Rather have unfashionable sedan

Little boxes on the hillside,

Little boxes made of ticky tacky ...

Little boxes all the same.

— Malvina Reynolds

When Pete Seeger recorded this song in 1963, it applied to housing developments in the heyday of suburbia.

Today, it could apply to sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks, which are mostly boxes on wheels.

They have become so popular that Ford has decided to phase out sedans.

I don’t understand this decision. I am sold on sedans.

I admit that in rural eastern New Mexico, pickups are often a necessity on farms and ranches, and an SUV is likely to bump down dirt roads to hunting and fishing sites.

For most buyers of new vehicles, who are urbanized, pickups and SUVs serve only fantasies of outdoor ruggedness.

And they look like boxes, which for some reason makes them fashionable.

I drove an SUV for a while when the family lived in surburban Los Angeles. I was more impressed with its awkward handling and poor gas mileage than I was with its room and storage capacity, which, even when we had kids was less than it seemed.

Most SUVs, including ours, never left suburbia. Had to keep it clean, you know. If we wanted to rough it, we took our Jeep.

Later, we bought a sedan. It cost less than an SUV with the same square footage and had the same amount of room. It could hold our kids, too, with no problem.

Since then, we have always bought sedans for traveling beyond commuting.

I also own a very stripped-down Ford Ranger pickup. It’s my commuting vehicle.

I wanted one when I bought it, but without stuff to haul, except musical instruments, which the pickup bed accommodates well, I have mostly regretted the decision.

With only the bed, pickups have terrible aerodynamics, like driving with all side and rear windows open. They have lousy rear traction in snow unless you shovel bricks or a lot of snow into the back end. Mine has a decent-size four-cylinder engine that eats gas like a mid-size six.

Rangers have been off the market for years, but they’re back. They’re pickups and look like boxes.

Our current sedan is a Ford Taurus. It’s roomy, gets excellent gas mileage for a six-cylinder car, drives well in a headwind or bad weather due to its low center of gravity, and it can hold my musical instruments unless more than three people are riding.

It doesn’t look like a box, however, so apparently it is not fashionable.

When we bought the Taurus, its price as an unpopular sedan made it a relative bargain, which was a key factor in our purchase decision.

Taurus is now going by the wayside with the Ford Fusion, a smaller sedan.

Ford is keeping the Mustang, their little sedan with cachet, and an SUV-like version of its Focus “entry-level” car.

GM, I understand, is also planning to drop real cars from its lineup in favor of fantasy-serving SUVs and pickups.

I hope this is temporary. Because SUVs and pickups are fashionable, they mean higher profit margins, but sedans work just as well, if not better for most of the routine getting from place to place we expect a car to do.

I’m going to watch prices on sedans while they’re still available, though, and we just might pick up one or two during the transition to get us through the time of boxes.

Steve Hansen writes about our life and times from his perspective of a retired Tucumcari journalist. Contact him at:

stevenmhansen

@plateautel.net