I love the Toyota Prius. It is the sleek, stylish in its own unique, highly functional way, and it sips gas like good scotch. In fact, I often find myself staring at them as they whiz by (and by whiz, I mean audibly, not from a performance perspective, of course), admiring the owner for her decision to drop out of the race for speed and features that we’ll never use after our salesperson closes us.

While I applaud Toyota’s significant efforts reduce the world’s dependency on oil (check out the preliminary details on the 2008 Prius – I hope that the production version isn’t as ugly, but with its use of solar panels on the roof and upgraded Synergy Drive system it is estimated to get up to 80 MPG!), Toyota is expanding its line of gas guzzling trucks, with its recent unveiling of a “supersized” version of the Tundra.

Therefore, Toyota’s commitment to reducing the carbon output of vehicles purchased by Americans is highly questionable, don’t you think?

Some might argue that Toyota is only serving consumers’ demand for larger trucks, and that this specific market is less concerned about carbon emissions. But is “the consumer wants it,” a reasonable enough excuse? When demand is low or even nonexistent for a product, and a company desires to sell more, it creates demand. So why is Toyota expanding its production of more fuel inefficient vehicles, when it could use the same methods of persuasion to encourage consumers to buy more efficient vehicles? If a company can simply point fingers at the consumer, and the consumer points her finger back at the company, we have ourselves an unproductive case of the “chicken or the egg,” don’t we?

My advice to Toyota: treat the US like a heroine-addicted family member and stop offering to sell him or her drugs, because clearly American consumers have an oil-dependency problem that even we don’t know how to cure without a little help.