I didn't give any references since I've heard that figure often enough to consider it well-known. (A quick google gives me the somewhat dated http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/cars/rules/cafe/docs/Summary-Fuel-Economy-Pref-2004.pdf, concluding that European passenger car fuel economy is 47% better than that of the US - sorry about those 3%.)

And you are quite right in that this is in part, but not completely, caused by differences in size. But are you really saying that SUVs are mainly driven off-road? According to studies, they are not. (see Automobile Politics by Pateron). If your big car has actually tasted mud, it should count itself lucky.

I live in the country-side of Sweden, where road salt is illegal for environmental reasons, and we have more than our fair share of snow. Seeing that Americans have ~420% higher death rates in traffic than we do (2.9 per 100,000 in Sweden, 12.3 in the U.S, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate), I'd say our "european-style" cars are handling it quite nicely, thank you.

"Oh wait" what? The gas consumption for the average european car _is_ about half of the average american car, so, yeah, it sort of has worked.
You can also see the development of fuel efficiency of american cars during the 70s oil crisis - the cars suddenly got a lot more efficient, and then became less efficient again as prices went down (which they of course did through a more adventurous foreign policy and generous distribution of bombs). You can read about this in Auto Opium: A Social History of American Automobile Design by David Gartman, and realize that the only efficiency that the automobile industry has even tried to achieve has been the rapidity of the obsolescence. (Which they, I would argue, have in common with a lot of industries. I don't really know from where the perception comes that companies would optimize anything else than their own profits - read Democratizing Innovation, by von Hippel.)

Subsidies for something that is killing our communities (Jane Jacobs wrote about this nicely in the 60s, in Life and Death of the Great American Cities), our environment and people (the leading cause of death among 18-24 y.o) is just as bizarre as the EU subsidies for fossil coal based energy production.

It's really time to start seeing the structural effects of automobility - there's a reason for the shitty public transit in the U.S. and that walking is no longer a valid option. Did you know that L.A used to have one of the best public transit systems in the world? Having trying to get around L.A. by bus, the best thing I can say about it is that you do meet a lot of... eh, interesting people.
But having lived in old cities in Sweden, Italy and Spain, built before the introduction of the automobile - I've never owned a car and never felt the need to.
Living in Venice for a year or so really teaches you what a life without the automobile could be like - you can smell flowers in the city and hear the children playing in the streets from a block away.

I find the idea that electric cars would solve the sustainability problems we're seeing naive, at best. Most of the electricity production comes from fossil fuels anyway. Wind and solar won't be able to step in to replace this energy production, we simply don't have enough material to produce that many wind/solar farms. Nuclear, you say? If we were to replace all fossil fuels with nuclear, the uranium would last about 20-50 years, just postponing the problem while adding a shitload of radioactive waste to it.

The only reasonable thing is to step away from the entire automotive regime. This is the only solution that will reclaim the cities to their citizens and stop the killing of 1.3 million people per year (and that's just in direct traffic accidents, not counting indirect deaths through e.g. air pollution).

Technical "progress" in the current system of innovation won't be able to do anything about the fact that the material basis of our existence is quite finite.

(Sorry about not posting sources, I work in this field and generally would - but I'm on vacation!)

In Sweden, we've had this law (in Sweden called Lagen om Elektronisk Kommunikation, LEK, the Law of Electronic Communication) for almost 9 years, more specifically since 25th of July 2003. When it was introduced, neither the government nor the police met the demands set by the law, and they were immediately facetiously reported to the police for it by a number of "concerned citizens", but they weren't charged. After a couple of months they'd implemented the necessary information on their web sites. I haven't heard of anyone having problems with the law (nor of anyone actually following it except the very large web sites), so probably the case law is quite reasonable.

I have recently bought a Notion Ink Adam for exactly the same reason. The nice thing with it is that it has a Pixel Qi screen, which makes it possible to read outdoors/in direct sunlight, but also a normal back-light mode, to read indoors. I find it absolutely wonderful to read papers/scientific books on. I previously used the Kindle, but I found the refresh time of the screen to be really annoying, as I like to skim large numbers of papers. And that it isn't possible to take notes on a Kindle in a reasonable way really made it rather useless for my purposes. (And then I sat down on it and broke it, making it even more useless.) The Adam is great to skim-read on. I have also bought a small portable USB-keyboard, so I can write longer comments on papers I read, or even write on articles when outdoors. Plus, I can read/write emails, surf and so on. But I must mention that the Adam has a lots of downsides: you pretty much need to have a geekish vain, since the original OS is complete crap (tabletroms.com has a nice pretty stable Honeycomb for Adam, which is great). Moreover, the reflective mode of the Adam really sucks compared to e.g. Kindle, you pretty much have to be in sunlight to see anything. It's quite similar to a Game Boy from 1990. Moreover, Notion Ink REALLY don't want you to buy things from them. Expect ordering time of at least a couple of months, and lots of issues. But I'm really happy with reading scientific literature on mine. Now I only need to buy a waterproof case for it, so I can read while in the bathtub. :-)