where should oil prices settle?

I like many of you am a car person, I love them and I esp. like muscle cars but for a long time I have been thinking about where gas prices should be. for many people they will say "as cheap as possible" but I on the other hand would not like see this at all, I won't make the jump to say I like where they are now but rather I would like to see them higher then 2.75 for regular.

Now I?m sure many of you are going to ask why I say this. One reason being is that no matter what we say about our prices being bad, we can?t complain to Europeans because will to assure you, they have it a lot worse then us.

Second in this country we have grown extremely dependant of cheap oil, just look at our cars and trucks they are big and have large and wasteful engines; look at European and Japanese cars, small engines they get great gas mileage and can be just as much fun to drive and put out lower emissions. In the American auto industry unless a market or governmental force changes the American auto companies never change.

In the 60s the American auto industry had the formula down, big engines in fast cars because of cheap gas and low insurance. But they also were ruining our ecosystem, and wasting large amounts of oil which just was not a big deal then. then we hit the early 70s the government finally placed mandatory emissions regulations on cars in order to clean them up forcing the auto industry to clean up the air, then the mid 70s gas shot up in price which forces the auto industry to shrink the size of cars and also shrink the engines. So the American car buyer had no choice when it came to performance or what not by this time, but what did this force the American auto industry to do? It got better with fuel injection and computers which allowed them to put higher horsepower cars out while at the same time maintaining fuel minimum regulations.

So if the auto industry is pushed now, they will be pushed to build a better car. a more environmentally friendly car that can pull 30 or 40 or even 50 mpg and still be able to run with the best of them, the hybrid tech is looking very promising and its just coming along, lets give it a nudge. what this will also do it put us at a less prone position from the middle east, because right now the middle east holds a huge card in our face. we just plain don?t have the resources of oil that they do and should our need for oil drastically decrease the middle east and its instability will not be the issue it is today in society.