Big and bulky, it's the Kia Borrego

When you need to move seven people 50 miles, it's unfortunate that public transit isn't always the answer. The problem is mathematical: seven times $25 (the cost of a train ticket) is $175. The alternative is to drive, and in this case that costs only about $20, plus another $13 for parking.

Ah, you say, but you have to have a vehicle capable of carrying seven. And miraculously, I did: A Kia Borrego. Don't worry if you've never heard of it, because it's new. And really big. This is the kind of gigantic body-on-frame SUV that could leave a trail of crushed crossover vehicles in its wake.

This is a dinosaur of a car in 2008, knowing what we know about our energy future. I heard a presentation this week by the author Richard Heinberg (Peak Everything) and he said it was "a very real possibility" that the airline industry will be barely functioning in three years. Why? Because fossil fuels have peaked, and we don't have a real substitute for them.

But we're still fiddling while Rome burns, aren't we? And I'm part of the problem, choosing to drive that huge gas-guzzling Kia on my family trip just because it saves me money. It has a 4.6-liter, 375-horsepower V-8 engine under the hood, sourced from the Hyundai Genesis. To be fair to Kia, the Borrego project was launched all of four years ago (that's how long new product cycles take). Nobody gave a thought to gas prices then ($2 a gallon, remember?), and it looked like the SUV phenomenon was going to last forever.

You don't necessarily have to go with that V-8; a 242-horsepower, 3.3-liter six is available, but even with that one you can expect only 18 mpg combined (the V-8 gets 17).

The Borrego is a dinosaur, and we know what happened to them. They no longer walk the earth, right? And in that same pipeline now is a whole new class of car. Plug-in hybrid cars, with the ability to travel 30 to 40 miles on battery power alone, then switch to gas power, are the adaptable mammals of our time. The $700 billion bailout legislation contained a lot of pork, but one good provision was $1 billion in tax credits for plug-ins.

Plug-ins are something both Obama and McCain (and Bush too) can champion. These 100-mpg vehicles will be cruising American roads long after the Sequoias and Borregos, like the dinosaurs, are reduced to fossilized remains.

By Jim Motavalli