Is the era of the SUV dead?
DETROIT — It's great for family trips and comfortable around town, but Scott Hall feels a little guilty going from point A to point B in his 2000 Ford Expedition.
So even though there are only 62,000 miles on the 4.6-liter V-8, Hall, of Ann Arbor, Mich., put an ad in the paper to sell the big red truck with a gray leather interior that gets 16 miles per gallon of gasoline.
"I feel like we were maybe a little bit on the selfish side buying it," Hall said on a recent Saturday morning. "Our views have kind of changed since then. Maybe this is not the right thing for this world."
Judging by sales figures this year, Hall is part of a trend. Gas prices that were nearing $3 per gallon have pushed people away from the truck-based sport utility vehicle category in droves. Instead, they're buying cars or car-based crossover vehicles that have plenty of room and are more efficient.
The pace of the exodus has surprised Detroit's Big Three automakers, who have relied on the expensive truck-based SUVs for huge profits. And it has many industry analysts speculating that at least part of the SUV segment is headed for extinction, like the wood-paneled station wagon of the 1970s.
David Healy, an analyst for Burnham Securities, predicted that the mid-sized SUV — vehicles such as the Ford Explorer, Chevrolet TrailBlazer and Toyota 4-Runner — will be gone in a few years.
"There's no excuse in the world anymore for having a truck-based SUV, and the segment is going to go to zero," Healy said.
When the SUV was in its heyday in the late 1990s, most people who bought them didn't need a truck with off-road capability, but they purchased them because they were trendy, said David Lucas, vice president of Autodata Corp., which gathers and analyzes auto industry statistics.
"The trendiness of having a large SUV has passed," he said.
Sales of the Explorer, the largest-selling mid-sized SUV, dropped 30.7 percent in the first eight months of this year compared to the same period last year. TrailBlazer sales were off 30 percent.
The mid-sized SUV segment, which includes 21 vehicles, is down 21 percent overall from last year, according to Autodata.
The decline is part of the reason why Ford, General Motors and DaimlerChrysler have announced production cuts for the second half of the year.
Analysts and top executives of the Big Three agree there will always be a market for the large truck-based SUV with three rows of seats because people with large families need the seating or the power to tow boats or camping trailers.
