Did I just buy an SUV?

I didn't mean to. I am an environmentalist. Really. But before I knew it, there it was, in front of my house.

Editor's note: Watch Mark drive his new SUV here.

By Mark Benjamin

Read more: Environment, Politics, News, Cars, Auto Industry, Oil, Mark Benjamin

Jan. 5, 2009 | WASHINGTON -- My wife and I sat in hard plastic chairs in one of those bland, nearly empty offices in the rear of the auto dealership showroom. At our backs, a wall of glass separated us from a cavernous room full of brand-new, improbably shiny vehicles wedged in at odd angles with stickers in the back-seat windows.

There wasn't much more than plain beige walls and a naked metal office desk. Not even a family picture. Car salesmen don't really need their own offices, I thought, just shared, temporary vestibules where they used to park potential prey during the attrition part of the negotiation; the "I've got to go ask my manager whether we can possibly make these numbers work" maneuver as they went out back for a cigarette.

That was back before the recession. Behold the cratering car industry: sales plummeting, dealerships failing. The salesmen will now dance naked for you.

Our child-hauling chariot, a 10-year-old Volvo station wagon, had grown too pricey to maintain. (C'mon. You knew it was going to be a Volvo station wagon. I write for Salon.)

We needed something bigger. We've got our two kids and we often haul around a couple of their friends. Throw in the dog and a couple of bags of groceries, and the station wagon quickly got too small. We needed a third-row seat.

No minivans, we agreed, though we didn't just come out and say that minivans are totally lame. We said things like, "I just don't like the way the space is utilized in a minivan."

We could never, however, drive an SUV, because they are unspeakably evil. I'm intimately familiar with liberal self-righteousness. I've been to the Unitarian Church. I've even flashed my own peacock feathers from time to time. I didn't eat meat in college, in part, I now think, just so I could say so.

I'm on the carbon wagon also. After all, Al Gore could be on to something with his PowerPoint thingy. My most recent major purchase prior to this car was actually an SUB, a sport utility bicycle, rigged out with massive panniers so I can haul everything from groceries to a 30-inch Weber grill around town without my car, thumbing my nose at the SUVs stuck in traffic. I ride my SUB to work every day -- and to the neighborhood farmers' market, where I buy locally grown produce. In the summer, I cook my curry-cream squash soup (am I turning you on, Volvo drivers?) in a solar oven. In short, I've been getting all Laurie David, all Ed Begley Jr. lately.

In the barren office off the car showroom floor, the deal was sealed for our new wheels. My wife and I leaned over the documents laid out neatly on the steel desk. There, on the first piece of paper, was the beautiful price we had so easily rammed down the salesman's throat. There was also some other data. Make: Mitsubishi. Model: Outlander. Type: SUV.

SUV? There must be some mistake. We were buying an SUV?

I felt a jolt, a pang, a slight tug in the gut. Was that shock? Guilt? Had my wife seen those three letters? I didn't make eye contact with her. We signed the document and moved on to the next one.

I was incensed. I wasn't buying an SUV; I was buying a new type of vehicle soothingly called a "crossover," as in, "You have crossed over into something that is not an SUV. So it's cool. Don't worry about it." It seems that the automakers have figured out that it is no longer cool to drive an SUV while the polar bears are jumping from ice floe to ice floe.

Crossovers are large, bulbous, trucklike vehicles elevated relatively high off the ground with large wheels. Most are four-wheel drive and come with a powerful six-cylinder engine, sort of like, well, an SUV's.

Although the documents you will sign on purchase still apparently contain those three bone-chilling letters, crossover ads peddle a carefully calibrated cake-and-eat-it-too message. They usually tout something like "SUV functionality with carlike handling." Others come right out and say you are not, by any means, buying a boring minivan but rather something akin too, but just short of, an SUV. One crossover I considered promised it all: "rally-bred performance, all-weather handling and great gas mileage." Considering that a "real" SUV might get 11 miles per gallon in the city, the idea that its first cousin might get 18 seemed faintly green. Some crossovers even offer hybrid engines, which increase the mpg to something more like 25.

That's the auto industry's version of getting all Laurie David on us. Buy a crossover. It's not an SUV. Then it isn't your fault that polar bears are likely to be relegated to stuffed-animal status within our lifetime.

Next page: Signing off on my new SUV was a shock. But the cushy seats had a surprisingly analgesic effect on my conscience