On ABC News this morning, there was a piece on the still increasing cost of gasoline at the pumps. Somewhere in California the price on the pump was $4.079 per gallon. What got my attention even more than the price were the vehicles lined up to get gas.
SUVs. Lots of them.
One man admitted - and seemed to be laughing about it - that this was the second time it had cost him more than $50 to fill up his SUV.
Americans really do have a short memory. And no sense of the future. We live in the everlasting "now." Where gas is always cheap and plentiful, where it's always better to drive by yourself than to car pool or take public transit. If there were effective public transit, that is.
There is an old story - apocryphal perhaps, but maybe true - that in the early days of the auto industry, many of the major car companies bought local train and trolley lines around the country through front companies. Then they systematically dismantled them and sold the rolling stock for scrap. Those were the days of robber barons and the American nouveau riche. It seems that even today, we are paying for their greed and avarice.
Full Disclosure: I have a Honda CRV that has a 4-cylinder engine that gets around 30 miles to the gallon on the highway. But it is considered an SUV.
My other car is a small Saturn sedan that gets around 35 mpg.
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