Originally Posted by The New York Times

Soaring gas prices have turned the steady migration by Americans to smaller cars into a stampede...

The switch to smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles has been building in recent years, but has accelerated recently with the advent of $3.50-a-gallon gas. At the same time, sales of pickup trucks and large sport utility vehicles have dropped sharply.
In another first, fuel-sipping four-cylinder engines surpassed six-cylinder models in popularity in April...

But with oil prices expected to remain high for years, auto industry executives are seeing a turning point.
“The era of the truck-based large S.U.V.’s is over,” said Michael Jackson, chief executive of AutoNation, the nation’s largest auto retailer.