mr peters, remembering history, makes a prediction for coming events in the suv world;

 

History often repeats, hence the saying.

About 50 years ago, gas became scarce and expensive. Average people found – very suddenly – they could no longer afford to drive the huge, V8-powered cars that were once the typical car driven by average Americans. If you weren’t there to see it, you might not believe it. Try to imagine a world in which owning a car larger – much larger – than a current Mercedes S-Class that had a V8 much larger than the little six the current S-Class comes standard with – was not just possible for working class Americans but also common. Just as it was common, once, for working class people to live in single family homes.

They – the large cars – were everywhere. It was a world in which the guy in the Mercedes just had a more expensive car – as opposed to the world today, in which every car is expensive.

Anyhow, what happened to the large cars that were once as common as sneakers, almost? Well, gas got scarce and expensive. There were gas lines – and gas shortages. Those large cars with their big V8s got maybe 15 MPG – so the need for expensive gas was constant as well as expensive. It very quickly became too expensive for working and middle class Americans to afford to drive their large cars and so they traded them in for smaller cars – typically imports from Japan. The traded-in large cars sat on used car lots; it was very difficult to sell them at any price because no matter how cheaply they could be bought, there was no getting around what it cost to fuel them. The new car market for large cars with V8s collapsed. This happened very quickly and the change in the new car landscape from circa 1974 to circa 1984 was dramatic. By the early ’80s, there were just a relative handful of large cars with V8s that were mass-market cars. Most had been replaced by much smaller cars with V6 and even four cylinder engines. The handful of larger cars with V8s that remained were smaller than their analogs of just a few years prior and they came with much smaller V8s...........more..........