And for most drivers, a huge SUV serves the same purpose. Once the new wears off, it will serve mainly to suck cash out of you. I m guessing it s outdoor adventure. Yet buying the damn thing seals your domestic fate. You can t light out for the territory, because you ve got to make your car payment.
Real cowboys pound the roads in battered pickups, ten and twenty years old.
My daughter who was nearly born in the Green Limo recently bought a Ford Explorer Sport. And after driving it some, and buying tankfuls of gas way sooner than I m accustomed to, it became clear that its six-cylinder motor, the smaller of its available powerplants, is propelling a hefty chunk of steel wherever it travels. Moving up, the line of SUVs extends through the Explorer Sport Trac, and then the Explorer sport my daughter s cruiser, less than halfway up the scale then through its big brother the Explorer, upwards past the mighty Expedition, and it culminates whew in the Excursion, a cruise-ship that makes my daughter s car look like a toy. In the ad the vehicles line up beneath an enticing expanse of green space, a golf course, with limitless open water beyond. But these monsters are less likely to expedite their owners outdoors than to fix them firmly to their desks, to induce exertion and exhaustion in those from whom exorbitant payments are exacted.