You are what you drive, you oversized lumbering @&#%$!!!

Here's two Sunday stories on the psychology behind auto marketing and design.
General, and SUVs.

If you drive an SUV, a sport utility vehicle, you may be feeling a little defensive these days.

According to some, you're not only unpatriotic and un-Christian, you're ruining the environment. You're also selfish and stupid and dangerous - a rollover waiting to happen.

So, are SUV owners sheepishly surrendering to more sensible cars? Hardly.

As 60 Minutes reported a few months ago, there's no end in sight to America's love affair with size and horsepower. Correspondent Morley Safer reports.
Ah, the thrill of the open road - if you can find one. Roads are more and more congested and the vehicles they carry grow ever larger. Today, the family car is no longer a modest station wagon, but a Suburban, a Yukon, or an Excursion or a Land Rover or an Escalade.

By and large, SUV owners seem a contented lot, lording it over the common herd, proud of the status symbols they captain to the shopping mall or the grocery store.

Urban and suburban guerilla groups, like an outfit called "Earth On Empty," are waging a losing battle, ticketing SUVs and citing drivers for their selfishness.

In California, a group called "Changing the Climate" uses bumper stickers to make its voice heard. And then there are the TV ads.

On the radio you can get another earful from the hosts of NPR's "Car Talk" - Tom and Ray Magliozzi. On their Web site, the Car Talk brothers feature nine downsides to driving an SUV, including "Other people on the road may hate you." SUV owners are not amused.

“They hate us,” says Tom Magliozzi. “All the vitriolic responses that we get.”

But the Car Talk guys' disdain seems futile, even with rising gas prices. With gas still costing less than bottled water, most Americans have shown little interest in more fuel-efficient cars and the auto makers happily comply.

It's been a lot of miles on the road since that summer 100 years ago when Ford Motor Co. incorporated and then began marketing its Model T's. Even a visionary like Henry Ford could scarcely have imagined the proliferation of today's makes and models - the 26 million registered vehicles in California now outnumber licensed drivers by 6 million - nor how a hunk of metal could become so intertwined in Americans' sense of ourselves.

And he certainly couldn't have foreseen "car shrinks" - men like Clothaire Rapaille of Palm Beach, whose Jungian archetypal research for Daimler-Chrysler had test consumers lying on mats in low light and free-associating to music. The goal: to concoct a new small car that would bypass their brains' logical cortex and hit their "reptilian hot buttons.

"People said, 'It's a jungle out there. It's Mad Max. People want to kill me, rape me.' "

Rapaille expounds. "The message to designers was clear. 'Give me a big thing like a tank' " - even if it was a small model. The test group also craved something that could distinguish them from every other look-alike on the road.

The result: the retro-hip PT Cruiser.

That research would influence the development and marketing of other vehicles, including the poseur Hummer H2. A Hummer pre-emptively shouts, "I'm overpowering!" - unless, of course, it's yellow, which undercuts the machismo with the message "Umm, just kidding!"

Suddenly, "emotion" is the big word in Motown, as in 'we want vehicles that make an emotional connection,' " Fortune Magazine has noted. "It's as if the industry had relocated en masse to Marin County."

Some 50 years ago, when sociologist Vance Packard wrote his expose, "The Hidden Persuaders," about the psycho-probers of the ad world, the country was appalled. Packard predicted that eventually "all this depth manipulation of the psychological variety will seem amusingly old-fashioned."

He was right - not, as he hoped, because exposure made it taboo, but because success made it seemingly indispensable.

Today's consultants have sliced and diced the vehicle-buying public into as many as 62 different demographic and lifestyle microcosms - with names such as "Blue Blood Estates," "New Ecotopia," "Young Literati" and "Shotguns and Pickups."

Automakers hire hypnotists, dream analysts and a host of other spelunkers of the subconscious, sporting either brilliant mind theory or ebullient psychobabble.

They then refine prototypes and aim ads directly at your psychographic profile, your "emotional pulse" - the rather irrational factor that make some vehicles particularly comely in your eyes.

How else to persuade you to do the inherently irrational: shell out thousands of dollars for an item that loses about a quarter of its value the instant you drive it off the lot?

"Forget focus groups. What we've done is come up with approaches that really get into your souls," says Chris Cedergren, whose Southern California- based firm, Iceology, has clinical psychologists on staff and has consulted for most major automakers. People tell focus groups they want an SUV for its usefulness, safety, carpool convenience and cargo capacity.