the farmers themselves. This demand in cities is driven by outdoorsmen or just people who like SUV's suspension and tendency to flip. As an example, I needed a 4x4 myself several times, as travel in Northern California in the fall to spring season is dangerous at height, and mountain passes often demand chains (hard to use, low speed) or a 4x4.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @11:56AM (5 children)
Nah, not the reason.
SUV's/truck's popularity in citys is a combination of 1) phallic symbol and 2) herd mentality.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @04:48PM (1 child)
I've noticed that the enviro-Nazis - and the left in general - seem very fixated on the penis. Very Freudian.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 20 2018, @12:32AM
How many guns do you own?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @04:59PM
You forgot 3) Uneven regulation.
To explain, in USA the first crash and fuel economy (CAFE) regulations were much more stringent for cars than for light trucks. The result was that cars became more expensive and light trucks were a cheap way to buy a new vehicle. The car companies noticed after a few years that more and more trucks were being used like cars, so they began to civilize their truck offerings and also expanded the SUV category. Then they really pushed on the definition of "light truck" with vehicles like the Chrysler PT Cruiser (yes--that was classified as light truck for crash and mileage) so they could still build big guzzlers and have a reasonable corporate average fuel economy (CAFE). Somewhere along this slippery slope marketing caught on to the trend and glorified the truck. And here we are, the only country that I know of where there are more light trucks sold than cars.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @10:08PM (1 child)
Nope. Women. They feel safe in a larger vehicle.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday December 20 2018, @06:28AM
They don't seem to feel that way about my van, even though I am quite happy to have it.
It was never designed to be a fashion statement. But will haul anything I can get into it and damn near anything I hook onto it.
Its no gazelle, not even a jackrabbit. If I were to choose an animal to use as its moniker, a musk ox or a hippopotamus.
I count on the farmers to keep the markets active so we all can continue to use these incredibly useful machines we used to make.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by toddestan on Thursday December 20 2018, @04:53AM (1 child)
Farmers account for an insignificant part of the market. Farmers tend to gravitate towards pickups, and less towards SUVs. Now, if you look at the pickup market, almost all pickups made nowadays are crew cabs and high trim line models. This is the exact opposite of the kind of trucks farmers buy - usually standard cabs and as basic as possible. The problem is there isn't much money in selling a basic truck to farmer for $20k. Now load it up as a status symbol and sell it for $60k to some urban cowboy, and that's where the money is.
Also, there's actually very few actual SUVs sold today if you go by what traditionally was a SUV - body on frame, truck-based, RWD or a real 4WD system. It's basically down to a the few of the largest models like the Chevy Yukon, and the Jeep Wangler. The vast majority are now car-based, unibody, AWD or FWD CUVs. These are mommy-mobiles, if you buy one with the intent to use it on a farm and drive it across fields you'll destroy it in no time (or just get stuck a lot).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 20 2018, @07:49PM
Now load it up as a
statusphallic symbol and sell it for $60k to some urban cowboy, and that's where the money is.There, FTFY.
(Score: 2) by aclarke on Thursday December 20 2018, @12:16PM
I'm a few inches shorter than you but still taller than most. American pickup trucks and SUVs are getting better in this regard, but for years until recently I found that they were amongst the worst to drive in terms of interior space. There still wasn't enough headroom in many cases and even though there was all that space, they put short seat rails in so the seat didn't go back far enough. Often a car like a Subaru was in practice a much more comfortable vehicle.
A couple years ago I sat in the back of the latest Chevrolet Colorado truck, and there wasn't enough headroom for me to sit there. What the heck? In a new-design truck? Surely it ought to have been designed for, you know, a "crew" of reasonably burly guys to go to a job site. I guess if you need to do "real work" you're supposed to buy a "real truck" but with that seemingly designed-for-failure attitude I walked away and scratched it off my list.