Look at how you use your car. How many trips to the mall require a six-passenger vehicle? How many commutes are made by individual drivers? How will your lifestyle change when gas tops $50 a barrel?

The inevitable fact is that limited oil production, transportation and refining capacity will cause gasoline prices to rise. As higher prices become the norm, consumers will look for ways to avoid massive gas bills. Small cars will be coming to your town -- and it's a good thing because the case for small cars is overwhelming.

Being small, they're cheap to buy.

Small cars come in two-seat and four-seat models and even as mini station wagons. There are also three-wheel trucks for city deliveries. With three wheels you can park just about anywhere.

In terms of real estate, with small cars a garage can hold a vehicle (and maybe two in a space measuring 12 x 22 feet) and still have room for tons of storage. It will be easier to buy a home because less income will go for transportation and car debt. Many households will inevitably have a "fleet" of cars -- small ones for everyday driving and a big one for trips or major hauling. Builders, in turn, will change home designs to accommodate small vehicles. The cost to heat and air condition houses in some areas will decline because there will be reduced oil demand.

No less important, we are soon to get small cars for the very simple reason that such vehicles are in the national interest. If our domestic car fleet got 35 miles per gallon, oil prices would plunge with reduced demand, less money would go overseas (thus protecting the value of the dollar) and we would be less dependent on oil-producing nations -- some of which are politically unstable, grossly undemocratic and utterly hostile.

The need for smaller cars is hardly new. Go to a historic auto rally and you can see that today's vehicles are minuscule when compared with the behemoths we produced in the 1960s. We've shrunk vehicles before and we can do it again.

Jimmy Carter said in 1977 that higher energy costs were the "moral equivalent of war." The tragedy of Carter's statement is that it was largely ignored. We went small, but not small enough. We downsized, but then vans and SUVs came into the picture. With the price of oil now rising, small is no longer an option, it's inevitable and it will change the way we drive -- and the way we live.