Earth Equity News

A Hybrid? Forget It, Say Rising Numbers of Pickup Buyers. By Patrick Jonsson, CSMonitor, January 22, 2009. "Thanks in large part to $10,000 dealer incentives and (relatively) cheaper gasoline, buyers are creeping out of the deep woods and urban jungles, emptying dealer lots of a gritty, gas-guzzling American icon: the full-size pickup truck.With all other car-sales categories as flat as a mall parking lot, sales of trucks at some dealerships jumped by more than 30 percent in December -- usually the slowest month of the year. In fact, dealers reported sales matching or surpassing figures from late 2007 -- before the Wall Street meltdown, the freezing of credit markets, and the federal bailout of Detroit's Big 3... 'The problem isn't as much the people who need the truck for work, but it's the people who haul lattes home from Starbucks who have been the prized customers of Detroit,' says Daniel Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign [of the Center for Auto Safety] in Washington, which lobbies for higher fuel-efficiency standards. 'These are people for whom the pickup is a vestigial piece of the past -- it's a lifestyle choice, not something they need.'"