Gas prices and SUVs

America's long love affair with monsterous trucks and SUVs now appears to be headed for an end. Over the last few decades, the low gas prices resulted in nobody caring about gas mileage. Ford and GM built bigger and bigger SUVs every year, until it was difficult to distinguish a Chevy SUV from a FedEx delivery vehicle. These vehicles gave roughly as much gas mileage as a typical BMTC bus. I am sure NASA did more research about making their space shuttles more fuel efficient than GM and Ford about their cars.

In this year's summer gas prices went up to more than 3.5 dollars per gallon, shocking the people who had just a few years back had thought paying 1.6 dollars was too much. This made the people think radically and take some unbelievable decisions, like switching to cars! (No, people are not yet thinking of using public transport). Suddenly they realised that the Toyota or Honda sedan that they never thought of driving could cut their gas bill by half! So sales of Honda and Toyota cars is increasing rapidly. GM is realizing that they never invested in making their cars more efficient. They always thought president Bush would wage another war in the Gulf to bring down the gas prices, but this time it is not happening in spite of the war. Honda and Toyota are smiling, thinking about the research they have been doing about hybrid engines.

Though it may seem like high gas prices hurts the US, it is good in the long term. It is forcing the US car makers to think about fuel efficiency and it is making the US consumers aware of this issue. As biggeest consumer of petroleum in the world, any such effort by US will help the whole world. I hope people in the US switch to smaller cars and all cars run 50 miles per gallon in a few years.