2021 Land Cruiser and Subaru Outback

 

Autoliterate decries the gargantuan. Why does almost everything in American life, including most Americans, relentlessly expand? Is it Manifest Destiny? Check the brutal antelope grill on this baby. It would make marmalade out of a moose, so lord knows what it would do to a bicyclist, and they're the wildlife here in Cambridge.

Oh, and the wild turkeys just up the street. And the Canada geese waddling along the banks of the Charles.

Land Cruisers are no longer sold in North America; perhaps they didn't get big enough. Maybe this unit is a 2021. (We posted on other Toyota hillclimbers, including an earlier edition Land Cruiser, back in the Spring.)  The over-several-tops décor on these machines...we never have been able to grasp who would take a glossy $90k swag wagon rock-climbing in the wilderness or sloshing up a riverbed, or do all the other he-manly stuff they're supposed to be capable of doing, at least in Super Bowl commercials. Is mock-utilitarian an automobile genre? The LC probably is fairly capable off-road, and maybe there is a useful stripped-down edition sold in the Asian and African markets, but after paying $90k, AL certainly wouldn't want to scratch the paint on this unit. Starting with that antelope grill, the LC teems with self-presentation–but bullies are often boastful, and if you've watched the classic Westerns, you might recall it's the slender, quiet types who often win the brawl in the saloon. Or the snowstorm on the Mass Pike.

And speaking of manliness on steroids, we noticed a hulking Subaru Outback Wilderness Edition also taking a break in our urbane Cambridge neighborhood. Do families really plunge deep into National Forests in these things? Or is some...fear --call it paranoia--that's present in the culture now raising the anxiety bar higher, year by year, for parents, and drivers, until they feel they need something like this to shuttle kids school and maybe to the weekend house in Vermont? What's next, armor-plating? Of course that is what's next. Every run-of-the-mill billionaire  will want his own version of The Beast. Already almost standard in other rich poor countries in the hemisphere, like Brazil. 

 

The future of American motoring!

Overdressed bulkster SUVs say something about who we are now, or whom we want to be. They're the 1958 Buicks of our era. The Buick's chrome grille–and the get-outta-my-way steel snout buckled to the front of the LC speak the same language of excess, using a different syntax. The tough wanted to look rich, with their hyper-chromed Buicks. These days, in their over-equipped SUVs, the rich want to look tough.