Out With the Old

The baby boom generation is out, Generation X and Y are in, and the automobile industry has finally latched on to a truth that the clothing, music and restaurant industries have known for years: Mainstream doesn’t cut it.

There’s a youth movement in autodom, with Toyota and Ford most aggressively selling themselves to the under-40 set, but the key is to build catchy, youth-oriented products and then let the market sort out the buyers. Youth, after all, is a state of mind, and a 60-year-old can be just as attracted as an 18-year-old to a new Toyota Echo or Ford Focus.

Just look at what over-40 buyers did for the truck market that was once monopolized by mini-pickup-driving teens and twentysomethings.

And light trucks--pickups, sport-utility vehicles and even minivans--continue to hold on to half the market even as they too are diced and sliced in all new ways in the industry’s continuing effort to put a new vehicle or two in every garage.

So as auto makers begin stuffing dealers’ showrooms with their

offerings for the 2000 model year, the big news is that the market is getting more niche-oriented and the industry is paying attention again to performance as well as pollution issues, to style as well as safety, to comfort and utility instead of conformity.

“This is a pivotal year in terms of the old thinking giving way to the new thinking in the industry,” said George Peterson, president of AutoPacific Inc., a Tustin market research firm. “We are starting to see the design philosophy that took us to smaller and narrower cars turn around. Cars are being redefined to offer more interior room, more visibility, easier entry and exit. They don’t push that aerodynamic envelope so hard now.”

Consumers can be forgiven for being confused: The ‘00s offer a head-scratching range of choices, from the ecologically friendly, 70-mile-per-gallon, ultra-low-emissions Honda Insight with its tandem gasoline and electric motors, to the 10-mpg Ford Excursion, the largest noncommercial passenger vehicle ever at almost 19 feet long and 3 1/4 tons.

J Mays, Ford Motor Co.’s outspoken vice president for design, vowed after he took the job last year that auto makers would no longer be slavishly copying one another in fear of being seen as unusual or out of step. Individuality--a drive to establish distinctive images for the hundreds of models of cars and trucks now available--is the new watchword, he said.

And, a year later, it is easy to see that his pronouncement was right on, says industry analyst Wesley Brown of Nextrend, a Thousand Oaks automotive consulting firm.

“All of the car manufacturers are placing much more focus on lifestyle issues” as they develop vehicles--and marketing plans--for the new century, Brown said.

That’s even true in the once-plebeian truck market, in which the new crop offers such disparate choices as the Xterra, Nissan’s back-to-basics SUV (which even comes with neoprene seat covers for those addicted to water sports but reluctant to soak their seats after every swim), and BMW’s X5, a four-wheel-drive “sport-activity vehicle” that the German performance-car builder says will come with all the handling, acceleration and luxury trim of a traditional Beemer.

Auto makers “are looking instead at attitude, lifestyle, personalities and behavior trends--and they are fashioning the new vehicles to fit all those niche lifestyles,” Brown said.

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Youth--even the state-of-mind kind--likes things edgy. Reflecting that in the 2000 model offerings “is a renewed excitement about sporty vehicles,” said Jeff Schuster, head of North American auto market forecasting for J.D. Power & Associates, the Agoura Hills-based market research firm.

So along with side-mounted air bags and electronic eyes that warn us when we’re backing into a trash can--or another vehicle--many of the new crop of ’00 models offer more responsive handling and more powerful engines than their predecessors, said Dean Benjamin, whose AutoSource Inc. in Manhattan Beach tracks the industry’s offerings model by model.

Nearly 30 models, including two each from General Motors’ Pontiac and Buick brands, even provide superchargers as standard or optional equipment. And while their image is Ricky Racer, superchargers--long popular in Europe--actually help auto makers get more power from smaller, less-polluting engines, thus benefiting the environment.

Cars that take their styling cues from cutting-edge concepts penned in studios in Frankfurt, London and Newport Beach--vehicles such as the Audi TT, the Ford Focus and the redesigned Toyota Celica--are supplanting those from the generic teardrop-jellybean school of design-by-wind-tunnel (think Taurus and Camry) that for years marked the basic offerings from Detroit and Japan.

Volkswagen, a brand long popular with younger buyers, has seen its sales soar 40% so far this year on the strength of its refusal to limit itself to conventional demographic thinking.

“They don’t chase age or income; they go after attitude,” Nextrend’s Brown said of the Germans and their master marketers. “If you see one of their ads and are struck by it and the car it features, then you go after that car. It’s like ads for the Gap. They don’t care who you are or what your job is or how old you are. You either get it, and buy their khakis, or you don’t.”

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The new crop of cars and trucks also offers consumers an unprecedented level of technical, design and manufacturing excellence.

“The bad cars are gone,” said David Cole, head of the University of Michigan’s Office for the Study of Automotive Transportation. “We are looking at much higher levels of execution in the products being introduced this year than ever before.”

A potential downside is that while cars and trucks cost a bit less on average than they did three years ago--thanks to a healthy competitive market and improved manufacturing practices--the average is still above $20,000.

Monthly car payments of $375 or more--that’s 30 cents a mile for a vehicle driven 15,000 a year--are the norm. The typical new-vehicle buyer needs an annual income of $50,000 to successfully budget for housing, food, medical and transportation costs, said David Healy, an auto industry analyst with brokerage Burnham Securities Inc.

Some analysts suggest that the industry’s next big initiative might have to be a search for ways to make affordable to the youth market all the cars and trucks they are creating to attract it.

But there are already new ’00 models that can be had for less than $15,000, including one, the Echo, with a starting price that makes it, just barely, Toyota’s first sub-$10,000 car in five years.

Still, Healy and others say there are no signs that the industry is pricing itself out of business.

The federal government’s consumer price index shows that new-vehicle prices have dropped about 6.8% since 1996. And with manufacturers still offering subsidized loans as low as 2.9%, buying a car has been easy this year--so easy, in fact, that a record 17.5 million consumers are expected to do so by Dec. 31.

And even though the typical new car or truck today has more standard features than ever--onetime luxury items such as power windows, power door locks and anti-lock braking come as part of the package on the $9,000 Daewoo Lanos subcompact from South Korea, for example--customers are loading them with more options than ever.

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There are affordable new cars even among the luxury and near-luxury brands (“affordable” being a relative term). Volvo Cars, now a part of the Ford family, has launched a new 40-Series line with prices starting at just under $24,000.

At the other end of the scale, Ford’s Euro-styled Focus is one of the new year’s most talked-about vehicles because it marks the brand’s first serious entry in the young-or-youthful sweepstakes. It starts at about $12,500.

For those whose budgets don’t stretch to new vehicles, especially SUVs and larger “family” and luxury sedans, the market these days offers a wide selection of low-mileage, late-model used cars, often vehicles that have been returned to the dealer after completing six months’ service with a rental company or finishing a two- to three-year lease term.

“These are very, very acceptable vehicles, with factory warranties and dealer service,” said Dan Gorrell, vice president of Strategic Vision, a San Diego automotive market research firm. “And they’re priced so that a buyer who can’t get a new car can afford a 2-year-old model or can step up from an entry-level new car to a larger, more luxurious vehicle that’s only a few years old.”

Used cars and trucks, in fact, outsell new models about 3 to 1, and industry watchers say they expect sales of 45 million used vehicles this year. About 15 million of them will be sold by new-car dealerships, at an average price of $12,180, according to CNW Marketing/Research in Bandon, Ore.

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For those whose focus is on the new-vehicle market, trucks are making a lot of the Y2K news.

Ford has already introduced the Excursion--the largest production SUV ever--and the rumor mill has General Motors looking at the wisdom of an extra-length Suburban to fight it (a rumor GM denies).

BMW’s X5 is an example of what industry watchers call “crossovers,” vehicles that mix aspects of two or more branches of the automotive family. Sport-utility vehicles are the most fertile ground for crossovers because auto makers can build SUV-styled bodies on passenger car platforms and give buyers a product that satisfies the need to look cool while providing the more comfortable ride and handling of a traditional sedan.

There’s a Ford F-150 SuperCrew pickup, technically a 2001 model, on tap for the first quarter of 2000. It offers a shortened bed to make room for a full-size four-door body (the typical “extended cab” has four doors and a full back seat, but the doors are about half the normal width and rear-seat legroom is half-size as well). The SuperCrew is to be followed by a luxury version, the Navigator-based Lincoln Blackwood, in 2001.

And GM doesn’t deny that it is working on similar products for its Chevrolet and Cadillac divisions, meaning that soon there will be Caddy pickups fighting for space with Lincoln pickups in the parking lot of the local country club--speaking of ignoring traditional demographics and grabbing for the brass ring.

Dodge is introducing a four-door “crew cab” version of its Dakota mini-pickup--a direct response to Nissan’s introduction earlier this year of its 2000 Frontier Crew Cab: Both have five-passenger seating with normal-size doors front and rear, but they offer shortened beds and are banking on buyers who like the truck look but really don’t need to carry full 4-foot-by-8-foot sheets of plywood on a regular basis.

In another crossover category, the minivan becomes positively cool with Chrysler’s PT Cruiser, a cross between a 1940s delivery truck, a four-door sedan and a minivan, built on the Neon compact platform.

On the car front, the spotlight splits between hybrid power plants, like that offered by Honda’s Insight (to be followed by Toyota’s Prius as a 2001 model), and what analyst Gorrell calls the drive to “make cars into supercars so they can compete with the truck-based products.”

That mix includes luxury products such as the new Lincoln LS sedan, a crop of convertibles that will start with Honda’s high-tech S2000 (to be followed by new Toyota and BMW roadsters), mid-range sedans like Nissan’s new Maxima and starter cars like the Ford Focus.

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And spread throughout the market are a host of safety and technology advances that let industry boosters brag that the worst new cars of 2000 are better than the best new cars of 1980:

* DaimlerChrysler has outfitted its luxury Mercedes-Benz CL coupe with the industry’s first active suspension system on a production car. ABC--for active body control--uses electronic sensors and hydraulic, electronic and mechanical parts to independently level each of the four corners of the car as needed during maneuvers ranging from acceleration to cornering to panic braking.

Thirteen sensors monitor the vehicle’s body movement and level, supplying data to a computer 100 times each second. The computer processes the information and signals hydraulic servomotors perched atop each of the car’s four steel coil springs. The servos apply the proper amount of pressure to the springs to regulate their action in relation to the body movement the system is trying to dampen.

* There are massaging seats, heated seats and ventilated seats, and now Lincoln is introducing climate-controlled seats that use a fan in the seat bottom to push heated or cooled air up through the interior and onto the occupant’s posterior--and upper and lower back--through perforations in the upholstery.

The seats have several temperature settings. The air is passed over a pair of thermoelectric wafers that absorb ambient heat or release heat into the airflow as needed to cool or warm.

* Hot rodders have known for years that a free-flowing exhaust system is worth a few extra horsepower. But conventional auto makers have had to cope with demands, from consumers and regulators, for quiet. So most factory-supplied mufflers actually choke the engine a bit. Now Nissan has come up with a tricky variable-flow muffler that gives five extra horsepower to the V-6-powered Maxima and four-cylinder Infiniti G20 and, by using a larger-diameter system, 10 extra horses to the V-6 Infiniti I30.

The system uses a single collector pipe to funnel exhaust gases from the engine to the muffler, which is outfitted with two tailpipes. At low speeds, a valve keeps one of the tailpipes blocked off, so all of the exhaust has to exit through one pipe. But at higher speeds, the valve opens and the exhaust flow is divided evenly between both tailpipes, reducing back pressure on the engine by up to 40% to increase horsepower.

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As has become standard during the last decade, the model year no longer begins in October. Dozens of 2000 models have already been slipped into the retail stream, some as early as last spring, and by the time the last of them are in showrooms next spring, they will be competing in a market that will also feature a handful of 2001 models.

Times staff writer John O’Dell can be reached at john.odell@latimes.com.

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From A to V

Brand by brand, from Acura to Volvo, we catalog the 2000 model year. W4-6