What amazes me about the explosion in popularity of cross over sport utility vehicles these days is that women, both young and old, are so enamored of them. Take Chevrolet's stunning new Traverse for instance. Strong enough for a man but made for a woman? Oh, absolutely. But why are these damn things so popular with women whereas the vehicle that's their direct spiritual predecessor, station wagons, are held in such low regard? It's because cross overs are a confluence of styling, driving position, and lastly and leastly, utility. Again, same could not be said for station wagons. Our subject is a 1968 Chevrolet Bel Air.
If station wagons offered the kind of driving position and the availability of four wheel or all wheel drive, would they have been as popular as cross overs are today? That's hard to say. At the end of the day, station wagons were little more than sedans with an extended greenhouse. No matter how handsome a job designers did with them, wagons like our Bel Air here could not escape what they were. Today's cross overs may share chassis and running gear with sedans but where it really counts, they're unique vehicles.
Station wagons were certainly not without merit, though. They could seat up to 9 passengers and with the middle passenger seat and the rear facing (good lord) third seat folded down, it made for a cavernous amount of cargo space. Lay the tailgate down flat and secure your load and you had even more room.
Unlike today's Swiss Army knife like cross overs, though, nothing screamed unhip "soccer mom mobile" or family car like station wagons of yore did. Lauded primarily for their versatility, what they could not do was convey any sort of elan that today's cross overs do. Young women in their twenties who have not an iota of subliminal nesting in them buy them as well as families do. In general, fifty years ago, most single, twenty something year old females wouldn't have been caught dead owning a station wagon - unless, for whatever reason, they had to.
Another thing that cross overs have been able to do is push sedans to the point of extinction. General Motors having made overtures that the current Chevrolet Impala will be the last and Ford hasn't announced that they have any plans for a replacement or update for the current Taurus and Fusion. Chrysler pulled the plug on their excellent "200" last year. At the rate they're going, we may all be forced to by cross overs because there won't be anything else left to buy.
No comments:
Post a Comment