Should Humvees Be Illegal?

So, I was watching a show about the car of the future and they were talking about all the different alternative-energy cars people are trying to develop such as hydrogen, ethanol, lithium battery, etc.
When I first started watching the show I was feeling hopeful. But after the show I was feeling somewhat depressed. it's looking pretty grim, frankly. Nothing's going to happen soon and, even when it does happen, it won't be enough.

They're saying by the year 2050 there will be 2.5 times as many cars on the road as there are now. And, while progress is being made towards finding alternative-energy cars, it's slow and none of the options so far is particulary ideal. Burning ethanol, for example, only reduces carbon emissions by 25%. And this doesn't even take into account all the energy required to preduce the corn needed for the ethanol. As it turns out it takes nearly as much fossil fuel to produce it as it replaces. Kind of pointless, isn't it?

While this is disturbing enough, there was something else that sort of pissed me off. Besides all the research being done towards alternative-energy cars, lots of research has been done to make current gasoline powered cars run more efficiently. They say that within the last 20 years engine efficiency has increased 30%. Yeah, that's good. That's not the part that pisses me off. What pisses me off is they also said that during this same time the average fuel economy rating has gone from 22mpg to 20mpg despite this increase in efficiency. Why? Because, rather than making cars more fuel efficient, car manufacturers have been using the technology to make "sexy" cars with more horsepower, or bigger vehicles. There are more SUVs on the road now than ever before.

So in this day and age of looming energy shortages and global warming, why do we even allow gas-guzzling vehicles? Why are Humvees, for example, even legal? Who the hell needs one of those? Considering the Earth's dire future with our current practices, would it be so aweful to make it illegal to own a huge vehicle without proving you have a need? No more Humvees, no more Ford Expeditions unless you can prove you have a real need for one. For example, if you earn your living doing construction and you need a big-ass pickup truck to hall your tools and supplies then fine. But if you're just some guy with money having a midlife crisis who get a hard-on about the idea of driving a Humvee, no go for you, buddy.

Most of the time I've actually seen Humvees on the road they're being driven by middle-aged housewives buying groceries or taking the kids to Big 5 to buy new soccer balls. She's probably driving it because her dumb-ass husband had a mid-life crisis and thought he was going to reclaim his youth with it but soon realized he couldn't afford the gas to drive it to work everyday, so the wife's stuck using it to run errands. This is just selfish, wasteful, and stupid, IMO. Would it really be so bad to just outlaw this kind of crap?