Start your engine, but plug it in first

DETROIT — Chrysler's new vice-chairman and president, Jim Press, would do well to remember a maxim that comes to us from the hallowed days of vaudeville: Never follow an animal act. For a media event introducing its 2009 Dodge Ram pickup, Chrysler's PR department wrangled -- or was it rustled? -- a herd of Texas longhorns in front of Cobo Center, site of last week's 2008 North American International Auto Show, known universally as the Detroit Auto Show. As Press nattered on about Chrysler's new product, one of the steers began to show his affection for another. Press, not surprisingly, had trouble recapturing the audience's attention. "OK, OK, look at the truck," he pleaded.

Hot steer-on-steer action notwithstanding, nobody cared.

This year's show drew a line in that proverbial line-drawing sand, dividing the American car business as it was -- big trucks and SUVs, a gluttony of horsepower, and the jumbo-sized parochialism of the market -- from the car business as it soon will be: smaller, lighter, smarter, more globalized, vastly more fuel efficient and less reliant on gasoline.

There are many good reasons: First, obviously, are the revised Corporate Average Fuel Economy rules recently signed into law, requiring automakers to achieve a fleet-wide average of 35 miles per gallon by 2020. Just as obvious is $100 per barrel oil; carmakers are finally shaking off the denial that has paralyzed them for so long. Build more fuel-efficient cars and trucks, or die. Third, there is the very real prospect that carmakers will have to meet not only CAFE's mileage requirements but also even tougher standards if, as seems likely, California and other states win their case against the federal government, allowing them to set their own vehicle emission standards on carbon dioxide.

Bottom line: Carmakers are swimming frantically to stay ahead of a regulatory tsunami that's heading their way.

Five years ago, an urban sprite like the Mercedes-built Smart car would have been laughed off the floor. Four years ago, the notion of a luxury plug-in hybrid like the Fisker Karma (an electric vehicle with a range-extending internal-combustion engine) might have only crossed the minds of some electrical engineers at UC Davis. Three years ago, a California-legal diesel-electric hybrid powertrain (as in the Mercedes-Benz S300 Bluetec Hybrid concept) existed only as some whiteboard fantasy in Stuttgart. Two years ago, a Prius-like pickup truck (Toyota's A-BAT concept) was the stuff of Toby Keith's blackout nightmares.