TALES FROM THE FREEWAY : Rough Riders : Ready for Rhino in 4-Wheel Drive, but Don’t Scuff the Paint
Admit it. You’ve seen the commercials. The ones where the Jeep Cherokee goes bashing through the rushing streams and up the impossibly steep hills with abandon.
There you are, perfectly content. The most macho thing you’ve thought about all day is whether to nuke some nachos in the microwave during the pregame show or after the fifth inning. But suddenly, that commercial plays, and you’re dreaming of the great outdoors, and being a guy. You think you’re in a Hemingway novel. You get this urge to drink, hit another guy on the shoulder and burp. You want to play with power tools. You want to eat burned red meat cooked over an open fire, preferably meat you’ve just shot while wearing denim and flannel and letting your beard grow.
So what do you do? You go out and buy a new Cherokee, take it up a dirt lane for a few miles, and spend the rest of the vehicle’s life commuting to work on the freeway.
You’re not alone.
Bob Fleeger of Pacific Jeep/Eagle in Oceanside says his dealership sells 40 Cherokees per month for around $16,000 each (after the extras are added).
And it’s not just Jeep. According to salesman Joe Van Horn, Encinitas Ford sells about 150 Ford Broncos a year at a price of around $20,000. But, said Van Horn, the hottest-selling four-wheel-drive vehicle on his lot is the new Explorer. Encinitas Ford can’t keep any on the lot, he said, because customers are buying them before they can even be prepared for showing.
What do buyers use these rugged four-wheel-drive vehicles for?
“They just use them to commute back and forth--like a family vehicle,” Van Horn said.
Look around. The car in the next lane heading for Orange County or down to San Diego stands a good chance of being a Bronco, or an Explorer, or a Cherokee, or maybe even one of those bizarre pickups jacked to Wilt Chamberlin height and outfitted with ballooning tires more suited to crushing cars than cruising the freeways.
The Range Rover is the height of this trend toward adventure for sale. Advertisements show a Range Rover out on the African veld being charged by a huge rhino. Forget that it’s been a long time since most San Diegans have seen a charging rhino on Interstate 5, this is pretty heady stuff.
“It goes back to the British colonial era,” said Jim Allen, the North American correspondent for Land Rover Owner Magazine. (Yes, they’ve got their own magazine.) Indeed, the British-made car screams old England. The brochures are festooned with the coats of arms of Queen Elizabeth, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen Mother and the Prince of Wales. Elizabeth, Phillip, the Queen Mum, and Charles have all given appointments to the Rover Group. The idea is to make a buyer feel a little like a Kenyan plantation owner from the old days.
Allen, who is also a mechanic at Pioneer Centers, the Range Rover dealership in San Diego County, likens buying a Range Rover to shopping at Banana Republic. You may never get to Africa, but it’s nice to be dressed for it.
Range Rovers, however, are just a bit more expensive than your basic safari vest. A Rover with the extra goodies included will run you nearly $50,000. According to Allen, that puts Range Rovers in the class of a “gentleman’s car.”
So why not a Mercedes or BMW or Porsche 944, all of which could be had for about the same price or even less? According to Allen, the cars are bought by “people with money because they are practical yet trendy. A lot of them don’t ever see the dirt. . . . That’s unfortunate, because it is one of the most capable off-road vehicles in the world.”
Gordon Bartow, a 53-year-old distributor of orthopedic implants who lives in Rancho Santa Fe, likes the image his Range Rover gives him.
“I am kind of a military history buff, and they had one in British green,” he said. “That spiffed up my interest, and I got one. They call it Gen. Patton Green.”
Bartow actually does take his car off road once in a while, but admits that the Rover spends most of its time on pavement. Still, he argued, the Rover gives him something else.
“I think it brings the romance into it,” he said. “I’ve got a rhino guard on the front of mine. I haven’t encountered any rhinos, but I’m ready for one. It is a fantasy car. Just because I go to work in a suit and a tie doesn’t mean I can’t think about other things.”
Perhaps anticipating that a Range Rover buyer will find himself all dressed up with no place to go, Pioneer Centers arranges off-road excursions for its buyers and trains them in the rudiments of dirt driving.
John Riddle, a 43-year-old Fairbanks Ranch real estate salesman, avoids taking his off-road vehicle on these adventures because “the cars can get beaten up pretty good and I don’t want any scratches or dings. I take good care of my car.”
Just one look at the Range Rover, and you instantly suspect that, even though it can go off road, the manufacturer doesn’t really expect you to rough it. There are all those colorful paint jobs like Beluga Black and Portofino Red. Then there’s the deluxe model with air conditioning, cassette deck, hidden player, seven speakers, carpet, sunroof, and cushy leather seats.
The main difference between the suburban and jungle vehicles may be the state of mind in which they let their owners travel.
The would-be safari types can imagine as they drive comfortably over California 78 or float down Interstate 15 that they are being chased by a pack of ravenous hyenas, not a sputtering line of bored commuters.