In a way, the car market is a lot like nature. There are places on this earth that, depending on the season, provide abundant wealth, in the form of food and water, for as many residents who wish to live there. Those are the good times. Then the days grow a little longer and the sun a bit hotter, the grass stops growing and the pools slowly evaporate. Some relocate to more fruitful locals, others stay to defend their deteriorating turf, while the rest simply die off. You’ve seen images on the Discovery Channel of fish flopping in shallow, isolated puddles, or crocodiles fighting over the last bit of moist mud – those are the not-so-good times. Those are the times large SUV retailers are going through right now. After a summer of record fuel prices and unprecedented natural disasters, sales of big American SUVs took a nosedive recently, falling between 20 and 25 percent compared with last year, though the Toyota Sequoia took the cake with a 46-percent decline in just one month. Hybrids are continuing to gain in performance and popularity, and those high gas prices haven’t receded – even though big oil companies are reaping terrific profits. Indeed, now is not necessarily a good time to be introducing a redesigned lineup of V8-powered big trucks. Unfortunately, seeing into the future isn’t an attribute of car companies, so they must continue to take gambles, hoping that the cars they design today will be desirable when they hit the lots two or three years (or more) from now. That’s just the problem GM ran into with its redesigned trucks, including this new 2007 GMC Yukon. Consider that GMC designers were benchmarking the Audi A4 back in 2002 for the 2007 Yukon’s interior, and you get a sense of how long the automotive design and engineering process can take. So, much of the new 2007 GMC Yukon took shape before skyrocketing gas prices and the subsequent shift to hybrids and more efficient smaller cars occurred. Should GM have been prepared with its own thrifty lineup, just as its import competitors were? We’ll leave that one for another time. In reality, people are still buying large SUVs, just not as many of them. And for those buyers, the 2007 GMC Yukon has a lot to offer. Its V8 engines are more powerful, the frame has been stiffened, overall styling is much cleaner, and attention to material and build quality has supposedly improved.
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