Pity the poor minivan.
It hauls the family on vacations, never complaining.
Carries the kids to school and soccer practice.
Ever ready for a spontaneous trip to the hardware store, but does it get any respect? Nope.
It gets called names.
"Loser cruiser."
"Road slug."
Well, if you make minivans, you can get mad. Or like Toyota, you can embrace the situation with a tongue-in-cheek rap -- “The Swagger Wagon” sung by an unhip, white, yuppie, suburban couple, with their two kids jammin' to the beat, next to a Sienna minivan.
"We rock the SE not the SUV, and it's true if I were you I'd be jealous of me, in the swagger wagon, yeah, the swagger wagon, I got the pride in my ride in the swagger wagon...."
Chrysler invented the minivan 27 years ago. But after being wildly popular for years, the segment has lost customers, first to SUVS, then to crossovers.
The people who design minivans are the first to admit they’re fighting an image problem. And they’re doing something about it. Chrysler has an optional all-black leather interior it nicknamed the “Man Van. “ All four of the biggest players – Honda, Chrysler, Toyota and Nissan – got minivan makeovers this year. There’s more sculpting, more chrome, more creased sheet metal. Even jaunty little fins. Sage Marie is with Honda.
"If you think of what makes a sports car compelling, it’s that its low and wide, that's what makes it emotionally exciting. So from a styling standpoint we tried to do that with the Odyssey."
In your FACE, sports car owners. And cue another tongue-in-cheek song about minivans, this time a Beach Boys-style parody by the Austin Lounge Lizards.
"Hey, little minivan, we're going to the grocery store!/She's got an automatic tranny with overdrive and the radio's tuned to Magic 95/ She gets 30 miles on a gallon of gas and I can schlep all the girls to gymnastics class/Hey little minivan, we're goin' to the children's museum!"
Well, upping the cool factor may help. But people really buy minivans for comfort, convenience, and practicality. The sliding doors, all that space. And the seats.
Minivan designers take fierce pride in their seating configurations. Honda’s Odyssey has a second row middle seat you can slide really close to the front seat. That puts the baby within arm’s reach of a parent. For Chrysler, the bragging point is “Stow and Go seats,” which, in a matter of a few seconds, can be neatly folded and pushed into a compartment in the floor.
Fold all the seats down and there’s enough room for a refrigerator or two. But one company thinks some customers could be willing to downsize a little, especially as gas hovers around $4.00 a gallon. Ford Motor Company’s new small people-mover, the C-Max, will seat seven. It will have sliding doors. But Ford’s Paul Anderson says it will get car-like fuel economy. Just don’t call it a minivan.
"It’s a multi-activity vehicle," says Anderson firmly. "That's what it's called in Europe, which is where it was first introduced."
So, move over SUV. Here comes the MAV.
But other companies think that lots of people will still want all that room. Chrysler's Ben Winter says in the end, people who want a minivan will buy it, no matter what it’s called. He knows people who have owned seven or eight minivans, as their families add kids, pets, hobbies, and sports. Winter says those same people often keep their minivans long into retirement, because they're easy to get into, and you can go anywhere in them.
"That’s why minivans continue to remain popular," says Winter. "Despite many people predicting for many years that, aw, the segment’s dying, the segment’s dying. It’s not."
And with Gen X and Gen Y starting families, many could find themselves doing something once unthinkable. Driving a minivan -- just like their parents did.
