Bay Area Trip Part Ia: To the Bloatmobile!

The rental vehicle from this trip is another story by itself. We were hauling three guys and a fair amount of gear, so I ordered Standard SUV Chevrolet Trailblazer or similar. I showed up, got my assignment, walked to spot J9, and… “Oh, you’ve got to be f’ing kidding.”


Yep… an Eddie Bauer Edition Ford Expedition. I went back to the desk to request something else.. unfortunately, the choices were a mini-van or cars… or waiting until they cleaned something more reasonable. So I wallowed out onto 101 in this beast.

I felt this strong wave of self-loathing every time that I got behind the wheel. I have confirmed that I have no wish whatsoever to drive one of these things. I have always been amazed by the clueless people who say, “Yeah, you SUV-haters are just too poor to afford one.” Um, what? You truly fail to understand the situation, don’t you? And for amusement, here’s a quote from a 2004 Malcolm Gladwell article on SUVs:

Bradsher brilliantly captures the mixture of bafflement and contempt that many auto executives feel toward the customers who buy their S.U.V.s. Fred J.Schaafsma,a top engineer for General Motors, says, “Sport-utility owners tend to be more like ‘I wonder how people view me,’ and are more willing to trade off flexibility or functionality to get that.” According to Bradsher, internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, selfcentered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills. 

Ford’s S.U.V. designers took their cues from seeing “fashionably dressed women wearing hiking boots or even work boots while walking through expensive malls.” Toyota’s top marketing executive in the United States, Bradsher writes, loves to tell the story of how at a focus group in Los Angeles “an elegant woman in the group said that she needed her full-sized Lexus LX 470 to drive up over the curb and onto lawns to park at large parties in Beverly Hills.” One of Ford’s senior marketing executives was even blunter: “The only time those S.U.V.s are going to be off-road is when they miss the driveway at 3 A.M.”

Parking this thing was an annoyance. Another thing to remark on: I was trying to fold down the third row of seats, and couldn’t find the pull tab to release them. Then I looked in the back of the car: they are power fold-down/up seats. Oy. Yep, people must be that lazy.



At one point, we drove to the Home Depot ¾ of a mile away in that SUV, and grabbed some McDonalds for lunch since we were pressed for time. Eww. I felt so quintessentially American from that experience.

Then refilling it before returning it to the airport was what I expected—12 gallons… for a half tank of fuel.


Man… I’ll be happy when gas prices start going up again. 


Huh... apparently, they are.

And rest assured, I gave Avis a 1 out of 5 for "Received requested vehicle."