Hammer Time: Of Man And Minivan

Want a cheap car? Buy a minivan. Even in today’s tough market, a minivan is a tough sell. A dealer friend of mine now has over 50 minivans spread out at four different locations. Not a single one sold so far this month. Only three sold the month before. In our business we don’t call that slow. We call that, “Yikes!”

It’s as if minivans are the automotive version of leprosy. Or perhaps the 2000’s version of a station wagon. Nobody wants em’. Nobody buys em’.

But should they?

If you took a unibody pickup… enclosed it… raised the seats a few inches… gave it front wheel drive… a ton of options… upgraded the suspension for comfort… and made it look like a beached whale… you would get a minivan.

You can seat seven (or eight). Tow 3,000+ pounds (in most cases). Enclose anything you want of real value in a safe manner. Heck, you can even stow 18 open cans of soda while letting your passengers enjoy an endless array of DVD’s and headphone fed tunes. Time flies in the cocoon that is a minivan.

For moms and dads, minivans have always been the road trip version of nirvana… and for good reason.

Except no one goes on road trips anymore. At least most families have low-tailed it since gas has remained at $3.00 and change. It costs an awful lot to keep a minivan running these days. Even the good ones.

A lot of other things have changed since minivans hit their peak sales of 1.37 million buyers in 2000. Americans are older. Poorer. Millions of jobs have been lost and nearly everything seems to increase in price in ways that the government can’t seem to track. While all this has gone on, hundreds of thousands have perished in the modern version of ‘oil wars’.

For the wars? Against the wars? Doesn’t matter. Only the most politically correct of big vehicles are selling these days. Even if those vehicles are far more wasteful and poorly designed. Automakers don’t push minivans anymore. They want crossovers, CUV’s, overweight metrosexual vehicles.

Let’s face it. You can’t even call a minivan, a minivan anymore. It’s a ‘lifestyle’ vehicle. A ‘family’ vehicle. A vehicle that is so icky in it’s pop culture connotations that you can’t even speak it’s name.

The deception of what is cool when it comes to a daily driver is just a small symptom of a much bigger problem. Americans are just slowly crawling back from a morass of media fed lies, poisons, and frauds. Deficits don’t matter. Wall Street is virtuous in its greed. Politicians can solve our problems. What does all this have to with minivans? I’ll give it to you in one word, representation.

The face of America is changing… and what we buy reflects it. While many of the usual purveyors of financial whoredom are still pretending that bad things are good, (high fructose corn syrup is merely ‘corn sugar’) many more of us simply know that all this shit just sucks.

Minivans aren’t representative of a bygone era of innocence. They reflect excess, bloat, and the one thing most businesses making record profits can’t seem to offer these days… commitment. Minivans reached their peak when the pursuit of family values and upward mobility seemed to be our country’s Manifest Destiny.

Not any more… families are now embracing a leaner lifestyle not because of want, but of need.

So who ‘needs’ a minivan?