Big SUVs need bigger garages
Lorraine Dillon couldn’t fit her enormous GMC Yukon SUV into her itty-bitty garage in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. So builder Al Shaheen made the entrance bigger.
“The garage had to be usable,” said Dillon, 72, whose husband drives a Chevrolet Suburban. “We didn’t have enough length to the driveway to park a car without blocking the sidewalk.” And she’s not alone. Builders see garage expansions as part of an ongoing trend.
“North American cars have never been bigger and they’ve never been taller. But they can’t get much wider,” said Eric Noble, a product development consultant and professor of vehicle technology at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena.
The dramatic consumer shift to pickups and large SUVs has created a niche business in garage remodelling as people try to make space for vehicles that might comfortably seat eight people and still have room for storage.
“We’ve moved from a sevenfoot garage door height to eightfoot. It’s difficult to fit them not only into garages but into parking spaces,” Noble said.
Dustin Collier, a builder based in Traverse City, Michigan, said his garage project clients include thirtysomethings but consist mostly of people in their 50s and 60s.
“Vehicles are just taller. You might be able to fit a Ford F-150 into a garage with nothing on its roof, but if you have lights or anything up there, it’s cutting things close,” he said. “Our busiest time is in the spring, when everybody gets their taxes back. We get calls in the fall, too, because people are trying to get ready for winter. I see a lot of four-door pickup trucks. They just don’t fit.”
Collier sees people spend $3,000 to $12,000 US “trying to make things right.”
While the eight-foot height is the new standard on garages, he builds as high as 12 feet now to accommodate the popular roof racks.
“People are all about their toys now,” Collier said. “The trucks are jacked up in the air with big tires.”
Improvements can run as high as $20,000 US for some.
“People are adding on to garages to make them wider, doing additions, adding rooms to the back and making garages longer,” said builder William Pachota. “If somebody has a truck with a cap on the back, and they lift it up, it can rip the back door off and bust the glass in it. You need clearance and peace of mind.”
“People are buying bigger vehicles. Families. All income levels,” Pachota said. “People really like a cathedral ceiling in the garage these days.”
He, too, sees a jump in business between Labour Day and Thanksgiving.
Architect Jon Sarkesian of Royal Oak, Michigan, has been designing renovations for three decades and he said the trend toward expansion has been steady and growing. A lot of families end up tearing down a detached garage if they can’t add space as needed. “People always bring up car size during the design process now.”
Even Erich Merkle, U.S. sales analyst for Ford Motor Co., said his dad can’t fit his F-150 into the garage, so he parks it in the driveway.
Attempts to fix the problem have left some in the field perplexed.
“I’ve actually had homeowners ask that the rear wall be extended out a few feet. Or I’ve seen it done where they just design the change so that the hood of the vehicle slips into a little cubby,” said Tim Kubinec, an architect based in Chesterfield.
“The cubby-hole enlargement for the hood of a vehicle surprises me. It’s just an odd way to accomplish the goal. Why not move the whole wall out? I don’t like being involved in projects that look goofy, but that’s sometimes what people want.”
After everything has been done to make garages larger, families have taken an additional step to maximize garage space by turning to garage interior organizers.
“We had a client who could barely fit a car in their garage, they had so much stuff. We were able to organize it where they didn’t have to get rid of anything and now they could fit their GMC truck and Acadia SUV in there,” said Tom Francis, owner of West Michigan Garage Interiors.
“We’ve been doing this 11 years. We used to see only people 55 years old and older. Now clients in their 40s are calling. Larger vehicles are obviously a trend,” he said.
Francis doesn’t do construction. He comes in to create space when everything else is done. He installs 16-inch deep cabinets instead of 24-inch deep cabinets more often than he used to — because of the larger vehicles in smaller garages, to allow car doors to open more easily without bumping the walls. “It’s just all about space. Cabinet space takes advantage of the walls. I mean, there’s a reason Ford is getting out of making cars. We see it.”
In August, the F-series pickup, long the best-selling vehicle in North America, grew 6.3 per cent to 81,839 units for the month. Overall, Ford’s SUVs saw a 20 per cent sales increase, while car sales declined 21 per cent.
The Ram truck and van brand enjoyed a 26.5 per cent sales increase.
Passenger cars dropped below 30 per cent of the market in August for the first month ever, according to Cox Automotive. A few years ago, they made up half of industry sales.
For perspective, one Ford F-150 rolls off the assembly line at the Dearborn Truck Plant every 52 seconds. The appetite for the Lincoln Navigator is insatiable, with buyers waiting months. And Fiat Chrysler is seeing strong demand for its new Ram trucks.
SUV sales are driving the luxury vehicle market toward a nearrecord year, according to a new report released by the car shopping analysts at Edmunds. Data reveal that 1.3 million new luxury vehicles were sold in the U.S. through August 2018, accounting for 11.4 per cent of the luxury sales market.
Edmunds car shopping analysts say SUVs are driving “massive growth” in the luxury car market for what is expected to be a “near-record year” of luxury vehicle sales. SUVs are hitting an all-time high of 62 per cent of luxury vehicle sales so far this year.
“Car buyers are willing to consider an SUV in pretty much any form they can get them, and the premium price tags SUVs command make for nice profit engines for automakers,” said Jeremy Acevedo, manager of industry analysis at Edmunds. “However, the flood of SUVs in the market is also driving up prices of new vehicles overall, blurring the lines in the eyes of car shoppers of what ‘luxury’ really means.”