Actually, gasoline tends to be sluggishly elastic. Demand DOES change, it just changes slowly. And similarly with supply. People can reduce a certain amount of gasoline consumption quickly -- avoiding unnecessary trips, walking (very) short distances, combining trips, carpooling, etc.. But the physical construction of our cities demands a commute. Cities these days are largely suburbs. Without a commute, we don't do business. And that's not a parameter that's easily or quickly modifiable.
Same with gas-miserly cars. Sure, given time the automakers can retool and start cranking out econoboxes again. But that takes years and a sustained demand for them before the manufacturers are willing to take the risk.
On the supply side, it takes years to drill new wells and build new refineries, to say nothing of developing alternate fuel technologies such as shale extraction or polymerization.
The money is made in the short haul, where the supply/demand curve goes grossly out of whack for a brief period of time because of some disaster (real or invented). In this last round of gouging, supply went short overnight, and the speculators and profiteers jumped on futures, which drove the price through the roof. The gougers made their money -- driven by hysteria they themselves helped create -- then bailed before the bottom fell out.
Classic amoral capitalism.
Developed over a half century ago & carefully shelved in favor of catalytic converters( a horror story in itself).
H P F I allows each fuel molecule to be completely surrounded by air for complete combustion (more bang for the buck), and no unburned fuel components that need a cat. to burn them after the fact.
For as long as we've had cat. converters all that wasted fuel burned in them could have been used to power our vehicles down the road( a 20~30% MPG improvement).
Just imagine if we had been able to use 20~30% less Towelhead juice since 1965!