We find ourselves at the beginning of a new cycle of an ending school year and the beginning of summer vacations.
Summer vacations have evolved, throughout the years, into more than a few quick trips to the lake or the ocean, or even to visit family in nearby towns. Today, Americans are more adventuresome and curious as to what is on the other side of the country.
You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a “sport utility vehicle,” otherwise known as an SUV. They are motor vehicles that are roomier than the average car, and generally more comfortable because of their size and weight.
SUVs traditionally have four-wheel-drive, or all-wheel-drive, to facilitate safe passage along our streets and byways in inclement weather, too.
And while significantly larger than the average sedan, SUVs are usually smaller than a pickup truck. Trucks are becoming more stylish and comfortable these days, with practically every model available with four-doors, for easy loading the entire family or crew.
Suddenly, loading the kids, the dog, boogie boards, countless suitcases, kayaks, and bicycles, began making vacation trips along with Mom and Dad plus the coolers full of food and adult beverages. Yeah!
But have you ever wondered where SUVs came from?
Back in 1970, with advent of Earth Day, busy bodies, who I like to call “buttinskis,” due to their sticking their noses into anything and everything that usually wind up disrupting other people’s lives, appeared like weeds across the nation.
Take, for instance, the propaganda pushed by the new crop of environmentalists – they were the pioneers of the climate change movement – screaming to everyone to “do something” about the dying planet on which we live.
Rumor had it that without significant changes to our lives, the Earth would die a horrible death, and take each one of us along for the trip to oblivion. A drop-dead date for the demise of civilization was predicted.
On the website AEI.org. appears some updates to these three dire predictions: Paul Ehrlich, renowned scientist and essayist, wrote, “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s”
Harvard biologist George Wald estimated the “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” wrote Denis Hayes. He was the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.
These three poseurs made a partial living terrifying peoples far and wide over a contrived idea that Mother Earth was deathly ill, relying on saviors such as Ehrlich, Wald, Hayes, and others, to ‘do something’ to save her.
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| Station wagon still in its original box |
A quick glance around the country found station wagons hiding in plain sight. Yes, station wagons. They were once the camels of the roads. Much like a Nepalese Sherpa, a station wagon was a regular sight laden with aluminum lawn chairs, umbrellas, and sleeping bags lashed to the luggage rack, neatly secured to the roof.
These workhorses lasted from their inception in 1910 as a Ford Model T, until the buttinskis felt they deserved a timely death.
President Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970, and played a major role in the station wagon’s disappearance.
Eager buttinskis immediately cozied up to EPA officials in an attempt to regulate all things environmental including vehicle gas mileage; those MPG stickers on new car and truck windows are there with the blessings of the EPA.
In their opinion, station wagons were excesses that needed to disappear, pronto. And buttinski pleas – driven by what is now known as faulty computer data – convinced the EPA to simply punish station wagon buyers.
EPA officials decided to place a buyer’s premium on certain vehicles they felt were unrestrained or extreme. In their infinite wisdom, EPA officials began using strong arm tactics to steer people away from station wagons, all in the name of the Holy Environment.
Those premiums were financially-based and consisted of a “tax” on any vehicle that had extra space, large engines, and consisted of heavy construction that were unnecessary for the public’s general use. In other words, no one needed a station wagon to drive to the office.
Using common sense, the EPA regulation scribes exempted pickup trucks and semi cabs from these regulations inasmuch as they needed the extra horsepower and beefy frames to pull trailers and tote building materials.
Once the proverbial dust settled, lawyers and engineers from the Big Three – General Motors, Dodge, and Ford – realized that merely placing a more luxurious body on an exempt truck frame would be able to circumvent the new rules made by guvment lawyers.
And so the SUV was born.
Oddly enough, these creative concepts
were well received by the public desperate to replace their old station wagons
with something new, spiffy, and perhaps safer than what they were driving
before.
SUVs have been around in one form or another since the 1980s. Jeep is often credited with marketing their Wagoneer to sportsmen, adventurers, and active families, with much success, and much to the chagrin of the EPA and rabid environmentalists, alike.
And the rest is history.
So the next time you stuff fishing poles, mulch, wet pets, bags of groceries, bikes, car parts, skis, and the like into your SUV, remember that this intentional action to punish you failed, not unlike other attempted modifications being pushed down American’s throats, all in the name of The Environment.
