A relevant post I came across on http://www.thesamba.com , a vw site that I checkout for westphalia interior parts.
Why are you even spending a second of your precious finite lifespan worrying about this? Relax and go out and drive your Syncro.
After being in the climate/energy/social-impacts field awhile (20 years researching at a nat'l lab, contributing author to multiple IPCC reports, including the Nobel Peace Prize winning IPCC AR4), the primary conclusion that I've come to is that humankind is going to consume every drop of petroleum, every pound of coal and every ounce of uranium that we can get our hands on.
Whether that gallon is burned in your Syncro today, in a Prius tomorrow, in an aircraft over Europe 2 weeks from now or in a container ship in the Pacific next month is immaterial. At the end of the day, it's still going to both get burned and end up in the atmosphere. Conservation is simply optimizing energy use along the time/use dimension. It's going to get burned anyway, so there is no ethical reason not to optimize along a different dimension, say the Fun dimension, by driving your Syncro.
The second conclusion is that we won't get serious about developing new large-scale energy technologies until things get much worse than they are today. Of course, this path leads you to the outlook that, the more you try to conserve, the longer it takes us to get to our next stage of energy. The "more hybrid than thou" crowd tends to have a hard time with this.
The third is that global population will continue to increase inexorably until it is externally throttled by food, water and density/disease thresholds. The impact here is that when peak oil and even modest levels of GNP growth are both factored in to this, the lifespan of our multi-century coal reserves that everyone's counting on to save our butts, is less much, much less than most people realize.
The bottom line is that, energy-wise, we're hosed and, unless we get that solved very soon, it's going to impact our civilization much more profoundly and rapidly than climate change. Yes, conservation helps (I personally commute more by foot/bike/bus than by car), but it's only a band-aid. To really put things in perspective, read this nice future energy options talk by CalTech's Nathan Lewis entitled "Powering the Planet" (warning large, 9MB, but it's worth it): http://eands.caltech.edu/articles/LXX2/powering.pdf
Basically, unless you are working on energy replacement technology, all you are doing is dancing on the after-deck of the Titanic.
Whether you dance slow or fast makes absolutely no difference, so you might as well have fun and dance fast.
So relax and go out and have fun driving your Syncro.
And be sure to post cool stories and nice pictures here of your adventures so we can enjoy them too.
Think of it as getting even more value out of your gallon of petrol.
These are the good old days...
