Oil Change

Forget change you can believe in and start dealing with the changes coming at you as fast as the price of fuel makes its way skyward.

With gasoline prices headed toward $5 a gallon, more than half the population has, in a matter of a year, become marooned in the suburbs. The economics of housing combined with the lunacies of city planning have left most Americans stranded, miles away from their places of work, their schools, their stores and medical facilities.

The physical plant of the United States for the past sixty years was designed on a premise of cheap energy. This has left much of our population locked into homes and communities they now can ill afford to leave in the morning, come back to at night, heat in the winter or cool in summer. Nor they can sell out and go elsewhere.

America is saying bye-bye to the Hummer. General Motors is ditching its great ape of an automobile, which gets about ten miles to the gallon. Ford is cutting back on its production of the fabled F series of pickup trucks, some models of which equal the Hummer’s mpg rating. The jobs of the people who made these giant vehicles also are being discontinued. “This is a fundamental change,” said Ford chief executive officer Alan Mulally, who may be slow on the uptake but appears now to have gotten it.

While American automakers try to catch up, millions of us are stuck with our gas guzzlers. There are more than 200 million private, gasoline-powered conveyances in the United States–a little less than one for every two people, counting the babies. Sixty percent of our households own two or more automobiles, hardly surprising in an era when families must have two wage-earners. Almost all of those cars get poor gas mileage, but even at five bucks a gallon it will not pay to trade them in to buy a new car with a lower mpg rating. At current replacement rates, the better part of a decade will pass before the current generation of gas guzzlers is retired to be replaced by more energy efficient cars, if–and it is a big if–there will be enough of them at the right price.

The Nation