This month's feature : Truck/SUV

On the Trail of the Trends

A Look at What's Happening in the Off-Road Market

These are the playgrounds: Sheer granite walls crowned with boulders the size of travel trailers. Massive sand dunes cresting starkly against a crystalline dawn. Mud as thick as newly poured concrete and deep enough to entomb a Cape Buffalo. An off-camber forest trail made treacherously slick by early-morning rain. These are the challenges that lure off-road enthusiasts to test their skills and the machines they've built.

Four-wheel drive and off-road vehicles have been mainstays of the specialty-equipment industry for decades. The light-truck market took off at the close of World War II when soldiers came home from battlegrounds with experience in early Willys and Ford utility vehicles, and it has rarely slowed since. Truck buyers are among the most loyal and steadfast automotive consumers in the world, and they have kept the market strong and growing with only few exceptions.

"We see the market continuing on an upward swing," said Jeff Greene, vice president of sales and marketing for Rough Country Suspension Systems. "Our business has seen steady increases for the last five or six years. I think that the economy and gas prices have people looking to save as much as they can, and we build quality parts that don't cost an arm and a leg, which is why our business is good. Still, I think you could get trucks up to $60,000 and gas up to $4 a gallon and people would still buy them and dress them up. There's nothing that any of us in the suspension or four-wheel-drive market sell that you have to have to continue to drive that vehicle, but it's a hobby and people will find the money."...read more

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