The advertising slogan for the Hummer is: "Like Nothing Else."
Which is also an apt description for the fuel price surge that has crashed the market for extra-heavy consumer vehicles. The physics and economics are simple. Lugging around a lot of iron requires a lot of fuel. At $4 per gallon, the fuel bills start to pinch hard and household solvency trumps a cool image every day of the week.
The Hummer was the most extravagant manifestation of Detroit's most recent business model, which was to turn dowdy trucks into ultra-hip, must-have wheels. Car guys know that people don't buy cars, they buy image. Detroit's car guys ingeniously pushed a lot of emotional buttons when they marketed Hummers and other slick SUVs, which convey an aura of dominance and allow their owners to show the world who's the toughest and coolest of them all.
Throughout most of the 1990s and the first part of this decade, the model worked great. Sales of flashy SUVs and pickups returned handsome profits. Economy car product lines were largely a nuisance to the Big Three, which built them largely to keep the companies in compliance with CAFE standards.
Unfortunately for Detroit, its business model was based on a premise that cheap oil would be available indefinitely. Detroit was slow off the mark when warning signals began flashing yellow, then red, that the era of cheap oil was drawing to a close.
Reality has arrived in the Motor City. ...
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