If you can wait a few months and downsize just a bit, just get a Ford Escape Hybrid; that way you can have an SUV and still get good mileage.
I own a Black 2003 Escalade. I bought it last April and I have less than 8000 miles on it. I am willing to give anyone on this board a good deal if they are interested. One owner!(me) Excellent condition. Just sits in my garage except for the weekends when I get back into town.
If you're going to spend that much... why not wait until the end of the year for the Lexus SUV Hybrid? Initial reviews say they get nice gas mileage while still performing like a light SUV. Otherwise, get a bad-ass sedan since you want a bigger car. A huge SUV is booooring if you're a single guy.
Tahoe's are da s***! There is not a better truck/SUV out there. Expeditions are just too much car unless you have a big family and even then you can still fit everyone in a suburban instead. Really, Tahoe's are just the best..... My opinion might be a little bias though considering I happen to be the owner of a '96 2 door Z-71 Tahoe.
How automakers save money with SUVs: They decided in the mid-1980s that they were going to build more light trucks to take advantage of all the regulatory loopholes and were able to do so very cheaply, even though they didn't have a lot of truck engineers. Ford had 12,000 car engineers and 400 light truck engineers in 1983, for example. What did they do? They took the steel underbodies of the pickup trucks and simply lowered onto them different passenger compartments and bolted them on. ... It was very cheap. You could build pickups and SUVs on the same assembly line. Since so many SUVs are car-based rather than truck-based at this point, I don't think this is so much the truth anymore. As a matter of fact, the move toward more car-based SUVs negates some of the things brought out on such websites. Except for the gas mileage issue, a Lexus RS330 (for example) has similar greenhouse gas emissions and the same EPA Air Pollution score as my sedan. The Toyota RAV4 actually has lower greenhouse gas emissions and supposedly gets better gas mileage (or about the same) as my Altima. Clearly neither the Tahoe nor the Expedition fall into this category, however.
