by Chris Messner

Created on: October 30, 2007

Conservation is a noble idea, but it will never be effective unless consumer choices in the vehicle marketplace are limited to fuel-efficient vehicles.

You don't have to take my word for it. Through their vehicle purchases over the past 35 years, since the first gas lines in the United States, consumers have spoken loudly and forcefully, and their message is crystal clear: Fuel economy is way, way down the list of items they consider important when they buy a vehicle. With the price of gas approaching $4 per gallon, recent sales of new SUVs have dropped significantly, but the damage was done decades ago.

The gas shortages in the early '70s saw gasoline prices jump by two-thirds overnight, and that resulted in the proliferation and increased importation of small Japanese cars that got phenomenal gas mileage. By the mid-to-late '70s, if you wanted a car that got 40+ miles per gallon around town and better than 50 on the road, all you had to do was go get one. As I recall, for awhile there was even a Toyota rated at 60+ MPG highway. Detroit was either unwilling or unable to produce anything comparable.

But those Japanese gas-sippers, while decent-looking, were severely underpowered and perceived as unsafe. As America adjusted to higher gas prices, with availability back to normal and 75-cent-a-gallon gas looking cheap, these super-MPG cars simply faded away.

During the late '70s to early '80s, Detroit's nod to improved fuel economy was to quit building huge "land yachts", and do away with the 8-cylinder engine. Smaller cars were here to stay and, for a long time, Americans could basically choose only between either a 4-cylinder or 6-cylinder engine.

Sometime during the early to mid-'90s, everyone decided that gasoline would be both plentiful and cheap forever, so the demand for gas-guzzling SUVs and pickups exploded, becoming the modern version of the "land yacht". So-called "soccer moms" somehow came to the conclusion that their precious cargo would be safer in Suburbans and Expeditions than in Escorts or Cavaliers, and fuel economy be damned. And the 8-cylinder engine made a comeback to provide these larger vehicles with more power.

I mean, why stop to think for a minute about what wasting all that gas now might mean for gasoline consumers 10 or 20 years down the road? Why care about how we'll have to struggle with the foreign crazies that hate us but sell us oil, knowing they have us over a barrel (pun intended) because we simply refuse to curb our petroleum consumption?

Americans

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