A Monster in the Driveway

This is it. The big week. The really big week, if you know what I’m talking about, and I think you do. Good thing you’ve got some of those big cups for your coffee, or you’d be in big trouble, have to collapse into your big chair when the big screen flashed the big news. Because this one’s a biggie: The biggest passenger vehicle on the road is officially here.

How big is big? Big, baby. Imagine a car that’s twice as big as a Honda Civic. A car that’s 6 feet, 8 inches tall. A 4 1/2-ton monster that would be a monster truck, except that its interior has five phone outlets and more leather than an Italian furniture showroom. A car that would dwarf your house, unless you also have one of those really big monster houses. In which case it would just dwarf, oh, a barn.

At this point, you may suspect a bias against the Ford Excursion, the heralded new “King Kong” of sport utility vehicles which is to be publicly unveiled this week. You’re thinking, “Here we go, another whiny, disapproving, road-challenged wienie with another jabbering tirade about SUVs and how they’re unsafe and dirty, I’d like to flatten her like Gumby.” And that’s just if you were the mom in the big green Suburban last Thursday in the preschool parking lot.

But no. Listen, nobody admires a 10-mile-a-gallon load o’ cup holders more than yours truly. It’s just, well, doesn’t it seem that this bigness thing has gotten a bit disproportionate? First there were the big sneakers, then the Big Gulps, then the big tear-down McMansions with the “great rooms” and the big furniture that made everyone who sat on a couch look little. Now this. How big is big enough?

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Lest this be construed as envy, let there be full disclosure: We used to have a sport ute, and it was a big ‘un too. A GMC Suburban with a gas tank so big you had to set aside a half-hour just to swing by the filling station. The interior was so huge, we’d periodically misplace a kid or two.

We bought it because my husband’s cousin Steve had one, and my husband’s cousin Steve is extremely cool. If we too had been cool, we’d have remembered that, unlike Steve, we had a 45-minute commute to work which we’d be making in a vehicle that got about 12 miles to the gallon. Alas, we forgot that tidbit, along with those tight corners in the office parking garage.

We also forgot how much you worry about lawsuits when you’re driving a potential demolition derby. Or how cleaning a car that size is like cleaning another house. Nor did we realize that those big hubcaps would cast a hypnotic light when the street lights hit them; we couldn’t drive after dusk without small animals hurtling out of the blackness toward our tires.

Eventually, events conspired to persuade us to get rid of it. (First, the side got an $800 scratch when we tried to squeeze past a drive-through ATM, then the price of oil went up, to the point that we were paying more for gas than most people pay in rent.) We traded down to a station wagon that made up in mileage what we missed in coolness and bigness. Except for the cup holders, which really were terrific, we never looked back.

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But that’s a digression. We thought we were big-vehicle people, we couldn’t cut it, OK, move on. Drive and let drive. It’s not the big car, per se, but the general trend toward bigness everywhere that makes you wonder. Why bigness? Why now?

What are we shooting for with, say, these ever-bigger corporate mergers? What are we searching for in the halls of 35,000-square-foot homes? Why does the latte have to come in a cup the size of a soup bowl to warm us? Why do we roam the aisles of Restoration Hardware, lusting for easy “chairs” the size of love seats, with cushions so high that adult legs can’t touch the ground?

It is said that people who express themselves with out-sized accouterments are compensating for something. So what are we compensating for? What doubt is so big, in this prosperous time, that it takes a V-10 engine and 8,600 pounds of rip-roaring metal to dispel it?

Only King Kong knows for sure.

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Shawn Hubler’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.