Over a Barrel : Americans With Gas Guzzlers Paying the Price at the Pump
Gasoline prices were on Renee Luke’s mind in the 1970s when she bought a Toyota Celica.
But in February, the city of Los Angeles senior personnel analyst decided she needed a vehicle powerful enough to tow a trailer, and she wanted to buy American. Her choice: a 5,000-pound Chevrolet Suburban with a 42-gallon gas tank.
With gasoline prices suddenly surging above $1.50 gallon, it costs her more than $60 just to fill it up.
“I have a gas guzzler, all right,” she said. “I decided in my more mature age, I wanted a car with power and room.”
If Luke was a typical American motorist in the 1970s, she is also a true manifestation of the 1990s. Chalk it up to short memories, aging baby boomers, traditionally cheap gas or the American passion for anything big and strong, drivers continue to favor gas guzzlers over gas sippers.
In retrospect, it is clear that the period after the 1970s oil price shocks--when the auto industry shifted gears toward the production of fuel-efficient cars and drivers snapped them up as if there were no tomorrow--was merely a detour from the main concourse of American behavior. And the recent unexpected leap in pump prices is being taken in stride.
In the ‘70s, “people were turning in Cadillacs for Sprints,” said Tim Lazaris, sales manager for S & J Chevrolet in Cerritos. “It’s nowhere like that now. In the ‘70s, they were worried about finding gas. Now, they know there’s gas. They feel the oil companies are ripping them off, [but they] feel it’s a temporary thing.”
Motorists’ flirtations with minivans, sport-utility vehicles and pickup trucks--whose heavier weights and bigger engines make them especially thirsty at the pump--has become a full-blown passion that’s turned the vehicle market upside-down. The vehicles, categorized by the government as “light trucks,” now account for 43.2% of sales, more than double their share in 1980.
And Americans are driving more than ever, especially in Southern California, as suburbanites move farther out in search of affordable housing and as congestion sends commuters on more circuitous routes.
Thus the average vehicle in the Southland traveled 13,276 miles in 1994, up from 9,675 in 1980, according to the Southern California Assn. of Governments. That is due in part to the increase in the average commute: to 14.6 miles in 1994, from 10.7 miles in 1976, SCAG reported.
All of which has left drivers exceptionally vulnerable when the gasoline price increases arrived in the last month.
“They’re completely dependent on the oil industry to deliver gasoline at a reasonable price, and if it becomes unreasonable, they still have to buy it,” said Janet Hathaway, senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group in San Francisco. “This is the consequence of an America that loves large, powerful vehicles and has never valued efficiency for its own sake.”
Of course, “large” and “powerful” are relative terms. Thanks to government fuel-efficiency standards, today’s vehicles are far less thirsty than their 1970s progenitors.
The fuel efficiency of 1996 model passenger cars averages about 28.2 miles per gallon, double those of 1974, according to the American Automobile Manufacturers Assn.
Even bigger vehicles go significantly farther on a gallon of gas.
Given the price of gas, it’s hardly surprising that it was the last thing on Richard Alarian’s mind when he recently bought a “performance” version of the full-size Chevrolet Caprice, called the Impala SS, with a mighty V-8 engine.
“I want to have what I want to have,” he said. “It probably gets about 10 miles to the gallon, but you know what? I’m happy.”
In fact, the car is rated at 17 miles per gallon in town and 26 on the highway.
Despite the growing popularity of truck-like cars, today’s fleet uses dramatically less fuel per vehicle: 513 gallons a year in 1993, the latest year for which there is data, compared with 760 gallons in 1970.
The bad news is this: Per-vehicle consumption bottomed out in 1990 at 502 gallons and is now getting worse.
The reasons are demographic, personal and economic.
As it is in society’s other arenas, the aging population is having a powerful effect on the auto market. Baby boomers with families and boats have abandoned the traditional station wagon for minivans, today’s more car-like pickup trucks and four-wheel-drive sport-utility vehicles.
They are also attracted to the safety inherent in bigger vehicles, and auto makers have exploited that in arguing against more stringent fuel-efficiency standards: High-mileage vehicles tend to be smaller and therefore less crash-worthy.
Yet the trend isn’t all practicality, said Christopher W. Cedergren, an auto market analyst with AutoPacific Group Inc., a Santa Ana consulting firm.
“It goes back to basically image. Right now, trucks are the cool thing to be seen in. . . . Most people who own a Ford Explorer don’t drive it, they wear it.”
But to many observers, the underlying factor that makes all this possible is cheap gasoline. Although most other industrialized nations tax motor fuel heavily to influence behavior--sending prices to $5 a gallon in France, for example--Americans have always considered affordable gasoline something of a birthright.
Since the mid-1980s, U.S. gasoline prices have been among the world’s lowest--about equivalent to those of the 1950s, adjusted for inflation.
“Until very recently, gasoline prices were about the same as, or less than, the cost of bottled water or Coca-Cola, and that’s a pretty low price,” said Diane Steed, president of the auto industry-funded Coalition for Vehicle Choice, based in Washington.
Public policy continues to favor heavier use of fuel, as in the recent boosting of the speed limit in most parts of the country to 65 mph and the apparent consensus in Washington to attack the current high gas prices by lowering the federal gasoline tax.
Similarly, efforts to toughen fuel economy standards for light trucks--which now stand at 20.7 miles per gallon, compared with 27.5 mpg for regular cars--have routinely been turned back in Congress.
What will it take to push drivers out of their Jeeps and into Honda Civics? Higher gas prices and, in particular, limited availability of fuel, observers say.
“Cadillac always contended that higher gas prices don’t scare us at all; what scares us is availability,” auto market analyst Cedergren said. “Once you start cutting off supply and the Cadillac buyer can’t go to the local gas station, he’ll start panicking.”
Motorist Alarian, a 49-year-old director of photography from Thousand Oaks, shows no signs of panic, although it’s costing him about $40 to fill up his new Chevy.
“It’s just one less time to go out to dinner during the week,” he said. “I don’t smoke. I don’t drink. There’s people who spend $20 on a carton of cigarettes. What’s the difference?”
* NOT A HOT BUTTON
Conservation is taking a back seat in the debate over gasoline price. A14
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Big Wheels
Consumers have shown an increasing preference for light trucks--minivans, sport-utility vehicles and pickup trucks--which are generally heavier and less fuel-efficient than most passenger cars. If the trend continues, light trucks could outsell cars by the turn of the century. Light truck market share: (please see newspaper for full chart information)
1996: 43.2%*
1980: 21.2%
* First quarter only
Sources: American Automobile Assn., Automotive News
