Too hard. We can’t! Boo hoo, it’s too complicated for our dumb American brains.

For more than a quarter-century, that has been Detroit’s basic attitude whenever lawmakers have suggested, however timidly: Can’t you guys try to make cars that guzzle less gas?

Instead, Detroit devoted all its energy to lobbying Congress not to raise the miles-per-gallon requirements that have been in place since 1975. And chicken-hearted Congress complied. Oh, last year it finally got the guts to ask for a measly 1.5-mpg increase in fuel efficiency for sport utility vehicles. Then it gave the carmakers three whole years to make it happen. Gullible Congress believed Detroit when it said American innovation just couldn’t wrest any big gains from the gas tank.

But if you hit the New York Auto Show this week, you’d see a gleaming, gorgeous, midsize SUV of an innovation: the Ford Escape. It gets 38 miles to a gallon.

That’s right. And before the show opened last week, this gas-electric hybrid was test-driven around New York City for 37 hours straight until it ran out of gas: 576 miles on a 15-gallon tank. That makes it 75 percent more efficient than the conventional V-6 Ford Escape.

So what happened? Did Detroit finally take the bull by the horns?

No. It bought the bull from Toyota. As one of Ford’s reps at the auto show explained with misplaced pride: “Ford bought their (Toyota’s) technology to use in the second generation of hybrids” — i.e., bigger cars.

Now, I am truly glad that Ford’s execs didn’t completely miss the hybrid movement. But how pathetic that they had to go out and buy it! If only our lawmakers had been demanding better mileage all along, maybe Detroit would have gotten there first!

“This is the kind of technology we should be exporting, not importing,” said Nathanael Greene, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. As we toured the auto show, he pointed out that hybrids are hardly the offbeat, only-Tim Robbins-need-apply vehicles that Detroit long assumed they’d be.

Last year, Greene said, 50,000 hybrids were sold in America. By 2006, Toyota alone plans to sell 300,000. Consumers are eager for them.

“We have the Honda Civic hybrid and a regular Civic we’re looking to trade in for another hybrid,” said Lenore Strocchia-Rivera, an auto show attendee. “The performance (of both cars) is virtually the same.” But her hybrid Civic is 65 percent more fuel efficient.

That kind of leap spells some relief from foreign oil dependency and soaring gas prices — things all Americans want. So maybe next time Detroit says, “Can’t do!” Congress should snap: “Quit whining and make it happen.”

Lenore Skenazy is a columnist for the New York Daily News.

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