42 AMERICANWAY
DECEMBER 15 2008
ILLUSTRATIONBYBRIANSTAUFFER
I N T E R N A T I O N A L
A
SUV
COD
AsAmerica’s love
affairwithgas
guzzlerswanes,
auto exporters have
found awelcoming
embrace overseas.
ByChrisWarren
ASANAUTO-INDUSTRYANALYST,
Jessica Caldwell has the job of
keeping close tabs on just about ev-
erythinghappening in the carbusi-
ness: what makes and models are
hot, whose sales are plummeting,
andwhere everything is headed. It
may have been a bit of a surprise,
then, when Caldwell discovered a
dealership thathasa two-yearwait-
ing list for theToyotaLandCruiser
200Series, a largeSUV.
How can that be? When gas
prices danced around an aver-
age of $4 per gallon this summer
before receding in the fall, large,
gas-guzzling behemoths— like the
Ford Explorer, the Cadillac Esca-
lade, andGeneralMotors’Hummer
— became anathemas to people struggling to
fill their tanks and buy groceries in a softening
economy. In fact, monthly sales of new SUVs
were down 17.5percent nationally in July2008
comparedwith the samemonth in2007, and in
the first quarter of this year, almost 20 percent
of SUVownerswere actually trying toget ridof
their vehicles. Dealerships all across theUnited
States have been complaining about the glut of
new andused vehicles clogging their lots; some
have even stopped acceptingusedSUVs, know-
ing that they’ll neverbeable toget ridof them.
So what is it that makes this dealership
Caldwell sleuthed so different from all those
struggling tomove SUVs out of their invento-
ries?Simple: It’s inRussia.
Caldwell, who works for Edmunds.com, a
website that provides comprehensive informa-
tion about everything auto-related, traveled to
Russia in August to attend theMoscowAuto-
mobile Show. There, she discovered that not
only does this particular dealership— part of
the largest automall inEurope—have a huge
backlog of people waiting for the Toyota Land
Cruiser but also that SUVs in general are in
sharp demand in the formerly Communist
