Achenbach on America and Cars!

Listen up folks cause what Joel says in his column on “Why We Keep on Trucking” is the least of what we should do:

It's been a rough stretch of road for the U.S. auto industry. Last Monday, we learned that Daimler had sold Chrysler for scrap metal. President Bush vowed to start regulating tailpipe emissions. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced new low-carbon fuel standards, a firm shove to the entire transportation sector. And gas prices hit an all-time high -- bad news for carmakers that keep cranking out gas guzzlers. But probably the worst moment came the week before last, on the reality TV show "Survivor," when Yau-Man gave the pickup truck to Dreamz.

Here's what happened: Yau-Man Chan, a 54-year-old computer engineer, had won one of the show's "reward challenges." The prize: a hulking, 350-horsepower Ford Super Duty F-350 pickup that looks like it's capable of towing your average volcano.

Yau-Man took one look and promptly gave it to a rival player, Andria "Dreamz" Herd, asking only for some strategic help at the next "tribal council." It was a shocking move by Yau-Man. But now we can report to the nation the real reason he didn't want the truck:

"I would disappear if I sat inside."

He's talking by phone from his home in Northern California.

"It's not my lifestyle," he says. And moreover: "I don't think it would fit in any parking spaces."

In fact, he needs an F-350 the way he needs his own personal oil tanker. Chan works on a college campus. At Berkeley. What, he's going to bomb around in something that looks like it eats Volkswagen Beetles for a snack? I doubt he could even sell it in Berkeley. The city council has no doubt banned oversized pickups, along with red meat and nuclear weapons.

And yet Detroit keeps disgorging monster trucks, souped-up sedans, overpowered SUVs and Hummers so brawny and masculine that merely sitting in the driver's seat makes hair sprout on your back.

Amazingly, people keep buying them. Never mind everything you've read about the fashionableness of hybrids and the new electric cars scooting along California highways. We still like big, fast, sexy, high-performance cars that allow us to make vroom-vroom noises as we rocket to the video store. Yau-Man Chan may well be the car buyer of the future -- a role model for us all -- but most of us are still burning gas like there's no tomorrow.

Here's what a lot of us in urban and suburban America actually need: a glorified golf cart. And such things are on the drawing board: "neighborhood cars" that are perfect for putt-putting around. Maybe they'd be communal property -- just grab one and go, like an umbrella by the office door.

But if you had to make an educated wager, you'd probably want to put your money on people continuing to drive pretty much the same vehicles they've been driving, at least for the near future. The automobile industry doesn't like revolutions. Detroit is conservative and runs on inertia. Big, fast, powerful vehicles yield higher profits. With Chrysler and all the other U.S. car companies struggling, they're not likely to go gangbusters for tiny, fuel-efficient cars. Technological advances have gone into performance, not fuel efficiency. Everyone today is driving cars that have the performance attributes of the sports cars of yesteryear. John Heywood, director of the Sloan Automotive Laboratory at MIT, says that if you extrapolate 20 years into the future, we'll all be driving the equivalent of today's Ferraris.

"Why don't we have fuel-efficient cars?" he asks. "It's because, at least in the past, fuel has been cheap. And why not? At many levels, they're more fun."

The American auto industry's general lack of imagination is one reason (along with labor, health-care costs, etc.) why Chrysler became so pitiful that Daimler essentially paid to get rid of it. "The transportation sector has been the least creative sector in our society," says Dan Sperling, a professor at the University of California at Davis who helped write the new California fuel standards.

Politicians, engineers and corporate bosses are all trying to figure out how to produce a greener fleet of cars while preserving profits and "consumer choice," which means the right to buy muscle-bound cars and trucks. There are optimists who see no pain ahead: We can take advantage of biofuels, hydrogen fuel cells and new materials (carbon-fiber thermoplastic composites!). Pessimists think the market alone won't wean us from oil addiction and curb greenhouse gases. They favor aggressive regulation, gas taxes, carbon taxes, etc. But what's environmentally desirable may not be politically feasible. California's fuel standards follow the market approach, letting industries come up with their own techniques for meeting the state requirements.

There are, in fact, a number of intriguing new Cars of the Future in development. Perhaps you've seen pictures of the 39-inch-wide Tango, a two-seat electric vehicle in which one person sits behind the other. The first 100 all-electric Tesla Roadsters will appear this summer, listing for $92,000, every one of them pre-sold to the George Clooney set. Toyota announced that it's coming out with a hybrid Lexus that will set you back $124,000. General Motors, meanwhile, has created a prototype plug-in hybrid, the Chevy Volt, that starred at this year's Detroit Auto Show. But GM won't go to market until someone develops a cheap, reliable lithium battery.

A lot of the futuristic cars seem to exist primarily in the parallel universe of Hollywood celebrities and dot-com billionaires. Just try to find an electric car in a showroom at Tysons Corner or on Rockville Pike. Here's what you see in the real world: big honking cars and trucks. That burn gasoline.

"We're not going to see huge changes in 10 or 15 years," says Marc Ross, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Michigan who has focused on automotive technology. "You can't really change the fuel in that kind of time span. It takes time. It takes huge investments. We have almost 200,000 gas stations. The only fuel you could change in a time like 10 or 15 years is to add ethanol, to adopt a mixture that can be served from the same gas pumps. But if you want to do something different, like hydrogen -- hydrogen is very difficult to handle -- that's going to take a great deal of time."

General Motors made and leased hundreds of electric vehicles in the 1990s, and other companies, spurred by a California mandate, began their own such programs. But automakers saw no profit in electric cars; critics say the industry sabotaged its own inventions. GM recalled and destroyed its fleet, as depicted in the 2006 documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" Meanwhile, Detroit spent billions to hypnotize us into thinking we need to go four blocks to Safeway in a four-wheel-drive vehicle capable of scaling the Matterhorn.

"We've become so dependent on our cars. We value that mobility very highly," Sperling says. "It's stunning to me how little response there's been to these high fuel prices. It's contrary to what the media report."

Sperling has calculated the "elasticity of demand" for gas (which, for the record, is between minus 0.05 and minus 0.1). That means that every time gas prices jump 10 percent, the demand drops, at most, only 1 percent. The policy implication: Gas taxes won't help curb demand as much as you may think.

The debate about the Car of the Future isn't just about consumer choice; it's also about the health of the planet.

"By 2050, the number of vehicles in the world is expected to go up by a factor of three," Heywood says. "That should scare you. It scares me."

By e-mail, Sperling summarizes the policy dilemma: "Most (but certainly not all) consumers want more and bigger things: more and bigger vehicles, houses, yachts, toys, etc. We also tend to want more access to more people. If I could get to Paris in 15 minutes for $5, I'd be there every other night for dinner. The real story, then, is how to deal with the tension between private desires and the public interest. If everyone drove a Hummer and owned a 5,000-square-foot house with a large yard, then disaster would soon follow, and only a few rich people would thrive. The role of government is to reconcile these tensions."

At some point, you have to reconcile your own tensions. I drive a six-cylinder Honda Accord. The two extra cylinders are what makes the car, and me, so dang sexy. But it's overpowered for my commute on city streets. So I decided to take a Toyota Prius for a test drive.

The Prius does not make the driver feel particularly young, heroic or pheromonally attractive. The gear selector is just this little knob, the size of a shot glass. You start the car by hitting a button. It's all a little cute, but it's also spiffy, and you can be environmentally conscious with each passing second as you monitor a screen that tells you your gas mileage.

Maybe that's the future. Maybe it's the right thing to do, even if it doesn't scream Stand Back and Let the Big Dawg Eat.

Oh, by the way: If you see a guy sticking to the speed limit as he tools along the freeway on his way to Berkeley, that might be Yau-Man Chan. He says he usually gets 51 or 52 miles per gallon, but if he's fanatical about the speed limit and can endure the honks from other motorists, he can get 53.

Of course he drives a Prius.

Now I live in Manhattan and long ago got rid of my car, but what Joel is talking about here is not crazy talk, it is the future and the least of it.