HIGH RIDE AND HANDSOME

By John Skow

THE SIGNS WERE THERE TO BE READ, even if at first they didn't make a lot of what is usually thought of as sense. There was, yeah, that white Bronco in Brentwood. And the black Jeep that Tim Robbins, consummate Hollywood dealmaking lizard, drove in The Player. And Arnold's Hummer. Not a normal car among them.

West Coast automotive analyst Christopher Cedergren read the signs two years ago on Rodeo Drive, at the opening of a shrieks-with-chic Barneys boutique. His epiphany was outside the store, not inside. Instead of Bentley Turbos, Mercedes S-class sedans and the usual Porsches and Lamborghinis, so boring, there was a Lost Safari of Land Rovers, Ford Explorers, Grand Cherokees and GMC Suburbans, all tricked out with steel brush guards, roof racks, off-roading spare-wheel mounts, and black-leather car bras to ward off gravel and grasshoppers on the Paris-Dakar run. Cedergren flashed his perception to his clients: "Cars are now history. The future belongs to trucks!"

Well, sure. Something has happened to the American psyche, even in the highest tax brackets, that has given Detroit a jolt of renewed self-esteem and left foreign manufacturers struggling in the dust. Even looking backward, it is not clear why. Maybe the baby boomers, grown thick in the waist, were bored with being sensible. Without any question--the brief dawn a few years ago of the tiny, puppyish Miata sports convertible aside--cars had grown tedious and indistinguishable. A Lexus or a BMW or a Mercedes said, "I've got mine, and I'm rich." A Volkswagen Golf or Ford Escort said nothing whatsoever. Did we need talking cars? Apparently: a Jeep with a mountain bike or kayak rack bolted to the roof said, "I'm doing the Ironman next month." You have to drive something, and if your $299-a-month lease can get you a Ford Explorer and a largely painless reputation for living on the edge, why not?

Well, why not? One truck model--Ford's F-Series pickup, the best-selling vehicle in the U.S. last year--sold more units than any of GM's seven divisions except Chevrolet. GM's truck-transmission plant in Toledo, Ohio, has operated every hour of every day for the past five years, and industry experts calculate that if GM could add two more truck plants, it could sell 450,000 more units a year, for an added profit of $3 billion.

As things are, sales of trucks and truckoids--sports utility vehicles known as "suvs" or "utes" or even, to those who sneer at them as wussmobiles, "sputes"--rose to 41.5% of the U.S. automotive market last year, up from 30% a decade before. And while U.S. manufacturers hold barely 60% of a shrinking market for passenger cars, they build 90% of the trucks sold; without them, the American automakers would still be losing money. And as that line outside Barneys attests, these aren't your basic hay haulers.

The foreign competition was caught off guard at first, but it is burning rubber to catch up, especially at the high end. Toyota has enlarged its rugged but cramped 4Runner; Lexus is just out with a pricey model (in the $50,000-plus range) that it calls the LX450; and Mercedes is hurrying to complete a $300 million factory in Alabama that will build a muscly growler it calls an aav, or all-activities vehicle, with a vip price tag in the mid-$30,000 range. (Will it have the effortless, raunchy, bad-attitude rumble of this writer's black-with-red pinstripes 1985 Ford F-250 plow truck, noble on its big wheels, with two gas tanks, chrome air horns, jaunty rust spots and revolving yellow cab light? Nah.)

But even this year's giddy sales numbers don't exhaust the good news. Cars are so complex and expensive to build these days, in part because of the demands of fuel economy, that there is not much profit left except in the luxury models. Trucks and truckoids, even with the power windows, CD players and pleated leather seats that suburban buyers are asking for, are still simple enough, many with rear-wheel drive and huge, iron power plants outmoded 20 years ago, to return $4,000 to $6,000 in profit per vehicle. And so far, buyers have absorbed sizable price rises--for pickups, from $17,000 or $18,000 to $22,000 or $24,000 in a couple of years--without much grumbling, except for wistful murmurs from carpenters and lawn-care guys who used to buy trucks to carry their tools around.

What do people think they're getting, or escaping, in the dream machines that some owners don't realize are, in fact, trucks? A good bet is that they are scampering away from the honk and fuss and double parking of the world that cars created. TV and magazine ads invariably show pickups and sports utility vehicles parked on a mountain spire or riverside gravel bar, with no pavement or other traffic in sight. Sure. Whether they can get you there in actuality is not important. Even if they are filling-looseners that drive like trucks on washboarded gravel roads, which most of them do, they are unbeatable fantasy machines. Land Rover, which encourages its salespeople to come to work in safari gear, admits its best U.S. customers live within 150 miles of Manhattan. Lincoln, in planning to bring out its Mountaineer model this year, found that only 15% to 18% of utility-vehicle owners ever used their machines to tow or haul anything. And as for off-road rowdiness, "They look at you as if you were crazy," says GM designer Bill Wayland. "Why would I want to drive my $40,000 vehicle off-road and scratch the paint on a bunch of rocks?"

Ready for anything, Road Warrior Part IX is part of the appeal, even if all you're heading for is the parking garage under the office building where you work. Riding high feels good. TV commercial actress Lonni Partridge of Manhattan Beach, California, traded her Mercedes sedan for a leased GMC Yukon last week. Her nine-year-old son and his baseball buddies fit better in it. But the high driving position makes Partridge feel more secure: "You don't have all the creeps in vans looking down at you." She feels physically more secure too: "When I drive the Mercedes, I just feel--black Mercedes, blond hair--it's like, 'Hi, here I am, carjack me!' "

Physical safety is an open question. The bigger trucks and their kin probably are more crash-worthy. Hit a deer and you may not do much damage, except to the deer. But the high center of gravity that feels good to the driver means the vehicle is easier to roll over. Lexus includes a fairly chilling warning in the manual for its new LX 450: "Failure to operate this vehicle correctly may result in loss of control or vehicle rollover; avoid loading any items on the roof that will make the center of gravity even higher . Your vehicle is more sensitive to side winds than an ordinary passenger car [and] can tip over sideways more easily than forward or backward."

But some dreams cannot be denied. As Ken Baronas, sales manager of an auto dealership in Oak Park, Illinois, puts it, "I'm a big-time type-A personality, and I drive a big truck." A couple of dudes near my place in New Hampshire have two deer rifles racked in the back window of their old Chevy pickup, and their bumper sticker says, YOU'LL GET MY GUNS WHEN YOU PRY THEM OUT OF MY COLD, DEAD HANDS. I decide not to interview them and instead call my friend Betsy from Sutton Mills. She bought her '87 Toyota 4x4 because she needed to haul manure (she likes to garden). So, yes, she guesses, her truck makes a statement. Drawbacks? "The bed fills up with snow in November and stays that way till May. Also, guys see me driving and want to talk about trucks. I could care." Advantages? "I'm short, and I like to ride up high."

So do we all, in the extra-snazzy John Muir model, with heated leather seats, power cup holders and crystal-perfect CD sound. Never mind crosswinds or the center of gravity; in wildness is the preservation of mankind.

--Reported by Marc Hequet/St. Paul and William A. McWhirter and Joseph R. Szczesny/Detroit

With reporting by MARC HEQUET/ST. PAUL AND WILLIAM A. MCWHIRTER AND JOSEPH R. SZCZESNY/DETROIT