The Detroit project also claims that customer demand for SUVs was artificially created by clever ad campaigns. It would seem that if Detroit marketers could exerts such a hypnotic hold on their customers, they might have used this power to prevent more than a third of them from defecting to imports over the past 30 years. It’s also peculiar that the Detroit project gives a pass to pickup trucks, which are almost exactly the same size and have identical fuel-consumption ranges as SUVs. Moreover, big pickups are much more plentiful than big SUVS—the Ford F-series and the Chevy Silverado have been the bestselling vehicles in the United States for decades.
And what’s about limos? What could be more wasteful than a large—sometimes grotesquely stretched—vehicles that typically carries a single passenger and spends many hours idling at curbside so its occupant will be spared the trauma of even a moment’s thermal discomfort? Sure, limos are scarcer than SUVs, but they are more egregious waters of energy than are the mid-size SUVs that satisfy millions of middle-class Americans. Perhaps limos get a pass because they are the preferred mode of transportation in the New York, Washington, D.C., and Hollywood precincts where Huffington finds so many of her fellow travelers.
Huffington claims the auto industry could easily produce hybrid SUVs that achieve 45 mpg, ignoring the fact that the industry barely achieves such efficiency with compact hybrid sedans that cost significantly more than conventional vehicles. She also claims that announcements at January’s Detroit auto show of upcoming hybrid vehicles were motivated by recent anti –SUV press, thus demonstrating a complete ignorance of the auto industry’s long lead times and knowledge of previous announcements.
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