SUVs and Malt Beverages

Consumer demand and regulation create strange offspring

Back in June, I wrote a piece for The Week in praise of station wagons. I argued that they were almost as roomy, but much safer than SUVs (for those being hit by them, but also, due to their lower risk of rollover, for drivers as well). I also touched on one of the reasons why SUVs, and even minivans, actually exist:

Despite the stereotype of wagons as “dadmobiles” and as stylistically tacky and obsolete, consumer preferences didn’t just inexorably evolve over the last 40 years. Government regulation in large part birthed the SUV, and in some tellings, killed the wagon.

The regulations in question were the CAFE fuel-economy standards introduced in 1978. From the beginning, there was a tighter standard for cars, and a looser one for trucks, including “light trucks.” This distinction exists largely because trucks were then understood as commercial vehicles, and the real purpose of CAFE was to raise the efficiency of passenger vehicles. A wagon is a car. An SUV or minivan, because of its platform or chassis, is a “light truck.”

Did you know that? I had heard it before, but I’m not sure I totally understood it until I wrote this piece. Basically, the CAFE standards were mostly about improving the fuel efficiency of cars, i.e. sedans or wagons. But automakers figured out that they could take the chassis of a van or light truck, and fashion the body and interior into what was essentially a car. That allowed them to check the “truck” box for regulatory purposes, thereby skirting the CAFE standards while still selling a consumer-grade passenger vehicle.

People come down differently on whether they blame the government for enacting the regulations, or the auto industry for its loophole-seeking. I’m less interested in who to blame, and more in the phenomenon itself. Think about it: in some ways, a regulation actually created an entire product category that might otherwise have been marginal or nonexistent. I think that’s really fascinating.

Now take a look at this, spotted at my local supermarket a couple of weeks ago:

Fireball is (to me anyway) an improbably popular cinnamon whiskey. This, however, is not whiskey, as the ABV suggests. It’s actually a “malt beverage,” putting it in the same category of drinks as things like Twisted Tea, Mike’s Hard Lemonade, and hard seltzer.

Normally, if you were making drinks like that at home, they’d consist of a little vodka and a mixer. But most states limit the sale of hard liquor, including pre-made cocktails or mixed drinks.

In order to get around these laws and get their products into supermarkets, gas stations, and drug stores, beverage manufacturers came up with “malt beverages.” These are alcoholic drinks which use filtered alcohol derived from beer—that is, liquor in all but name—and then they add mixers and flavors to that filtered malt alcohol. Here’s an industry article explaining it.

But in recent years, they’ve taken this a step further, and are now producing malt-beverage versions of actual hard liquors, rather than only trying to emulate mixed drinks. (As you might expect, it’s mostly mediocre at best.)

There are also wine-based clones of liqueurs, such as “chocolate milk” wine or “limoncello” wine. Same thing: filtered wine-alcohol base, flavors, and colors.

It’s ingenious, isn’t it? The alcoholic beverage industry was faced with a set of rules, and reverse-engineered certain products to get around those rules. You might think they obviously violate the spirit of the law, and they do. But once you have a regulation that defines, in very specific terms, what exactly a product is, then you can come up with all sorts of things that obviously aren’t that product but which also meet the regulatory particulars.

That’s about it for today, and I know this is off the beaten path, but there is an example of something like in architecture/land use (and probably quite a few!): Those four- or five-story apartment blocks, often with colorful facades made of lots of different materials.

There are regulations designed to make these large buildings look nicer, particularly to create the appearance of multiple buildings or breaking up the appearance. This could be done in a number of visually different ways, but builders have found a template that basically works. So while there are many factors at play here, those somewhat odd looking apartment buildings are almost reverse-engineered to fit the code, rather than designed from the ground up.

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Related Reading:

A Different Take on Suburban Parking Lots

A Repair Journey Through Low-Cost Manufacturing

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