KEY POINTS:
Arnold Schwarzenegger and David Beckham are the emblems of the end of an American economic era. Each owns at least one Hummer, the giant SUV designed around the Army's Humvee personal troop transporter.
But the Hummer has fallen out of favour and was last week put on the
block by General Motors. It is little wonder. Who would want to buy a beast that does about 15km to 4 litres and costs a small fortune to fill up?
GM also closed four SUV assembly plants as it put Hummer up for sale. But these drastic moves by GM are more significant than they first seem.
The desire to own big, thirsty motor vehicles with V6 and V8 engines, capable of transporting families over vast tracts of asphalt-covered prairie and mountain range, was a defining tenet of the American economic model of the past century.
Building roads and making cars to drive on them was a central plank of the New Deal, the economic plan devised by President Roosevelt to drag the country out of the Great Depression.
A network of state parkways was conceived and built in the 1930s and 1940s by Robert Moses, the father of American urbanism and the American Dream.
But today, with oil above US$130 a barrel and daily news stories about commuters who cannot afford to commute and hauliers who cannot afford to haul, the dream is over.
David Cole, director of the Centre for Automotive Research in Detroit, believes the US is on the brink of a new technological era and in the next five to 10 years advances in biofuels will enable Americans to drive big cars at a fraction of the environmental and economic cost.
GM has invested heavily in two companies which claim their bio-engineering and genetic modification methods can produce alternatives to petrol costing about US$1 a gallon. But a bold Government move may also be required. Cole, who fears the oil price will take a tumble, is calling it to set a US$50 floor for the price of a barrel of crude. If oil becomes too cheap, he believes, the impetus to invest in new technology will be lost.
It may be that Arnie and Becks will be able to keep driving their dinosaurs, but with biofuel in the tank instead of petrol.
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