I don't think it will be. What I see these days is a lot of new cars coming out CLAIMING to be SUV's, thus trucks, thus escaped from CAFE. The problem is that they are getting smaller and smaller!
A SUV to me is something like a Ford Explorer. It is NOT like that hideous Outback toy from Subaru. If you have to use a step ladder to get into the vehicle it's a SUV. If you can step into it from the curb it's a hatchback descendent.
I think the American public is getting sick of the SUV. The cost of gas is too high for vehicles with effective MPG of 20. If this is Chrysler's strategy it's going to fail.
One of the things that people always miss about the American car market is that because it includes a far larger slice of middle clbutt owners than most markets, it works kind of like in reverse.
If you want to see what is going to be a popular new car seller in 3 years, look at what are the hot used cars now. People who are regular used car buyers, since they don't have the kind of money invested in their vehicles that a new car buyer does, they can move very quickly to ditch an unpopular vehicle in response to changing markets. Thus when the gas prices started rising the first people that dumped SUV's on the used market were the people who had got them used to begin with. They could afford to sell a SUV for $5K that they had bought a few years earlier for $8K simply because that's not a lot of money. And what are they buying like candy to replace them? Accords and Civics and poo like that. In other words, all that nice legroom and space in the SUV was just jolly when gas was 1-2 the cost it is now, a few years ago. But today, gas has doubled, the price of the huffing big tires needed for the SUV has gone up, etc. etc.
The new car owners of course all want the same thing the used car owners are buying, small cars that are cheap to run. But they can't sell out of their existing Explorers and such until these depreciate enough so the owners won't lose their shirts. And what the automakers are bring out today they had on the drawing boards 2 years ago, when the SUV was still popular.
Ted
