I'm not following you. An SUV is a UTILITY vehicle. "Utility" implies that it serves a useful function.
So nobody wants to haul around a boy scout troop because gas goes up 2 cents a mile? What are you supposed to do with the boy scouts? Line em up against the wall and shoot them?
If you are cramming 7 people into your SUV, and it gets 18 miles per gallon, you're getting 126 passenger miles per gallon of gas. Plus there's the added bonus that if some weenie dog hybrid death trap slams into you, yours won't be the vehicle described in the newspaper as being "squashed like a bug".
According to the auto manufacturers own stats, the vast majority of SUV owners don't drive them for the reasons the vehicles were originally constructed. And as for shuttling around vast quantities of kids, said kids would be safer in certain types of crashes in a passenger sedan or a minivan than they would be in an SUV.
I drive a Jeep Cherokee limited with a V-8 which in the winter is VERY beneficial in getting from point A to point B.
I don't have anyone to haul around being single, but I'll be GD if I'm going to follow the trumpeting of labeling in reference to the SUV being the scourge of the roadways and concern myself with increasing my mileage from 21mph to something else that will only decrease my ability to get to where I want to go. (in comfort I might add)
boy scouts are immoral.