In the past few weeks oil prices have reached nearly $50 a barrel, both a record and a sure sign of things to come. What's coming? Little tiny cars that will change our homes, roads, and national priorities -- cars we should have adopted years ago.

Consider the streets of Rome, many of which are old, narrow and filled with motor scooters, motorcycles, and tiny cars powered by gasoline at $5 a gallon.

By "small" cars I do not mean what we in the U.S. think of as compacts. Think smaller. Much smaller. How about a car that's less than nine feet long overall, seats two -- and gets 60 miles per gallon in town and 75 on the highway?

I suspect the first reaction to such cars is that while the gas mileage is great, they're simply too small for U.S. roads. It's not true. In Italy you routinely see tiny cars on the Autostrada, the equivalent of our interstate highways, and while small vehicles are surely not the fastest cars on the road, they're fast enough and get where they're going, fast enough to breach most U.S. speed limits. As to safety, you wouldn't want to get hit by a truck in a small car -- but then you wouldn't want to get hit by a truck in an SUV, either.