From that year forward, instead of increasing fuel economy, what began to increase was both weight and horsepower. In 1984, the average light vehicle sold in America had less than 100 horsepower. By 1995, the average vehicle weight had gone up by a third and the average horsepower had gone up more than 50%. And the speed limit Congress had reduced to 55 in 1974 was rolled back to 65 in 1987. If that rate had continued, by now we'd be driving around in bloated vehicles that average more then 200 horsepower on highways where the speed limit is 70 or more. Oh, wait a second – we are.

So, if you're waiting for the day where people say "Saddam who?" and "Did there used to be some towers there?" you only have four more years to go. I'd like to suggest that there is at least going to come a day in 2018 when people have trouble recalling George W. Bush, but some bruises take longer to fade.

Not only is the average family mobile packing ponies that were once the domain of only a "performance car," we often justify this on the grounds of safety. As in "by having more power, I can accelerate out of danger." Here's a tip: stomping on the gas pedal and outracing the fireball from a tumbling fuel tanker or crashing airliner only happens in the movies. People getting smashed to jelly because they drive their giganto-box too fast for them to control happens every damn day. As for that "I need to go 0-60 in 4 seconds to merge into traffic" argument, I drove a 3-cylinder Geo Metro for years in an area with a 70MPH speed limit and drivers that never bothered to read the signs. I have no sympathy.

While we're at it, we might as well deal with the whole "big = safe" proposition. Proponents of delivering 1.0 people to the office in a vehicle designed to carry 1.8 basketball teams often get in a hurry to present the idea that bigger cars are safer than smaller cars. They point at indicators that show fewer deaths per million miles traveled in large vehicles than in smaller ones. But what those charts don't show is another important figure: dollars. In America, small cars are almost uniformly cheap small cars. Many of these cars carry over older designs and pack in less safety gear than more expensive larger vehicles. When price is factored into the equation, the supposed advantage of large vehicles more than disappears. For example, a Mini Cooper has a curb weight of about 2,700 pounds. A Ford Excursion has a curb weight above 7,000 pounds. But the rate of deaths per million miles is 68 in the Cooper, 115 in the Excursion. For a more extreme example, you only have to watch a Formula 1 car, weighing less than 1500 pounds, smash into a wall or go flying through the air, only to have the driver climb out of the wreck unharmed. Engineering matters more than weight. So long as small cars are considered "starter cars," they get poor engineering. When they get good engineering, they're as safe as larger vehicles.

One place where driving an SUV or truck does consistently come in handy is if you want to kill someone. 75% of deaths in multi-vehicle accidents involve a truck, and about half of them come when a truck strikes another vehicle on the side. In a two vehicle accident, risk to the driver of the other vehicle is about two and a half times greater when a truck or SUV is involved. So if you really want to do someone in, go ahead, live large.

To see the results of our national amnesia, in which we forgot that fuel standards and the national speed limit did not exist merely to cause irritation, you have only to glance out the window. To see where we might be if we'd made other choices, you have to look a little harder.

Plenty of high mileage vehicles made it to the highway – my rattletrap Metro among them. There were better cars, too, including high mileage versions of the Honda Civic. Unfortunately, those cars were coming in as American drivers were opting for larger and larger vehicles.

But I want to zip right on past the good cars we actually saw on the roads and look at the kind of cars we should have had by now, and which we still might see in the near future. While all the media attention may be going to the will-they-or-won't-they Chevy Volt --and I certainly hope they will --, it's far from the only game in town or the most imaginative of the creations coming soon to a road near year. The half-hearted race between Toyota and GM to be first major automaker to crank out a plug-in hybrid is certainly significant, if only because when one of them finally does get a product to market, the big label imprimatur will make such a car acceptable to millions.

Still, if we had continued down that other road (pun intended), either the Volt or a plug-in Prius might seem rather pedestrian today (pun also intended, if painful). If rather than beginning to suffer a plague of automotive obesity, we had continued on our diet of light, more efficient, and smarter, there might very well be cars on the road today that were not too different from the "hypercar" that Avory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute have been pitching for over a decade. If you wait for GM, or Ford, or Toyota, or any other recognizable nameplate to give you a car like that, you might be waiting a long time, but fortunately there are other options that may soon bring these cars closer than your imagination.

It's been a long time since a new American automobile company was launched but there are several outfits out there trying to give it a shot (and don't worry, even though I've purposely not included links in these articles so far, I'll be sticking in some "foot notes" this time so you can see what these guys are about). In fact, I'm even going to skip over Tesla Motors and their lovely, oh-so-desirable electric sports car. I'm going to highlight two would be hypercars, because these vehicles strike me as imaginative, desirable, and even beautiful.

Actually, it's a bit of a misnomer to call either one of these companies an auto company, as both of them might as well have the motto "four wheels bad, three wheels good." The absence of that fourth wheel is all it takes in most states to make these guys motorcycle companies. However they're classified, these are the vehicles I want to see in my drive in the next five years. I'll warn you, you might as well skip the descriptions and go straight to the web sites, because if a picture is worth a thousand words, how much would I have to write to keep up with Youtube?

First up is a vehicle that not only gets classified as a motorcycle, it tilts like one. Venture Vehicles' VentureOne uses technology from Dutch company Carver Engineering. Carvers are already on sale in Europe, but those vehicles are both pricey and a bit ungainly. Even so, watching a video of a Carber in action is like seeing fun boiled down to its essence. Venture has given the Carver a slick redesign and paired it with a plug-in hybrid or all-electric power train that promises snappy performance along with better than 100 mpg.

They've recently gotten an infusion of cash -- $6 million – which sounds like (and is) a very small down payment on forming a auto company. However, Venture is hoping to take advantage of the upside of the kind of corporate structure that Robert Reich describes in Supercapitalism. They don't want to design every nut and bolt, in fact they don't want to design the whole car. They hope to hire someone to design it, someone else to build motors, someone else to create the frame, and so one. It's an auto company that works the same way that most computer companies -- they assemble the final product. I have great hopes that they'll make it work, not only because their vehicle is insanely cool, but because their business model might open up this market to smaller more agile companies.

The second hypercar I want to hype is Aptera's Type One. Aptera mean "wingless," and if you've spent any time around experimental aircraft, one glimpse at the Type One is enough to tell you why. It looks very much like a small aircraft, minus the wings. Like the VentureOne, the Type One has three wheels, but the arrangement is reversed – the Type One pairs the wheels at the front and leaves a solo wheel in the rear. The essence of the Type One is to take those super mileage vehicles that win marathon races under track conditions, and make it practical for the road. Aerodynamics and weight are the key, and Aptera has set lofty goals for each – aiming at a vehicle that weighs less than 900 pounds and has the drag coefficient of a fighter jet. As a result, the prototype Aptera gets 230 mpg. They're really like to get 300. How much do I like this vehicle? Enough that I have a downpayment in for one. If you want an Aptera, the line forms after me.

Skeptics are sure to point out that both these vehicles hold only two (or three in the case of the Aptera) passengers. You've got me there. We'll hang onto my wife's fat and gas-guzzling Prius for those times when we need to haul a crowd. But for my daily commute, I'm going to be flying past – in one of the cars that should have been here already.

Now those promised links:

Venture Vehicle' site at Fly The Road.

Aptera's heavily flashed based site and more informative Myspace page.

The Rocky Mountain Institute's description of a hypercar.