Let’s call this one.

Tag it and bag it — the sport utility vehicle has passed on.

Might as well hold services right here in the driveway of the Thielke family of Aurora, where their hulking, 10.5-mile-per-gallon Ford Excursion is on fire sale with few takers and is soon to be replaced by a less greedy minivan.

Killed by insanely high gas prices and a general cultural embarrassment, the SUV leaves lots of survivors but fewer and fewer friends.

“We’re kind of in a pickle. We need a large car, but it’s killing us,” Erin Thielke, mother of eight, said of the family’s $100-plus weekly gas bill. “It stinks. It’s just like throwing money away.”

And thus begins the requiem for the possession that defined America for nearly two decades: the box on wheels with more cup holders than seats, the gas-sucking, soccer- team-hauling, rollover-prone vehicle that was cooler than a minivan but more reviled than a coal-fired power plant. It’s only decent to hold services here in the West, as Colorado and Wyoming ranked at the top of per-capita SUV purchases.

Peter Brown of Automotive News in Detroit is already referring to the SUV as a dinosaur plodding through some distant, inexplicable past.

“The cultural phenomenon of the early 1990s is almost certainly dead forever,” he said.

Official SUV sales were off more than 25 percent in the first part of 2008, and unofficial reports have them “falling off a cliff” since then. The Big Three U.S. automakers are idling the plants that produced giant vehicles that until recently were synonymous with American freedom and bounty — the Liberty, the Excursion, the Tahoe.

Permanent changes

Economists and auto experts say that changes in consumer habits are permanent as gasoline settles into a $3-to-$4 price range. The federal Department of Transportation reported total vehicle miles driven in the Western region dropped nearly 3 percent in April from the year before, a lifestyle change economists call shocking when the U.S. populations of people and vehicles continue to rise.

“You can say we’re definitely in a different realm today than we were a year ago, in terms of the breadth of responses we see consumers making,” said James Hamilton, a professor of economics at the University of California at San Diego.

A Kelley Blue Book study for June shows high gas prices have altered the choices of 72 percent of people looking for a new car. Some have dropped out of the market entirely while more than half are checking out fuel-efficient, small hybrids.

New homes in far-flung exurbs — the terminus for so many of those SUV trips — are going unsold or going into foreclosure. Hamilton reports that 15 percent of the homes in Temecula, Calif., a distant bedroom community for San Diego, are now in foreclosure. People can afford neither the house payments nor the gas payments to get them there.

Denver-area real-estate agent Mark Hodge agrees, saying central homes and apartments are holding value, while suburban homes can’t sell. For himself, he likes having an SUV, but not two — the extra one in his driveway is for sale online.

Hodge’s 2001 Eddie Bauer Ford Expedition is posted at $2,000 under blue-book value, and he’s had no phone calls so far.

“It’s panic selling,” he said of the severe price reductions in used SUVs.

Travis Stahle saw an era pass with three swipes of his credit card — on the same trip to the gas station. His Ford Excursion sported a 44-gallon gas tank, so here’s the math: Many gas stations have a $75 credit-card limit. If he needed 40 gallons, the $160 bill would take three separate transactions.

Shift in vehicles

The cultural shift is getting Scott Carter reacquainted with his motorcycle. His Highlands Ranch family’s 2006 Toyota Sequoia is on the market while they look for a Honda Accord or Civic. Having three competitive hockey players in the family means long drives to practice and tournaments, and a 16-year-old son needs to learn to drive in something less than a street yacht.

“If you don’t really need it, you have to question if you really have to have it,” Carter said. “It’s getting away from the ‘want’ side of things a little bit.”

The Carters’ shift echoes another factor in the flight from SUVs: the maturing children of the primary SUV buyers. The modern SUV era began in 1990 with the introduction of the populist Ford Explorer and peaked in 2005 when SUVs and light pickups reached 55 percent of the new-car market.

A generation of kids grew up surrounded by a dozen cup holders and overhead DVD players, and now they’re leaving for college in Toyota Priuses.

Along the way came the square-house-on-wheels Hummer, designer models like the Eddie Bauer and endless ridicule from environmentalists and foreigners. A Frenchman who analyzed American SUV mania likened us to reptiles seeking the most armor for instinctive combat.

Filling the supertankers was cheap; buying oil took up only 3.5 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product in 2005, while it will hit 6.9 percent this year if gas prices stay high.

Parents bought the SUVs because they were slightly cooler than minivans, Brown of Automotive News said. They claimed to need the extra space to haul kids and friends and camping equipment, but more often, like the Clockner family of Parker, they used massive trucks like the Excursion to commute 2 miles to work.

“Eleven miles to the gallon doesn’t do anybody any good,” said John Clockner, among those now trying to sell a used SUV at swallow-hard prices. “An Accord gets 28 or 29, plus you can find a place to park it.”

Eighteen years after the first Explorer, a nation of SUV lovers is now talking like a bunch of binge drinkers ready to sober up.

“Gas prices are just too high,” Thielke said. “People are getting slammed in the pocketbook.”

Still, Thielke is evidence that while the SUV might get buried, it will not go entirely unmourned.

“The kids are having a fit,” she said, looking out at the Expedition she planned to chalk a “For Sale” sign on that very afternoon. “I have tall children. And the big cars have lots of comfort.”

Michael Booth: 303-954-1686 or mbooth@denverpost.com