It's The End Of The World

 There's a Mitsubishi Montero that inhabits one of the parking spaces close to my apartment. It's a damn fine looking vehicle, brutish and big, and it has a presence that many a sedan lacks. You notice the Montero, a predator among the sheepish Camrys and Accords that mull around the parking lot.

 It will probably never venture off the paved highways and romp through the wildlands of Tennessee, and logocally a mini-van would have fulfilled the owner's needs better, but logic always fails when it comes to the defining characteristic of the American consumer, passion.

 There's a lot of buzz going around about the rising cost of gasoline, and how that's going to impact the automotive world. It's having an effect, but cruising around the auto internet gives you the impression that America's love affair with SUV's is about to collapse and we're all going to start driving Honda Insights and Toyota Prius'. It ain't gonna happen.

 Passion has to be thrown into the mix, otherwise we would be in the middle of a mini-van craze rather than an SUV craze. People have been buying SUV's because that is what they want, what they desire. Yes, large SUV's are going to take a hit with rising fuel costs, but to say that the dominance of SUV's has already come to an end is jumping the gun. Smaller, more fuel-efficint models will gain in popularity, the process of basing models off car vs. truck platforms will continue, and mileage across the board will increase.

 SUV's are at a bump in the road, not a roadblock.