Opinion: SUVs lumber onward

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The great SUV backlash that many of us have been predicting ever since the price of gasoline cracked the $3 mark has been surprisingly slow to materialize. As April’s auto-sales figures show, Americans aren’t necessarily racing to embrace smaller cars -- they just favor smaller SUVs.

Well, actually they aren’t really racing to buy anything. U.S. car sales in the first four months of the year were down 2.9%. Hit especially hard is the market for big SUVs and pickups, while small cars are up slightly. That shows gas prices are indeed having an effect on consumer behavior, but a closer look at the numbers shows it’s not as dramatic as one might have expected. Sales of small SUVs are up a whopping 38.6%. Apparently, we still want big cars, just big cars that guzzle a little less gas.

It’s time to save Americans from themselves. While there are certainly consumers who need large four-wheel-drive vehicles, there aren’t very many. Parents can haul their kids to soccer practice in as much comfort in a station wagon or sedan as they can in an SUV, even if they won’t look as much like rugged, adventure-loving individualists while doing it.

The biggest complaint from opponents of tighter fuel-economy standards for automakers, the subject of a bipartisan push in Congress, is that such a move would force Americans to buy smaller cars than they want. Well, boo hoo. Asking people to drive smaller cars with upgraded fuel-saving technology isn’t really imposing much of a hardship, while leaving it up to market forces to make people go green only seems to push them into slightly less wasteful SUVs. Global warming and reliance on foreign oil aren’t small problems; small solutions aren’t going to work.