On any given Sunday morning, if I were offered the keys to either a Saturn Sky or a Chevy Tahoe with a big boat hitched to the back, 110 times out of a hundred I would put down that gnarly top on the Sky and make my way to the beach via the twistiest road I could possibly find. Once there, I would much rather go for a swim and lay on the beach than mess around with trying to launch a boat and later haul it out of the water.

Having made my own personal biases clear on this subject, there are clearly a great many people who would make the opposite choice. Many people choose to drive big SUVs for a wide variety of reasons, and with gas prices again at $3 a gallon and rising around most of the most of this country, those people would surely like to get a bit better gas mileage. After a long wait, they will soon have the option of a full-sized General Motors SUV with a new two-mode parallel hybrid setup, and AutoblogGreen has just had the opportunity to take a first drive in one. If this first application of the new hybrid system jointly developed by GM, BMW and DaimlerChrysler is of interest, check out ABG's detailed report by clicking here.