Well, she was happy to tell me why.
My sister and her husband have two cars, a Mercedes sedan that's a few years old, and a 2-door Nissan sport coupe that is about 15 years old.
They also now have two small children, both still car seat age. They also have a third teenage son who is over 6 feet 4 inches tall, but he no longer lives with them, so he's gone from a regular passenger to an occasional one.
The Nissan can't accommodate the kids, and if only one car can carry kids, then only one parent ends up shouldering the responsibility for dealing with the kids and day care and transportation etc. Not acceptable in a balanced household.
So, they knew they need another car, and space or room was probably their #1 desired feature. And not just space and room for the kids, but space and room and ease of storage of their stroller and all the other baby accoutrements. Plus the occasional trip to Home Depot and Ikea.
My sister was very resistant to the idea of an SUV and fuel economy was another major desired feature. So how did they end up in a Toyota Highlander? Read on and find out...
Given their space preferences they figured they were stuck with getting either a station wagon, SUV or minivan.
Now there were a couple of prejudices going into the search:
#1: Howl and scream all you want, but my sister and her husband were prejudiced against the American car makers. I am the only one in our family who has regularly bought (and had luck with) American cars. Everyone else has gone Japanese or German. At my urging they did test-drive the Saturn Vue, but it felt cramped and not much bigger than a sedan on the inside.
#2: Call it an emotional response, but my sister was dead-set against a minivan. (She can't be the only young mom out there who feels that the purchase of a minivan would back her into the box of being described and viewed as a suburban soccer mom.)
My sister didn't have much more affection for the idea of getting an SUV, mostly because she, like me, has spent a lot of time cursing the ever-increasing number of big SUVs on the road, with their arrogantly bad drivers.
But with minivans elimiated, they found that station wagons are not filling the lots of car dealers like they were when we were kids. There are nice ones, but all at a pretty high-end price that my sister felt they couldn't afford. (Think Audi, Volvo, BMW...pricy.)
What attracted them, at first, to the Toyota Highlander was that there was a hybrid version available. But they discovered, as I discovered when car shopping earlier this year, that right now you are paying a huge premium for the "status" of having a hybrid. (Not to mention getting on annoying waiting lists.)If you do the math (and I did) it would take the hybrid over a decade of use before its slightly better gas mileage paid back the huge price differential between the hybrid and non-hybrid equivalent.
Gas mileage was a factor, so they looked for vehicles that got a reported minimum of 20 MPG highway. Which eliminates a lot of choices. (FYI: Just about any non-SUV V6 car gets in the low 20s at best.)
So in the end, despite reservations and a certain embarrassment at admitting their impending purchase to their bleeding-heart, liberal, non-SUV-owning family, they are going to go with an SUV on the petite, non 4x4 end of the SUV spectrum and suffer the slings and arrows.
So are SUVs popular because people want them? Or are they popular because car makers don't offer enough alternatives?
And in 3 years when my own car lease is up, will my dream that there will be dozens of hybrid models to choose from, rather than 3 or 4, come true?
I'm hoping.
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