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We have three kids (and before you go judging that, yes, two of them were adopted) and two dogs. We drive a Mazda 5. It has six seats (2-2-2 configuration), the front two rows are buckets and the back two seats are perfectly comfortable for children (and with three kids, our 9-year-old is always in the last row, sometimes with the dogs on his lap...). All four back seats can be folded down individually to give you all sorts of configurations for cargo. The kicker? We get...drum roll please...an average of 30-31 MPG, which is even higher than expected.
Do we wish we had a bigger car? Sure, sometimes, and it's easy to think that way now that gas is down to <$2 a gallon. When we're packed to the brim with luggage for five and the dogs are on our laps, yeah, we're craving more space. But that's maybe five days out of the 365 days a year that we drive our car. We looked at the Honda Odyssey and came close to buying it, but then gas prices shot up to $4/gallon while we were car shopping and it sealed the deal. I know that next year, or in the next few years, when gas prices go up, we will have NO regrets whatsoever. If we need to haul a boat, or drive a soccer team full of kids to a birthday party, we'll rent a truck or a bus or whatever the hell we need to get from point A to point B. But in the meantime, I will drive the smallest car that I possibly can on a daily basis. Not just for me, but for everyone else I share this planet with.
Having two kids is NO excuse for getting an SUV. Smug assholes like the author of this article are STEALING from all of us- including MY CHILDREN. You are stealing the future; the environment and all its precious resources are being wasted on your generation. My husband and I are in our twenties and are terrified of what will happen when the Earth is torn to shreds and the entire human species is left paralyzed by a lack of fuel and investment in clean energies. When we decided to have a large family we were determined that we would NOT live off the backs of future generations.
Mark, when your kids are unable to breathe clean air, or travel long distances because there is no fuel left, I'm sure they will NOT be thanking you for buying your big, stupid SUV to drive around their friends when they were ten years old. Excuses, excuses...you're just like every other "green" yuppie jerk.
