SUVs

In a recent column, the Boston Globe takes Toyota to task for selling the Sequoia, a full-size SUV. Their complaint, essentially, is that Toyota is encouraging its customers' bad behavior:

“...the company remains happy to profit off Americans who cannot look past their hood ornament.”

As much I think most large SUVs are unnecessary, I am with Toyota 110% on this one. Last time I checked, Toyota, along with thousands of other corporations, was in the business of selling product at a profit. So if the customers will buy the Sequoia, Toyota will sell the Sequoia. It's a no-brainer.

To their credit, Toyota did respond, though their response was far more meek that it could have been. It appeared in the company's official blog on their website, read presumably by people who are already fans of the brand or owners of its products. Why not reply in the very paper that published the original attack? As an op-ed perhaps, or at least a letter to the editor? If the Globe has any journalistic integrity left, they would publish it in a second. But I digress. Eventually, after criticizing Derrick Jackson, the author of the original article, for lapses in fact checking (trivial in the grand scheme of things), and praising some of their fuel-efficient models (also irrelevant to the main point), they do eventually get to the meat of the question:

“...how can Toyota be responsible to its stockholders (to whom it is compelled by both law and by ethics to be responsible), and to its customers, if it fails to offer such vehicles [as the Sequoia]?”

and eventually, almost all the way at the end:

“Toyota’s position is that people should make their own decisions about what they drive. It’s our job to provide them with the best choices possible, which is precisely what we’re doing.”

Thank you. Amazing that this still needs spelling out, isn't it?

What is Jackson trying to argue here, exactly? As far as I can see, it is that companies like Toyota should be dictating what consumers buy by offering only those products. That, not to put too fine a point on it, is preposterous. See above – Toyota is not in the nanny or moral righteousness business. They are in the business of selling cars. But maybe something more sinister is going on here. Whenever the question of fuel economy and the wastefulness of SUVs comes up, the discussion turns very quickly to the proposals, currently before Congress, to revise government fuel economy standards. Jackson, needless to say, if wholly in favor. So is he really saying that if companies don't dictate what people buy, the government should do it, even if it is done indirectly, by legislating what the companies sell? A nanny state, one that purports to know what's good for its constituents and require, by law, that they behave in accordance with their own moral standards? Do I need to remind him that in a world where people aren't free to buy a giant SUV, he probably would not be free to write about it?