I was reading in The Week that the humble minivan is making a comeback in America, and maybe this is really a story about people finally noticing they've been had.
For years the minivan has been the least cool thing you could possibly drive. Soccer mums, school runs, the motoring equivalent of a cardigan. Meanwhile everyone and their dog went out and bought an SUV, a car designed to cross a desert, to drive to Tesco.
The SUV 'coolness tax'
The latest figures are pretty clear. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, Americans bought 281,000 minivans in the first eight months of the year, up 8%, while overall car sales actually fell.
And the reason is money. Minivans go for roughly three fifths the price of a big SUV, they're more practical and they're cheaper to run. One analyst at Edmunds reckons only about one in ten SUV owners ever actually takes the thing off-road. One in ten!
So nine out of ten people paying a premium for a vehicle that can climb a mountain are driving it to work and back, and getting stuck in multi-storey car parks because the thing is the size of a small bungalow. It's been a real triumph of marketing over common sense....
The coolness tax is a good phrase for it. You're not paying for the car, you're paying for the image of the sort of person who'd drive that car... rugged, adventurous, outdoorsy... when actually you're going to Costco.
Meanwhile, in Britain...
Over here more than half of all new car models on sale are now SUVs, up from a handful back in 2000, and the choice of MPVs has shrivelled to almost nothing. Ford binned the Galaxy and the S-Max, Vauxhall dropped the Zafira, and what used to be the default family car for anyone with three kids has basically vanished from the forecourts.
That's not because the cars stopped being useful. It's because the manufacturers worked out that a jacked-up hatchback with some plastic cladding on the wheel arches can be sold for several grand more. Choice gets narrowed, prices go up, and we're told this is what we wanted all along.
It's all about status
From a sociological point of view this is textbook conspicuous consumption. Cars have always been about showing off as much as getting from A to B, and the SUV became a status symbol in a way the people carrier never could.
What's interesting is that it seems to be the cost of living that's breaking the spell, not any sudden outbreak of good sense. When money's tight, people stop paying extra to look like they climb mountains at the weekend. Apparently it's even middle-aged blokes buying them now, which as a middle-aged bloke myself I can only applaud. Once you're past fifty you've earned the right to not care what your car says about you.
