Is it bravery – at last – or desperation?
Both sometimes conspire to the same effect, the instinct to survive being overpowering.
GM, FiatChrysler, Toyota, Mazda, Nissan, Subaru and Hyundai/Kia apparently want to survive. They have just announced they are opposed to what is doggedly and dishonestly portrayed as “clean” vehicles by the Fake News media.
They might as well have done a blackface skit – as far as the predictable eruption of feigned outrage in the usual quarters. Typical was this effusion from Senator Tom Carper of Delaware:
“Instead of choosing the responsible path forged by four automakers (he means Ford, Honda, VW and BMW) and the state of California, one that will move us (he means force us) toward the cleaner (a lie; bear with) alternative fuel vehicles of the future (oy vey) these companies have chosen to head down a dead-end road.”
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But what is actually at issue is the open road – and whether it is to be closed, via onerous fuel efficiency mandatory minimums despicably conflated in recent years by Carper, et al, with emissions regulations – to guilt-trip acceptance of their legitimacy and suborn acceptance of the state of California’s attempt to impose a near-doubling of these mandatory minimums on the entire nation.
Which, if it comes to pass, will make cars unaffordable for most people.
Federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regs currently require that new cars average about 36 miles-per-gallon; those that don’t cost you more to buy – via “gas guzzler” taxes applied to their manufacturers, who naturally pass those taxes along to the buyer.
CAFE regs date back to the ’70s, when it was thought the world was close to running out of oil (or so we were told) and “steps” had to be taken to conserve what was left. But the regs are as outdated as bell bottom cords given the facts about how much oil there actually is – and right here in the U.S.
We are literally swimming in it.
But the regs – premised on a scarcity that doesn’t exist – persist and expand, forcing people to pay more for “efficient” cars than it would have cost them to buy less “efficient” but far less expensive cars which didn’t have to have cost-padding technologies such as Automated Stop/Start (aka, ASS) and direct-injection (which carbon fouls engines) and transmissions with nine or even ten speeds rather than five or six to eke out fractional MPG gains.
California is insisting on much more than fractional gains. It is demanding the MPG/”clean” regs be raised to almost 50 miles-per-gallon – and by 2025.
