It’s been a long year for the gas-guzzlers!

No one’s wallet has been hit harder by the rising gas prices than the truckers and soccer moms with  forty gallon gas tanks. At $4 dollars a gallon, that’s a $160 tank of gas, and it’s even more if your designer SUV only takes premium gasoline, or your truck runs on $5.50 bucks per gallon diesel fuel. At these prices, it was only a matter of time before that fad finally ran its course.

First came the news last week that car dealers couldn’t move SUVs off their lots, and that used-car dealers were going to stop buying up the glut of unwanted SUVs that are flooding their market.

“For the first four months of this year…SUV sales plummeted 32.8 percent”

In line with classic supply and demand, General Motors just announced yesterday that they’ll be closing four major truck and SUV manufacturing plants this year. In fact, they may just ditch the Hummer brand altogether, hopefully selling it off to whatever chump can eat the losses.

The company also announced that they’ll be moving their focus towards smaller, more fuel-efficient cars.

The best part of this whole collapse, though, was this statement:

“High fuel prices have produced a rapid and permanent change in consumer preferences away from the truck models on which it has depended.”

This is the really important part of the puzzle - the companies will always shift their priorities in accordance to the bottom line. However, you’d better believe they would go right back to building huge, gas-guzzling trucks if they were popular enough to make them profitable. However, a “permanent change” in consumer attitudes is the stuff environmentalists have been dreaming of, and something that all the public education initiatives could never accomplish.

It’s too bad that it took gas prices to make the American public reject the SUV, and that the change in consumer attitudes didn’t regard the damage that the cars have been doing to the planet. Still, I think the environmentalists will take what they can get - I know that I’m satisfied with whatever gets these polluting, inefficient cars off the road.

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