And by RIP, I mean “rot in historical ignominy.” It turns out that consumer demand for fuel is more elastic than we all feared. With gas prices going through the roof, people are finally starting to buy more reasonable cars.

GM saw a 28% drop in light-vehicle sales in May. Ford’s sales fell 16%. The Ford F-150, the most popular vehicle in the United States almost every year for the past three decades, was knocked off its perch by both the Toyota Camry and Toyota Corolla.

Hummer sales fell by 60%!

GM has announced the closure of its Janesville assembly plant, and the discontinuation of the plus-sized Tahoe, Suburban and Yukon lines as early as 2009. No word on the Hummer, but the buzzards are circling. GM will add additional shifts to plants that produce more fuel-efficient cars, and the company hopes to have the electric Chevy Volt in showrooms by 2010.

As a side note, the H2 hummer was not only an obnoxious and wasteful “fuck you” to everyone whose visual field it polluted, it was also a shitty car, engineering-wise:

Related Posts:

• Apple Releases Environmental Impact Analyses (October, 2008)
• the big three got killed by babies (March, 2006)
• TED Talks: Humanity’s Violent History, Developing Rwanda, Redefining “Bioenergy” (December, 2007)
• John Robb’s “Dissipative Systems” (June, 2008)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 11:01 am and is filed under environment, fuck you big oil. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.