There is a difference between rebellious 15 year olds and adults that need to haul their families.

If you have a typical family with 3 or 4 kids, busy weekends with projects and sports and stuff and gas costs $1.50 then an SUV or Pickup looks perfectly logical. It's ridiculous to think that millions of americans bought cars that they hate because they got talked into by a slick sales pitch. Really. And then they kept buying those same SUVs and trucks over and over even though SUVs and trucks contain no addictive chemicals and form no habits.

Here is a better analogy based on a real situation. They just busted a guy in my city for stealing electricity. He had wired a second box into the house thay bypassed the meter. His normal box billed him a regular $80/month but he was really using $800 worth per month. Who needs $800 a month in electricity? Someone who does not pay for it.

Who drives a huge vehicle just because it is convenient to have the hauling space and it is comfortable to have the room? Someone who is shielded from the cost of driving it by low fuel prices.

The type of thinking you wrote about is behind the misguided CAFE standards. This tells automakers to build fuel efficient cars and trucks even if that is not what people want. The different mileage targets are actually what moved people from cars to trucks and SUVs. As the CAFE standards shrunk their cars, americans simply started buying trucks with higher CAFE limits instead. What congress should have done if they were serious about improving fuel economy was dramatically increase fuel taxes. This is the European route to fuel efficiency and it is noticeably more effective as it aligns buyer goals with the governments.