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American Morning
The Big Question: What's the Hottest New Thing on Wheels?
Aired March 20, 2002 - 09:42 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: The Big Question this hour, what's the hottest new thing on wheels? Almost every automaker is pushing some kind of sport utility vehicle. Even Porsche, the standard bearer for high-performance cars, with the Cayenne. Then there's Mercedes-Benz, with its model of luxury, the G-500. And don't forget BMW. They are in the SUV game, too, riding high with the BMW X-5.
Also, believe it or not, the station wagon is coming back, but not as a car, as a "crossover" vehicle. What's that? Well, best we can tell, it fits somewhere in between a minivan and an SUV.
We're joined by Jean Jenning who is Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Good morning.
JEAN JENNING, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, "AUTOMOBILE MAGAZINE": Good morning. How are you?
WHITFIELD: I'm doing good.
Hard to believe, 12 years ago, the SUV came on board, the Ford Explorer one of the first ones, and now some 60 versions of SUVs and now we've got a new version of station wagons. What does it say about what Americans want out there? Obviously space.
JENNING: Well, I think Americans want room for their stuff. They want to be able to look out of a nice big piece of glass, and they want to sit up fairly high. They want their hips to be sort of in the position of sitting in a chair, and not with the knees around their ears, and I think that has a lot to do with the age of us all move a little bit upward.
WHITFIELD: Everybody used to frown at station wagons. Station wagons how uncool, you know, how suburbia like. And now it seems like all the cool folks want to sit in a station wagon.
JENNING: Well, if you think about it, Fredricka. All cars go through this sort of up and down. Station wagons were out and minivans where in. How uncool are minivans now? Gone up into pickup trucky sport utility era. Now we're getting out of that, as the whole category morphs all over the place. If you think about it you say 60 some in our "Automobile" magazines sport issue on the news stand now, I think we have 58 different sports utes, and we're covering everything from passenger car-like sport utes to high-performance sport utes.
WHITFIELD: And we're looking at the Chrysler Pacifica. That is pretty sporty-looking vehicle. All of them along the lines of luxury. Though these are not cheap rides.
JENNING: Well, some are cheap and some aren't cheap. But I think, frankly, people are tired of driving around in tree houses. They don't want to be camping in their cars anymore. Now they're looking for style. They're out of anti-style into style. Also looking at vehicles with better fuel economy. As long as gas is relatively inexpensive, people buy what they want. They're will not care about fuel economy.
WHITFIELD: Boy, oh, boy. Hard to believe Porsche will step away from the sporty two-seaters and introduce the Cayenne. What do you know about these vehicles.
JENNING: Well, the Cayenne is pretty interesting. The ground has been broken there by Mercedes-Benz with a very high performance sport ute, and by BMW with their X-5 also a high performance I call it a tall sports car. You drive it around, you almost fall on the ground, because you forget you're so high up in the air. Porsche dealers want something else to sell other than just two-passenger cars, high-performance cars.
WHITFIELD: And it would seem that all of these makers have to finally come to some agreement on what to call these vehicles. Are they hybrids? Are they crossovers? Are they sports tourers, sport utility wagons?
JENNING: We don't know what to call them anymore. We give awards every year. We give our all-star awards, and they're not just sport utes anymore, but they don't want you to call them station wagons.
WHITFIELD: And we're looking at the Mercedes G-500, likely to be a big seller, just because people like to have the Mercedes emblem, don't they?
JENNING: Well, that's actually a little bit of a dinosaur. That vehicle has been around. That is a real tree house, but it's a high- luxury treehouse.
WHITFIELD: But in the states.
JENNING: Yes, it's been on the gray market for over $100,000, and Mercedes decided to bring it in, because it has a lot of attraction. There won't be a lot of them sold. They won't pump a whole bunch of them out.
WHITFIELD: These vehicles soon to be on the market, some of them already from $20,000 to $100,000. Certainly the face of our rides on the roads certainly changing.
JENNING: That it is. WHITFIELD: All right, thanks very much, Jean Jennings from "Automobile Magazine." Thanks very much for the new look at the new rides we will be climbing into, or at least seeing on the roadways. Appreciate it.
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