There's a general sense, amid reports that Nissan, General Motors, Toyota, and Ford are all scaling back production of full-size trucks, that the end is near for the 15-year-long SUV craze in America. "The SUV as a lifestyle choice, as a personal statement, is dead," Aaron Bragman, an industry analyst at Global Insight, told Wired. "People are downsizing from their big trucks to smaller cars."

The report said that car sales, which accounted for half of the industry's volume last year, hit 57 percent last month, while truck sales fell by double-digits to their lowest levels since 1995.

"We've never seen this big of a change in the product mix, this fast," said Jesse Toprak, chief industry analyst for Edmunds, to CNNMoney.com. "Certainly five to 10 years from now you're going to look back and say the spring of '08 was the turning point. Even if gas prices go down for a month or two, consumers are not going to rush back out and buy SUVs. This appears to be a permanent shift." It appears the trigger was the $4/gallon price point for gas. It's had a sudden, devastating effect on SUV sales in a way that the $3/gallon price point never did.