Gas price watchers wonder when guzzlers will get outmoded
By James R. Healey
USA Today
Gasoline prices could keep setting daily records into September, fueling increasingly strident complaints that nevertheless are unlikely to change what or how most people drive.
Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser
Gas would have to hit $3 a gallon and stay there permanently to get people out of big vehicles into small, fuel-efficient ones, according to studies by automakers and auto-industry consultants.
Auto industry surveys indicate that the threshold for price tolerance is about $3 a gallon. Still, people in the industry say, consumer trends would take years to change.
Even so, stubbornness remains. "Our data show that 57 percent of new-car and truck buyers would not change the type of vehicles they drove at any price," says George Peterson, head of consultant AutoPacific.
"Hard to believe that," he acknowledges, adding: "We understand, anecdotally, that the price at which they would change is around $3.50 to $4 a gallon."
The issue is important to car companies because they take two or three years to develop a model. Automakers don't want to hit the market with big V-8 engines just as fuel shortages occur, or offer only fuel-sipping four cylinders when gas is affordable and plentiful and rivals are selling powerful V-6s and V-8s.
It's important to environmental advocates, who've long sought a way to get rid of big vehicles that they consider fuel wasters.
And it's a concern for safety advocates because smaller vehicles generally are deadliest for their occupants in a crash. No matter how much safety gear they have, small cars don't have as much structure to absorb crash forces or enough heft to prevent deadly, neck-snapping, bounce-back injuries.
If people expect high fuel prices to last two years or more, "then you could expect changes in buying behavior," says Chrysler Group spokesman Sam Locricchio
Chrysler, somewhat more conservative than others, thinks a permanent price floor of $2.50 a gallon could cause a switch.
Nissan thinks high fuel prices wouldn't hurt the launches of its full-size Armada sport-utility vehicle Sept. 29 or full-size Titan pickup Dec. 1 — the company's first, and expensive, forays into full-size trucks. A Nissan study found "there wasn't significant impact on buying as (fuel) prices rose ... at least up to the $3 range.
Lack of availability is an issue," says spokesman Kurt Von Zumwalt. But automakers predict generally stable fuel supplies.
Whatever the prices, "There's nothing you can do. Those are the prices. You can't cut down on driving," says Peter Tennant. He's paying $2.42 a gallon to fill his delivery van on Martha's Vineyard, Mass.
He has made one change, though: "It stops me from going to the other side of the island to fish. No sense taking a 50-mile ride when you can fish on this side."
