Maya Motavalli photo

The author and Tesla's fabulous Roadster.

For the 14th straight month, the Federal Highway Administration is reporting that the vehicle miles traveled (VMT) by Americans has declined. Fuel consumption is down an incredible 5.25 billion gallons in December 2008 compared to December 2007.

Obviously, VMT started declining when gas prices hit $4 a gallon, but it's now less than half of that and we're all still driving less. Why?

The answer seems to be that at some point the motivation shifted from the high price of fuel to the high cost of living. The price of oil is down because the demand for it is significantly impaired. Recessions will do that. Americans are driving less now because we're not taking as many long trips, and we're not going out to dinner. (We are going out to the movies at an unprecedented level, but that's pure escapism, like the Busby Berkley movies of the 1930s.)

The auto industry is suffering because we're not buying cars, either. The forecaster Global Insight predicts there will be 13.4 million cars sold in the U.S. in 2009, down from 16.1 million in 2007 and 16.5 in 2006. They don't see a sales recovery until at least 2013.

So habits are becoming ingrained. And fuel economy matters again. The age of the SUV is definitively over. If you don't believe that, GM has a Hummer division it would gladly sell you.

The future belongs to electric cars, and that's not a bad thing, even if you're a performance enthusiast. I drove a Tesla Roadster last week, and I've never had a more exhilarating driving experience. The thing felt alive, and off-the-line acceleration was just sick. They say it reaches 60 in 3.9 seconds, and that's about what it seemed to me.

The Roadster gets that kind of performance from lithium-ion batteries, more than 6,000 of them. Li-ion is the new world standard, and companies all over the world are competing for a share of tomorrow's auto industry.

Tesla Motors has delivered something like 200 cars, with orders for 1,200 more. It predicts it will reach profitability by the middle of the year. If that proves correct, it will be an amazing feat in this economy. The Roadster costs $109,000.

We still have a couple of years before the first mass-market EVs are delivered. In the meantime, people are either driving cars with good fuel economy or they're not driving.