Name: 小型货车的倒塌（The Fall Of The Minivan）
Uploaded: 2021-04-25T02:14:18.000Z
Duration: 10 min 16 s
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The minivan is a vehicle that too many screams domesticity.

It calls to mind images of suburbs, family life and youth soccer

進階被動語態

teams. For much of its history, it has been praised for its

practicality and yet maligned as so deeply uncool.

Even Kevin Hart had something to say about the minivan in his comedy

If your husband or your boyfriend drives a minivan.

Any man a jobs, a minivan does not care about life.

But the minivan once helped save Chrysler from total ruin in the

1980s. The unveiling of the first Chrysler minivans in 1984 is still

considered a landmark moment in the history of the automotive

industry. But the minivan is now relegated to a small portion of the

automotive market, despite seeming like the sum of everything.

If you were to look at it from said automakers point of view, a

product planning point of view, you would ask consumers, what do you

want? And they would give you a list of things like roomy, spacious

cargo, good fuel economy, and even sliding doors might come up in

It would be a minivan, but nobody wants to buy one because they all

want SUV is now. It's such an image problem.

But my God, the moment someone drives on to say, wow, this is really

Meanwhile, buyers scoop up sport utility vehicles and crossovers at

an increasing rate. And automakers are faced with the choice of

whether they ought to keep selling these multipurpose vehicles or

throw in the towel in favor of more popular and more profitable

Believe it or not, the subject of sometimes fierce debate.

Some would say the first minivan was the Volkswagen bus, which the

German automaker began selling in the 1960s.

Others may point to even earlier examples such as the Stout Scarab, a

But the minivan, as customers typically know it, is traced back to

the 1984 model year when Chrysler rolled out its Dodge Caravan and

The story is that Lee Iacocca, who had previously been famous for

shepherding the Ford Mustang into existence, had left Ford for

At the time, Chrysler was struggling just a few years earlier.

Congress approved the Chrysler Loan Guarantee Act of 1979, securing

one point five billion dollars for the automaker.

Chrysler needed a hit and it got one under Iacocca is leadership.

Chrysler developed the K car platform, a kind of simple skeleton

which the company used as the base for a wide range of cars.

This is common practice in the auto industry.

But this particular platform was so adaptable it allowed Chrysler to

simplify product development and cut costs to an unprecedented

degree. It was a major turn for the company, and its first minivans

were one of the many vehicles Chrysler built on this platform.

Coca had been part of a team at Ford that had been working on a small

family van concept to compete with station wagons, which were quite

When Iacocca decamped to Chrysler, he took the idea of the minivan

with him and the caravan and Voyager models were released soon after.

This is one of the most important new concepts in American family

The Chrysler Corporation's new T wagon, the Plymouth Voyager and the

The idea was to combine the spaciousness and practicality of a cargo

It could take sharp turns and fit into a conventional garage.

The generous interior space was made possible by the front wheel

drive powertrain on Chrysler's K platform.

The van went on sale in January of 1984 and by the middle of the

month, Chrysler's truck sales were already soaring 160 percent over

One vehicle that takes the place of an economy car, sporty car

station wagon and Van Dodge Caravan is a transportation

revolution. Other automakers rushed to get in on the action.

Toyota repurposed one of its vans for the U.S.

market and Detroit competitors Ford and General Motors released their

own smaller vans in the years that followed.

To lure away customers, for better or worse, the minivan became a

kind of cultural icon, a symbol of the suburbs in much the same way

the station wagon had once epitomized American family life.

It really became the replacement for the station wagon and for what

family is. You know, prior to that, took as a you know, as a vehicle

of choice for a rather, they were moving around the city and doing

sporting events or what have you to take vacations.

So it quickly became the vehicle of choice for families.

Minivans grew from about 4 percent of new car sales in the early

1990s to a peak of around 7 percent in the early 2000s.

And automakers who once scrambled to catch up to Chrysler's hit

Car buyers today won't see a single sliding door on a car based

Besides Fiat Chrysler, the only other automakers selling minivans to

The Dodge Caravan sold 150 1927 units, up 21 percent from the

previous year. The Chrysler Pacifica held steady, selling one hundred

eighteen thousand three hundred twenty two units.

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小型货车的倒塌（The Fall Of The Minivan）

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