“Big” is a relative term and I will say this: as long as I have to drive on the highways along with double trailer big eighteens whose drivers are high on speed and on tight time schedules, I am driving an SUV and not some tin can.
Can you believe it? Americans are displaying the unmitigated gall to purchase vehicles that actually meet their transportation needs. Disgusting (/s)
SUV’s and their ilk are the modern substitute for the (by ME) missed STATION WAGON. The venerable wagon was the automobile that could fit all the kids, their carriages, sporting equipment and the stuff the parents had to carry with them. Try doing that in a lawn-mower engined “Fuel efficient” vehicle.
Also, my sorely missed wagon could take the entire load of stuff I needed down to “the boat” in a SINGLE trip. Friends with little cars with 1 cubic foot “trunks” took several trips to do the same thing. My “gas guzzler”, taking only a single trip, was much less of a gas “user”, accomplishing the task with a single trip.
Only the “elite” should drive safe cars.
The rest should drive “economy vehicles”, if we are allowed to drive at all.
“...cheap gasoline sends consumers flocking to less-efficient pickup trucks and sport-utility vehicles.”
Are people really this gullible? ‘Flocking?’
I LOVE my Ford Escape. I will never own anything smaller, again. I drove a Dodge Colt for 15 years. Great little car - but little. Now that I can SEE EVERYTHING I feel SO much safer and I can power out of situations - of run into, or over, others more safely, LOL!
FUCAFE!
I’m trying hard to envision a way of enforcing fuel efficiency standards that is more fundamentally stupid than CAFE, but I’m not having much luck.
I’m not sure who dreamed up the idea that forcing manufacturers to build what people don’t want to buy would improve efficiency, but it can’t have been anyone who had the slightest connection to the real world.
How DARE the car manufacturers try to sell consumers vehicles that they want to buy? Don’t they understand that Obamanation is a central planned socialist economy?
Five and ten year plans have been written. The just need to follow them.
Get the Hell out of our lives and do your constitutionally legislated jobs!
Its time to get rid of “fuel economy standards.” They are a relic of the Jimmy Carter era and are no longer relevant.
American automakers lose money on all the toy cars they are forced to sell, they have to make up the loss selling trucks/SUVs.
Whereas EPA is heavily involved in reducing CO2 emissions from stationary sources such as power plants and cement kilns, they specifically declined to regulate tailpipes only because the rising CAFE standards would reduce CO2 emissions.
So, if the CAFE standards are relaxed, the enviros will be filing numerous lawsuits, and based on the 2007 SCOTUS decision, the enviros will likely win these lawsuits.
If these CAFE standards prevail US highways will look like Cuban streets with fleets of aged trucks patched together and still running as replacements are not available.
If people buy vehicles that guzzle more gallons of gas, that will mean the DC backstabbers won’t have any excuse to raise the gas tax, right?
Give me a Road Runner with a 440 six-pack!
Some years ago Reason Magazine had an article on the tradeoff between increased gas mileage via shrinking the size and mass of the car via the CAFE standards and the savings in petroleum.
As I recall, whatever fuel cost savings were obtained thru greater gas efficiency were offset by a factor of 5 from the increase in the costs due to the greater number of deaths and number and severity of injuries from accidents.
Everything has a cost, a principle so fundamental and simple that it’s beyond the comprehension of politicians.
Just a reminder, Hillary wanted the 55 MPH Speed Limit reinstated to protect the planet.
I love the way Politicians just make up numbers.
Gas Mileage (make it 1000 MPG), Minimum Wage (make it $1,000 an hour), The Stimulus Package (keep it under a Trillion), Obamacare (it will save you $2,500 a year), makes no difference.
They also take credit for the Engineering needed to achieve their lofty Goals. You know, so it is written, so it shall be done.
I guess they think that is Leadership. I call it Tyranny.