I pumped 60 bucks of gas into our SUV the other day. That was a record. My husband and I are heavy users, so we can count on pumping in another 60 bucks before the weekend. Ouch! This is getting painful.
"Honey," I said, "Maybe it's time for us to trade it in."
I am not the first person to have this thought. Sales of SUVs and gas-slurping pickup trucks are crashing across North America. Fuel hogs are out. Hybrids and Smart cars are in. And if you think things are bad right now, just wait. Gas prices could hit $1.40 or $1.50 a litre by Victoria Day. Anyone can do the math. Soon you'll be forking over 75 bucks for a fill.
Not that I'm complaining. Soaring gas prices are an environmentalist's dream. They are accomplishing more than regulation and lecturing ever will.
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I don't get why people cheer when someone like Hillary Clinton says she's going to bust OPEC in the chops and declare a gas-tax holiday. High prices are an enormously effective way to get people to change their habits and cut down on fossil fuel.
They're a good thing.
Something else has changed too. SUVs just don't have the cachet they used to. They're too big, too square, too hard to park, too easy to roll over. They're starting to remind me of the giant shoulder pads I used to wear in the 1980s. I thought those power suits looked great then. They just look silly now.
"The SUV craze was a bubble and now it is bursting," George Hoffer, an automotive economist, told The Boston Globe.
"It's an irrational vehicle. It'll never come back."
Like those shoulder pads, SUVs are mainly a way to pretend you're someone you are not (if only to yourself). Urban moms drive them because they're not minivans, which pretty well scream "soccer mom." Men drive them because they're not station wagons. My husband, for instance, would rather be dead than drive a station wagon. "You can't pick up chicks in it," he explains, even though he freely admits he hasn't picked up a "chick" in 35 years.
But when everybody on your block drives one, it's hard to feel like a cowgirl on your way to the nearest roundup. If you must know, the main rationale for our SUV is our cats, which come to the country with us on the weekend. Sometimes we put a bag of dirt in it but, in general, our SUV is basically a big cat taxi. No wonder our eco-conscious younger relatives think it's disgusting. Now that it's getting so expensive to fill up, I'm inclined to agree.
That's not the worst part, though. The truth is that SUVs are the new station wagons - bourgeois behemoths that only aging people drive. In spite of what my husband thinks, no eco-conscious "chick" is going to give him a second look.
The car companies aren't dopes. They know higher prices - lots higher - are here to stay. They're investing zillions into battery power, clean diesel and other fuel-efficient technologies. They also know that with auto sales heading toward the dumpster, the only hot new market is for cars that are small and clean and sexy. They have seen the future, and it's spelled "mini."
There's just one problem with getting rid of our old SUV. Nobody wants it. I admit it's a bit bashed up - it's fought with too many parking-garage posts. But when I checked out what we could get for it, I was shocked. The car that once made me feel like the Queen of the Road might fetch a summer's worth of gas.
"Maybe we should leave it by the curb with the empty wine bottles," I said, "and somebody will take it away."
Meantime, we're trying to decide between a Yaris and a hybrid Civic. I think you could fit both of them into our SUV.
The cats won't like it. But they'll just have to rough it.
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