Who said you'd dismantled the Gas Guzzling argument?

As far as I can tell, no matter what anyone says to the contrary, SUVs get abominable mileage (MPG) - far below most regular cars, and even in some case as bad, or worse than the old gas guzzlers of the 60's and early 70's.

How is this dismantling the "Gas Guzzling" nature of SUVs from the arguments about SUVs?

The only thing that makes those things even half affordable to run is the very low gas prices you pay - probably due to lack of taxes on gas sales, but there are other factors in there as well [like current US energy policy and lack of concern about doing anything practical about tackling global warming by reducing US CO2 emissions].

Previous graphs showed in this thread that the US uses twice the level of oil per capita than the rest of the industrialised world does.

Most of that extra usage I'd bet comes from the booming market for SUVs.

Also, if SUV's are not gas guzzling, then how come the average MPG of the total US vehicle fleet is actually decreasing (getting worse) and has been doing that for the last 15-20 years (about the time the SUV craze took off), and is now nearly at the same point it was in the early 70's, when 30+ years of fuel efficient technology and millions of efficient cars and big trucks have been made and sold in that time - and all the old gas guzzlers from the 60's and 70's have mostly been retired or scrapped?

The only candiate vehicle to explain this downward trend, I can see is the (rise in) SUV.

Remember this figure is an *average* (the sum of the mileage driven divided by amount of gas used divided by the count of vehicles on the road gives an average MPG).

The only way this average can get worse over time is if new vehicles have worse mileage than the older vehicles they are replacing and thats true even if the old cars they replace are kept on the road.

And of course, the MPG is merely a scapegoat for the pollution that these things emit, which in some cases is not easy to find out what the levels of pollution SUVs emit - or get anyone to make them less polluting as SUVs are exempt from any clean air and pollution reduction requirements other cars have to meet.