How much driving do you actually do?
If you're putting 3k miles/yr on a car because you bike to work/work from home/etc, and mostly use it to go out camping in the muck, that's very different from putting 20k miles/yr of commuting on it in city traffic.
What do you actually need in a vehicle, and what are your wants?
I've got a truck that gets about 12mpg, but it rarely gets driven outside times I'm using it as a truck (hauling, towing, climbing around our hillside in 4Lo, etc), so the fuel economy doesn't really bother me. I'm not spending much on fuel in the first place. However, we optimized my wife's car to a Chevy Volt, which is quite cheap to run for our common 20-30 mile trips into town.