At 9:30 on a September evening last fall, a gleaming black stretch limousine sat idling in front of Stern Hall, preparing to convey 16 students to a celebratory night on the town in San Jose. Fashioned exclusively for a luxury rental market, the vehicle had sumptuous leather seats, a bar stocked with champagne and a fancy stereo system. But what made it more popular than all the other limos in the fleet was the audacity of its profile—instead of the sleek, sinuous lines of a conventional limousine, this one had an imposing, square-jawed exterior that shrieked intimidation. It was a Hummer.
Evan Berger had been looking forward to this night for weeks, but not for the reasons one might assume. A senior majoring in American studies, he had just begun researching a thesis that would examine the mystique and document the impact of the revered, reviled Hummer. Although he was “slightly embarrassed” as he and his friends got into the limo, his ambivalence quickly faded. Over the next 2 1⁄2 hours, Berger began to realize why Hummers—a modified version of the Humvee military transport—have captivated the American imagination. “I enjoyed the extravagance. It made one feel good, almost blessed.”
Never mind that the vehicle was too large to fit into the drive-through lane at In-N-Out Burger, where the group stopped on the way back to campus. For a few hours, Berger and his friends were kings of the road. “It was a fun night, and it helped show me why expensive, unwieldy SUVs like the Hummer had become so popular among Americans,” Berger would later write in his thesis.
The first 70-plus pages of his paper detailed the safety and environmental drawbacks associated with SUVs and the Hummer in particular, and drew parallels between these gas-guzzlers and U.S. positions on the Kyoto Protocol and Middle East foreign policy. But in the end, the author sounded a cautionary note—luxury can seduce even the well-intentioned.
“Over the past few years, all of the doubts raised about the SUV’s safety and the frequent condemnations of its environmental effects have done nothing to blunt the SUV’s popularity,” he wrote. “I can see now why these appeals to reason have had such little effect; they certainly would have had no resonance among my friends and me as we were riding in the Hummer limo.”
Berger’s conclusion: “Americans, it seems to me, are loath to place their sense of shared responsibility ahead of their self-gratification.”
It’s an observation others have made in recent months. As concerns about global warming and the effects of oil consumption on U.S. foreign policy grow, so does the debate about what constitutes responsible car ownership. Is the type of car we buy an ethical decision? Recently, an initiative titled “What Would Jesus Drive?” encouraged Christians to be circumspect about their choice of automobile. Conversely, some SUV owners have responded to the backlash against their vehicles by suggesting that critics are impugning American principles such as personal liberty.
At Stanford, the debate has taken place in classrooms, in dorm lounges and in White Plaza, where a year ago a few dozen students demonstrated against SUVs— “axles of evil.” Later they took their protest to a Hummer dealership in Burlingame, Calif., where they brandished signs and shouted slogans, but did not damage the vehicles. (According to a report in the Stanford Daily, staff at the dealership tried to run off the students by tripping car alarms on the lot.)
“Choosing what car we drive or where we live, how much we consume, what job we have, etcetera, are all ethical decisions,” says dean for religious life Scotty McLennan. “So are national energy policy, regulatory standards for fuel efficiency, government incentives to develop alternative energy sources like solar power, commitment to the Kyoto accords, and much more.”
Stanford scholar Sarah Jain comes at the issue from a different angle. She wants students to understand Americans’ relationship with automobiles, and the forces that shaped a nation of drivers.
An assistant professor of cultural and social anthropology, Jain teaches Car Culture, a course designed to examine the automobile as a cultural object. It’s extremely popular—often oversubscribed, it has attracted as many as 100 students—and it’s widely praised, even by students who took the course primarily because they love cars. Jain says, “Occasionally a student will write in the course evaluation, ‘What is she talking about? Cars are totally cool.’ I’m not saying cars aren’t totally cool. I’m saying let’s look at them from all angles and see how they affect our lives.
“One of the first words most children learn is ‘car,’ ” she adds. “We’re conditioned to see cars as desirable things to own, but we don’t spend much time thinking about what they do to us.”
Jain avoids characterizing SUV owners or assigning blame, instead preferring to explore why people make the choices they do. Take a typical Bay Area family. “They want a small car to commute in because gas prices are high and parking is tight. But they want something bigger to go skiing in Tahoe, so they buy an SUV for the weekends. The irony is that buying that vehicle makes some sense at a personal level, but no sense at all on a cultural level because it consumes more gasoline and increases the safety risks for other drivers,” Jain says.
Jain notes that Americans’ dependence on cars really began in the boom years following World War II, when personal autos supplanted public transportation, suburban development created a commuter culture, and the government built thousands of miles of wide, easily navigable highways. The result: vast, sprawling metroplexes catering to cars. Today, Jain says, “if you live in the suburbs you’re physically handicapped without a car. How are you going to get to work?”
But the source of our collective infatuation with the automobile isn’t just utilitarian. Cars and trucks are marketed and widely embraced as icons representing sex, adventure, even patriotism.
“The auto industry has been very effective in constituting myths around cars,” she notes. Few images in the American consciousness are more powerful than those of a well-made car on an open road in a beautiful setting. They conjure romance, and appeal to our sense of independence. “Promoting cars as instruments of freedom is a great way of cutting off debate about the downsides.”
In the 1950s and ’60s, cars expressed the exuberance of a nation ready to party after the sacrifice and self-denial that had characterized the Depression years and World War II. And they were designed to appeal to men, who bought the vast majority of them. (Anthropologists have noted that some of the most beloved cars of the era—think ’57 Chevy—featured curvaceous fenders and buxom chrome bumpers.) Cars were no longer merely modes of transportation; they were also symbols of prosperity, masculinity and prowess. Jain points out that the old-fashioned drive-in restaurant was a classic example of how cars were used to amplify cultural norms that subordinated women. “Pretty girls in skirts coming out on skates to serve men.”
In the 1970s, a gas shortage momentarily stalled America’s love affair with cars. President Jimmy Carter pushed hard for conservation and better fuel economy and called the country’s oil consumption “a national security issue.” But the message didn’t stick. It didn’t help that many of the small cars built at the time were junk. Ugly, poorly built and unsafe, autos like the Pinto sabotaged efforts to promote a “smaller is better” campaign. “Compact” became synonymous with “cheap.”
SUVs sent the pendulum swinging the other way. Designers muscled up the exterior and put the driver high above the ground, literally looking down on other motorists. Jain believes this sense of being “high up” is an important feature of SUV popularity. In a time of insecurity and unease, the SUV seems like a safe haven, above it all.
That’s precisely why Nicole Miller, ’05, bought hers. She owns a Jeep Grand Cherokee, she says, because it makes her feel safe while surrounded by other large vehicles, especially when she’s driving back and forth between campus and her home in Los Angeles.
SUVs are relatively uncommon among students, which perhaps is why they tend to draw attention. Miller’s Jeep is no exception. “At school, it becomes a ‘friendmobile.’ My friends are always asking to borrow it, and they usually want me to drive when we go somewhere off campus,” she says.
Would Miller ever buy a Hummer? “No. Never. The practical benefits of an SUV disappear when you get something that big.”
Even among hulking SUVs, the Hummer stands out. The H1 is more than 7 feet wide and weighs 7,500 pounds. The H2, the Hummer’s smaller cousin, weighs half a ton more than a Chevy Suburban, its closest size rival. At best, it gets 11 miles per gallon in city driving. Despite its relatively small imprint on the American economy—of an estimated 205 million cars and trucks on the road, fewer than 100,000 are Hummers—it has become a cultural and political statement, lauded as a symbol of freedom and denounced as a sign of American excess.
SUV owner Kris Bonifas, ’05, has heard those arguments. In fact, he took Jain’s Car Culture course as a sophomore and “loved” it. But for him, a car purchase is based on personal taste, not public opinion. “I’m a big guy so I really need a lot of interior space,” says Bonifas, who is 6-foot-1 and weighs 235 pounds. “When I get my football buddies in a smaller vehicle, it breaks down pretty fast.”
He owned an H2 last year and was the target of abuse. “People gave me the finger a few times,” he recalls, but more disturbing to him were repeated acts of vandalism. “It was keyed twice, and people were always messings with the hitch. I understand why they did it, but it was disappointing just the same, seeing as I was on campus at the time.”
He sold the Hummer, but not because of the reaction from others. “It wasn’t very well built, actually. It was falling apart.” He replaced it with the car he drives now, a Mercedes G500. “I just love the SUVs, and I’ll probably always have one.”
The tension between choices that may be good for the individual and bad for society animates much of the conversation surrounding SUVs. The rhetoric is particularly high-pitched in the Bay Area, where neither the climate nor the terrain suggests a need for the SUV’s ruggedness, and where manufacturers of hybrid vehicles, like Toyota’s Prius, have found an eager market.
SUVs are a convenient target, Jain says, but they’re merely an extension “writ large” of a culture dominated by the automobile. She believes the backlash against SUVs expresses frustration about the flip side of the car culture—terrible traffic, lack of parking, long commutes, accidents and environmental harm. “It’s easy to place the blame on other individuals, especially when they appear to be making selfish choices. But the SUV debate is also an opportunity to really question the hegemony of the car in American culture.”
There is some evidence that the tide may be turning. A Harris poll conducted last spring showed that one of every six prospective car buyers had changed their preference because of rising gas prices. Sales of SUVs did not grow in the first few months of this year, despite dealer incentives. By contrast, sales of electric hybrids are expected to double this year.
If consumers like Nicole Miller are representative, the bloom is off the SUV. When she graduates, Miller hopes to switch to a vehicle on the other end of the spectrum—a Mini. “I’m tired of having such a big car.”
She says she might even consider a hybrid, with one caveat. “They have to make them look better.”
Kevin Cool is the former executive editor of Stanford.
