Originally Posted by RustyC

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Better get cracking on unloading the SUV before the used-car places stop accepting them. It'll be like reselling used Peter Frampton records used to be.

A lot of people are going to have some really painful adjustment because of fuel, but then I give only partial blame to those who bought too far out from a city and thought gas would stay at $1.20 (or that traffic wouldn't get worse). It's not just them, but also the system that supported and even encouraged that sort of behavior. Governments tend to subsidize sprawl and spread the infrastructure costs rather than make new construction pick up all the bill. Zoning and NIMBY politics are very hostile to densities or "new urbanism" multi-use communities, including the quaint sorts of towns built 100 years ago. And you've got tons of vested interests like Home Depot that'll cheerlead with ad dollars for a version of the American Dream that also happens to be optimized for high consumption (or, as the special interests see it, high revenue).

A myth about markets is that they provide what the buyer wants. They provide the most favorable arrangement to the seller that the buyer is willing to accept, which isn't necessarily the same as what the buyer wants.