Who's Gonna Drive You Home Tonight?

This morning I heard an amusing phrase: "lower than average annual fuel costs." It was in reference to the new H3 pickup. It's not exactly a surrender, but it certainly is a long way from the rough and tumble image that the Humvee has always projected. When Jeeps no longer satisfied the rugged individualists here in the United States, AMC began to churn out a civilian version of their military High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle. It was just the thing for a truly massive personality like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
That was back in the late 1980's, when the suggestion that Arnold could become governor of California was more likely to be the pitch for one of his movies. Twenty years later, science fiction has become science fact, and the Governator has managed to become one of those most elusive creatures, a prominent Republican in the state of California. That disconnect is hard enough to fathom, but the fact that in 2006 he signed a bill creating the nation’s first cap on greenhouse gas emissions is enough to confound even James Cameron.
In 2008, we continue to work at saving the planet while we try to save ourselves. Suddenly those silly little hybrids have become the status symbols, and urban assault vehicles sit on car lots across the country, dreaming of being adopted. The new trend is that automotive hermaphrodite, the hybrid SUV. Mazda makes one that gets about thirty miles a gallon, while most of the rest hover around twenty. Any potential fuel savings must,however, be offset by the amount of gas used driving around trying to find a spot large enough to dock one of these beasts. And so, we are left with a world where action heroes really can save the world, but only from the comfort of their climate-controlled environmentally-friendly bio-fueled all-wheel drive Wagon Queen Family Truckster.