Loyal buyers await GM’s new SUVs
STERLING HEIGHTS, Mich. — The big SUV rolls on.
Five years ago, when gas hit $4 per gallon, auto industry analysts boldly predicted that enormous SUVs would vanish like the automobile tail fin.
On Thursday, General Motors unveiled a completely redesigned lineup of its truck-based SUVs, three-ton behemoths that are still popular with drivers hauling around boats, campers and large families, or who like to sit high or feel safer in a heavy vehicle. The 2015 Chevrolet Tahoe and Suburban, GMC Yukon and Cadillac Escalade will hit showrooms in either late winter or early spring.
“There are some people, especially in our market, who want a product in that segment,” says Ed Williamson, part-owner of two GMC and Cadillac dealerships near Miami, where people often use the V8-powered SUVs to tow boats to the ocean.
In recent years, buyers have flocked to crossovers, which are carbased sport utilities that are easier to drive, carry just as many people and get better gas mileage. Yet there’s still a lucrative U.S. market for the truckbased SUVs, and GM controls more than 70 percent of it.
Americans bought more than 132,000 big SUVs from GM from January through August, compared with around 114,000 in the same period a year ago, even though the sticker price can top $50,000 and a fill-up can cost close to $100. With gas mileage around 17 mpg in city and highway driving, those fill-ups come more often than with many other vehicles.
GM executives aren’t sure if this generation of SUVs will be its last. Government pollution limits and stricter fueleconomy requirements in the future could force the company’s hand eventual- ly. But for now, the business case for updating the SUVs makes perfect sense to GM.
They sell to highincome households for an average of $47,000 each, about $20,000 above last year’s average price of a new vehicle in the U.S. Analysts say GM makes at least $10,000 per SUV.
GM had already designed new engines, transmissions and suspensions for its full-size pickup trucks.
Those will be used in the SUVs. All it took was a minimal amount of engineering to make the SUV bodies a little sleeker, update the interiors and add third-row seats that fold into the floor.
GM says the new models will be more efficient than the current ones. Actual mileage won’t be announced until a later date.
The company unveiled the Chevy and GMC models Thursday, with the Cadillac to follow. No prices were announced.