Jeep decides to drop a Commander from 1200 feet in the sky and Operation Gratitude gets a PR buzz. Hilary Clinton makes predictable suggestion that perhaps Jeep dropped the wrong commander.

The 40mpg.com Web site says it's found a new clot of Republicans who believe "windfall" oil industry profits should be taxed to fund alternative energy initiatives. Huh? Did they call Lincoln Chafee's house a hundred times?

Dodge is looking for a replacement for HEMI Guy #2. Resume must include TV experience, ability to look like a Dukes of Hazzard refugee, and willingness to be indirect butt of size jokes.

Ford's going to be selling a lot more hybrids by the end of the decade. Ford, Lincoln and Mercury are covered -- but wouldn't Volvo also be a great place to sell green luxovehicles?

Mitsubishi will be giving gas to its customers in a new sales incentives. That's the logical follow-up to the heartburn that former president Pierre "E-Z Credit" Gagnon gave to Mitsubishi's board of directors.

Bye! The Dodge Neon has hit the end of the production line. That sadness you're feeling is strictly for the hot SRT4, right? Please say yes.

We're still recuperating from the aftereffects of the Frankfurt Auto Show. Email your suggested antidotes for the puffy, gravy-coated carbohydrates served up at the Skoda stand. Bloated? Oy, you haven't seen bloated.

Is it too early to give you our Christmas list?

Is it heat of the moment in the post-Katrina, pre-Rita calamity? Or do Americans really believe that we should fix our energy problems by taxing corporations more for doing what corporations are meant to do – make money?

That’s the big question left by the release of a new poll from the Web site www.40MPG.com and the Civil Society Institute, which enlisted the Opinion Research Corp. to conduct a poll on American attitudes toward price gouging and the response to Hurricane Katrina.

Of note: the Web site and the Institute profess to being nonpartisan. However, a quick read of the Institute’s Web site, reveals a host of pet causes including global warming and universal healthcare that would hardly be keynote speeches at a Republican or Libertarian political gathering.

Regardless of orientation, some of the survey’s findings have a ring of credence. They do seem to have been worded to wring out emotional responses from those polled, however. Nine out of ten respondents said they believed oil companies were gouging customers, while four out of five said the government wasn’t doing enough about high prices and American energy dependence on the Middle East.

Taking on the question of price gouging alone is a difficult one in times like this, because charges of price gouging are inevitably an emotional reaction to the pocketbook squeeze. To some, price gouging is a symptom of a market economy run amok. But this survey doesn’t ask these critical questions in the right way. What is price gouging? Prominent libertarian critics like talk radio star and Fair Tax author Neal Boortz would say there is no such thing. And when people complain about high gas prices, they forget decades of cheap gas just past. The facts are that America has the most extensive energy platform in the world and has had energy cheaper than some countries awash in oil. In this deadly hurricane season, no one has had the chance to ask who will pay to rebuild the damaged drilling platforms in the Gulf, or to stitch together the net of pipelines ruptured during last year’s Hurricane Ivan and worked over more by Katrina. Or, who pays for the exploration that busts without a single barrel being pumped from the ground.

Other questions in the 40MPG survey appear more reasonable—until you deconstruct them. The survey says three of four Americans say the price hikes make it more important that the government boost fuel efficiency standards. And four out of five say that American companies should follow Toyota’s lead and convert their fleets to hybrid power. It’s difficult to argue with these contentions, unless you believe in free markets. In thirty years of fuel-economy mandates, buying habits haven’t changed in the U.S. In fact, buyers have shown their predilection for vehicles that get about the same gas mileage, on average, as they did when CAFE came into being.

As TCC’s Mike Davis reminds me, nobody wants to drive the vehicles that get 40 mpg today, with the possible exception of the Toyota Prius. “One of the few legitimate 40-mpg cars was the Toyota Echo which they pulled from the market a few months ago because they couldn't give them away. I want to see ANY 40 mpg vehicle hauling a trailer, not to mention a family with three children and luggage,” Davis says.

Lastly, it’s hard to imagine the logical contortions surveyors had to engage in to get the right answer to the question of oil company profits. According to the survey, 76 percent of people who identify themselves as Republicans would support "a tax on the windfall profits of oil companies" if the money was spent on alternative energy research. Is there a disconnect here in the their interpretation of Republicanism? Or is there some secret cache of voters who really believe in less government and less friction for business AND believe that a “windfall” of profits is something to be taxed?

Numbers like these should make us all think about how snap polls can inaccurately portray a situation and the true sentiments of the public. Or the motivations of the people who ask the questions.

Would you do this to your Jeep? Chrysler Group, which has a fascination with destroying its own vehicles for press stunts, is at it again. The brand that ran a Grand Cherokee through a glass wall at the Detroit auto show has dropped a Commander from 1200 feet to demonstrate its committment to Operation Gratitude, a nonprofit organization that sends care packages to troops overseas. The skydiving Jeep, along with human companions, made its drop this morning near Chelsea, Mich. Jeep says its dealers will be drop points for civilians who want to send their own care packages to troops around the world. For more info, click over to the Jeep Web site or to Operation Gratitude.

While iosis might sound like something you need to cure, it could be the fix for a variety of Ford Motor Company's ills, starting with the automaker's seeming addiction to boring design. During an interview at the Frankfurt Motor Show, last week, Ford’s design director, J Mays, admitted the company has made some serious mistakes. We’d venture to guess one of them is the bland Five Hundred sedan. It scores high in terms of driveability, but just doesn’t got much notice. It’s not just Ford’s designers who deserve blame. Top management, including Chairman Bill Ford, have taken a timid approach, hoping not to scare off buyers. They’ve had the opposite effect. And so, with management’s strong support, Mays now promises there’ll be no boring cars from Ford. If the iosis is any indication, he means it. The prototype was one of the hits of the German auto show, and company insiders hint that many of its striking design cues will soon show up on production models.

“Twenty. Fifteen. Ten. Five. BAM!” In just that amount of time, two Volvos make it to the end of their brief and final test drive. The 2.5-ton XC90 you expect to survive; with the new C70 hardtop convertible, you expect more damage than the minimal side intrusion and broken bits scattered over the indoor crash-test facility Volvo operates at its headquarters in Gothenburg, Sweden.

The safe structure designed into the C70 is an engineering marvel, but it’s surely a marvel few consumers ever will see in action. And even if they do, Volvo wants to make sure they live to tell about the experience.

Hardtop convertibles are odd ducks to begin with—halo cars meant as much to draw shoppers to showrooms as they are meant to put drivers in a sunnier state of mind. And engineering one of these semi-roadsters to be among the safest cars on the road is an almost breathtaking feat of will over common sense and cost efficiency. You may as well disregard the fact that the C70 even has a metal top, when it comes to rollover accidents: the car’s actual roof panels are almost incidental to rollover protection. Instead, pop-up rollover bars, actuated by springs and pyrotechnics, and the windshield frame are the structural elements meant to protect occupants should the car roll— a hugely rare event, one expects, since only about 8 percent of accidents are rollovers and of those, almost half are accounted for by sport-utility vehicles.

Watching the C70 be struck by a massive sport-ute renews your faith in their engineering, for sure. But it also raises some unanswerable questions about the marketing impulse that drives all the design work. All this ingenuity is applied to a vehicle that will sell at most 16,000 copies a year. A lot of expensive technology is bundled into one convertible that may only survive on accident, too. Given its multi-piece hardtop, large glass areas, deformable body structure and pop-up roll bars that are designed to smash the rear glass when the car senses an imminent rollover, a middling to major accident in the C70 almost certainly means a total writeoff of its estimated $35,000 to $40,000 sticker price.

This sort of fatalism is not strictly applicable to the C70. The Benz SLK is in the same boat when it comes to a severe accident. Most major cars built up around modules, especially aluminum-bodied ones like Audis and Jags and Acuras, are easily torqued beyond repair in medium-speed collisions. And in many of these cases the crash lessons learned aren’t easily translated to other models. While Volvo’s XC90 has bred a handful of sedans and crossovers already, the complex, expensive top mechanism on its C70 is unique to the entire Ford empire and likely will remain so.

So is it worth all this effort for one very low-volume vehicle? Volvo’s killer app is safety. Without it, they may as well be building televisions. And thus, despite Ford’s financial straits and all the other headwinds against its existence, the C70 can endure horrific crashes AND fold away its origami roof. In this case, safety is something Volvo hopes very, very few people ever experience—but everyone knows is there.—Marty Padgett