I'll give you that urbanites driving SUVs is silly, but I simply cannot figure out the hostility I see among the people here. Kill the bastards! Take away their !#$!%#$$ SUVs and make them drive Hyundais! What you don't seem to figure out is that that attitude is one of (the many) forces pushing the SUV craze.

The CAFE standards actually drove the SUV craze. Without CAFE, we'd still have the full-bodied station wagons that big families used to enjoy.

Nowdays, there are station wagons, but they are a shriveled excuse for what once drove Chevy Chase across the American plains.

CAFE is an excellent example of "unintended consequences". They imposed a mileage requirement on cars, so the station wagon went bye-bye. But then the auto people started getting sales of pickups and such and realized it didn't apply to what is known as SUV's, so they started making them and people bought them out the wazoo.

Sigh.

The regulators still don't realize that the problem isn't oil, it's in the basic mechanism we use to drive around. Until you get something other than the internal combustion engine, 36 miles per gallon isn't going to fix dicksquat.