He does a lot of bad weather driving over a 9000 foot mountain pass, and he realizes now that [[Subaru] performance beats stereotypes and marketing. I don’t think we could have put him in a safer vehicle for twice what we paid for it new.
In 1997 I bought a used Ford Taurus station wagon for my kids to drive to school. My son (16 at the time) hit a patch of wet leaves at 15 mph going around a corner, hit a big ol' maple tree, and that POS Ford crumpled up like an empty Budweiser can. I did some research and confirmed that that car was a known unsafe POS, and if I wanted my kids to be as safe as possible on the ch!tty ice/wet roads of Wisconsin, I needed to buy a Volvo or a Subaru. Those were the two safest cars on the road at the time. I bought a used 1994 Subaru Legacy wagon with 66,000 miles on it.
I sold that Legacy wagon 10 years later with over 500K miles and virtually no money/work on it other than routine maintenance. Since then my kids and I have owned 4 more Subaru's, and all of them have been solid, reliable cars that perform on snow & ice better than 95% of the cars on the road.
I don't drive one now simply because we have snow & ice in this part of Texas exactly 1.428 days per year.
And as for penis-extenders, er, I mean, pickup trucks... Yes, I drive a pickup, and I use the sumbitch, but if I didn't live out here in the middle of BFE I wouldn't drive a pickup. I could get more use out of a Subaru Forester and a utility trailer and save a couple thousand dollars a year on fuel costs.
Most of the folks who "need" a pickup truck, don't. Pickups perform horribly on snow & ice, they get lousy gas mileage, and they don't ride for ch!tt compared to the average sedan. Not to mention that NTSB stats show that a pickup is much more dangerous to its occupants in a wreck than a sedan or minivan, more prone to roll over, and with less side impact protection.
Everybody insists they "need" four-wheel-drive, but if you look at the stats, most 4WD pickups never leave pavement, not even once! And if you look at the honest use of pickups for hauling stuff (and I'm talking about personal vehicles, not vehicles used for work) the pickup bed is empty for over 99 out of every 100 miles driven.
I saw the cutest little gal at a local restaurant the other day... she couldn't have been more than 5'4" in her 5" heels, and she had as good as the dad-gummed biggest, perkiest rack and shiniest peroxide-blonde hair-dos I've ever seen, and it was hard not to laugh as I watched her clamber up into her lifted F150 4X4 after leaving the diner.
Seems to me if we start talking about stereotypes of people & their vehicles, I'd have to say that the biggest, baddest pickups are typically driven by short guys and short gals. The guys are usually bald/ing and the gals usually have big ol' fake titties. At least that's my observation.
