[69ConvertibleFirebird]

Diesel is the answer. My commuter car (when I'm not doing my best to "kill" the planet with my Sequoia SUV) is a 25 year old diesel VW pickup. It gets 43 mpg commuting (mix city/highway). It cost me virtually nothing, costs less than $100/year to insure, and gets better mileage than most, if not all, of the hybrids.

Diesel fuel can be grown by your local farmer as well. Stop paying dictatorships for oil.

[SmoothTalker]

They run for ever too. And now that the performance and refinement are in the same league as gas there is little reason not to switch. There is about to be a huge wave of diesel cars added to the market in the US. In europe it took only about five or ten years of the modern tech diesels being out for them to overtake gas. I expect a lot of the market to start to go diesel in the next decade here. The main challenge will be overcoming the stigma of the slow and unrefined diesels of a generation ago.