Big Vehicles Stagger Under the Weight of $4 Gas

A fully loaded Ford F-250 pickup truck is a whole lot of vehicle. It can tow a horse trailer with multiple horses. It comes with a DVD-based navigation system for the driver as well as a DVD player for passengers who are sitting in the extended cab.
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And how much does an F-250 set you back these days?

Try $100,000.

The F-250 is part of the first generation of mass-market vehicles — along with the Lincoln Navigator, Lexus LX 570 and a few others — to approach the six-figure mark. Now, if you walked into a showroom today and asked to see one of these trucks, the price tag wouldn’t be anywhere near $100,000. It would be much closer to $50,000.

But you don’t buy a vehicle to leave it in your garage. You buy it to drive it. So it makes sense to consider the full costs of ownership, which include insurance, interest, repairs, taxes and, of course, gasoline. If gas remains near $4 a gallon, as many analysts expect, a big vehicle like the F-250 will cost $100,000 for an owner who keeps it for a typical amount of time (five years) and drives it a typical amount (15,000 miles a year). The gas alone would cost about $30,000, up from about $10,000 in the 1990s.

No wonder, then, that Americans are changing their driving habits so quickly. With sales plummeting, General Motors said Tuesday that it would stop making pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles at four of its North American plants.

The company is also considering selling its Hummer brand, an emblem of the megavehicle. Rick Wagoner, G.M.’s chairman, explained the moves by saying that he thought the shift toward more efficient cars was “by and large, permanent.”

The unyielding reality is that price matters, enormously. That’s all you need to know about the car market these days. And it’s almost all you need to know about the debate over energy policy that has consumed the Senate this week.

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