Never go full glam.

 If you are younger or more musically discriminating or just uninterested in anything 80’s, you wouldn’t have heard of this term called glam metal. 

And instead of burying you with a trash heap of words to describe this car crash of a musico-sartorial movement, please stare at the below image - overexposure might burn your retinas and kill some grey cells. 

Potted history: somewhere in the early eighties, Van Halen and Motley Crue were putting out good music. But people were more interested in their fashion than the guitar solos and good song writing. 

One thing led to another, music was kicked out of the car and had to take a cab to the beauty salon. This epidemic of hair spray is what eventually came to be known as glam metal. 

This music was so popular that other music went underground. Many squillions of dollars were made. 

Most of it - erm, almost all of it was utter garbage. Because it had nothing to do with good music. 

If metal music has a foundational trauma in its history, it is glam metal. Trust me, it was difficult to even write this. 

I wanted to use this movement as an analogy - to address a car buying habit that is following something similar. The rise of the Sport Utility Vehicle (SUV).

SUV’s came from military vehicles - roughly speaking. The idea was to make cars rough and ready to take any terrain. There was enough interest that civilian models were made - think early Toyota Land Cruisers, Willys Jeep, Mercedes Benz G-wagon. 

Fair enough. In combination with low fuel prices, people wanting to avoid the minivan-suburban image and growing life expectancies, SUV’s went from a niche to a booming market. 

The companies saw the trend and got their grubby hands on the concept. Zeitgeist.

                                    

From a niche market, to essentially every car being sold in the US these days. 

So now you have many many SUV’s - small and big. Tall and less tall. 5 and 7 seaters. Bulky and bulkier. Hybrid and ICE and EV. 

In the process, SUV’s practically killed off the sedan, hatchback and minivan. And created a whole army of brick faced unrecognizable facsimiles that even the manufacturer wouldn’t be able to tell apart. 

Of course, there are good ones here and there - but the vast majority are unengaging, gas guzzling, tire and brake and tarmac chewing phatboy road cloggers driven by people who are uninterested in cars and think that the arrival of a new baby has to be celebrated by a buying an SUV. 

And the car enthusiasts, and small car buyers and the true eco-conscious were left stranded or bankrupted. 

Many squillions of dollars were made.

In short, the SUV went full glam. And just like glam, eventually, it will crash, burn and be denounced.