Affordable Vehicle for Snow

musicprnt
Mon, 05 Sep 2016 15:13:18 +0000

It is funny, I remember driving 20 years ago + in maine (early 90’s) when the SUV craze was just starting to really heat up, back in the burbs and such people were gobbling up Cherokees and Suburbans and Explorers and so forth, they were becoming really common. My wife and I were kind of shocked driving through snow country in New England, we saw more than a few Subarus but many were front wheel drive, not AWD , and SUV’s were pretty rare, saw some older Cherokees and such, some international harvesters from a pre-day, relatively few of the then dominant SUV’s. I asked someone about it, and they said part of it was how expensive the SUV’s were, but part of it was people in those parts learned how to drive in snow and bad weather routinely and probably didn’t think they needed that. SUV’s originally were developed for people who went offroad, hunters, fisherman, people that drove on beaches, and people like farmers and the like who needed vehicles to get through truly bad conditions.

I am glad that more modest cars offer AWD, among other things it has decreased the number of people driving the big SUV’s (at least that is how it looks), which are a disaster gas consumption wise and also to me are a menace, people drive a suburban like it was a sports car or the other big truck based SUV’s, and these days I generally see people driving the big trucks like that because they need them, tow things, carry a lot of stuff (part of that I think is the big SUV’s have become a lot less of a status symbol, despite being expensive, when my son went to a private school where there was a lot of status showing, the Yukon Denalis, the Cadillac SUV and the like were big deals, now that luxury cars like Benz and Lexus and infiniti and so forth offer AWD, has cut into the big SUV as a status symbol).