Posted on 08/12/2002 8:16:08 AM PDT by dubyagee
No gas hogs in LaLa Land
ROWLAND NETHAWAY Senior editor
Californians are strutting about congratulating themselves for their new state law requiring higher automobile fuel efficiency.
They believe that California's new state law will force car manufacturers to stop producing gas-guzzling vehicles responsible for global warming.
The logic behind the new law requiring greater fuel efficiency from car manufacturers is a faith-based belief that the automobile industry is involved in a giant conspiracy to deny the public fuel-efficient cars.
Ford, General Motors and the other car manufacturers, according to these anti-big business addicts, have the secret to 300-miles-per-gallon internal combustion engines locked away in a safe somewhere. The car industries make immoral profits by keeping this information from the public.
These urban-myth conspiracy theories have been around since the invention of automobiles.
Since I was a boy I've heard stories about the invention of new spark plugs, carburetors or fuel additives that could allow cars to run for hundreds of miles on a gallon of gas.
Generally, the stories included specific details about how the inventors of these miracles had been paid off and threatened to keep their mouths shut, if not simply murdered. Their supposed inventions were guarded more closely than the Coca-Cola recipe.
Same conspiracies, different era
Fifty years ago, these fanciful tales were voiced by run-of-the-mill drug store and pool hall conspiracy buffs.
In recent years, it has been the greenies, environmental groups, anti-globalists and Californians who think that government laws can force General Motors et al to finally release these secret fuel-efficient technologies.
It was cockamamie nonsense in 1952 and it remains just as harebrained today.
Car manufacturers wouldn't have to offer zero percent interest rates to sell cars if they could build cars with the size and power that buyers want and also get hundreds of miles per gallon.
Every car, SUV and truck owner in the nation would line up to buy such a vehicle.
The oil industry might not be pleased with 300-miles-per-gallon cars and trucks, but, hey, that's the breaks. There will always be uses for oil.
Since no knowledgeable person expects revolutionary efficiency breakthroughs on the venerable internal combustion engine, about the only way to increase fuel efficiency is to decrease safety by making cars and trucks smaller and lighter.
Anti-SUV acolytes may want to see everyone in scooter cars and public buses, but that's a hard sell to motorists who don't feel better about themselves driving around in lightweight, cramped, underpowered vehicles.
The last I heard, the car manufacturers said they would contest the new California fuel-efficiency law.
I suggest that the automobile industry simply ignore the California law.
Californians think their state law will force the car industry worldwide to build cars to California's standards.
Instead, car manufacturers should notify all the car dealers in California that they will be out of business on the day the state's new fuel efficiency standards go into effect.
If Californians want to own a new car, they will have to move to another state.
After a while, California would look like Havana, Cuba, where the cars are caught in a 1950s time warp.
Californians want the rest of the nation to pay to subsidize their lifestyles, which includes a gluttonous appetite for oil, electricity and water taken from other states.
There will be a lot less self-righteous strutting in LaLa Land if the auto industry simply ignores California's new fuel-efficiency law.
Rowland Nethaway's columns appear on Wednesdays and Fridays. E-mail: RNethaway@wacotrib.com
All of that is true. Nonetheless you are not likely to rid the nation of democrats or environmentalists soon and even if you were magically to convert them all into intelligent people, it would be several years before we could build our own production up to meet our needs. There's no telling what might happen this winter with the war against Iraq and the real possibility Saudi Arabia could fall into the hands of Al Quaeda or similar lunatics, and they could very easily be rationing gasoline by December. All I know is that if I owned an SUV, it wouldn't be the only vehicle I owned.
Aside from the little problem of putting more money than necessary in the hands of our enemies which you refuse to acknowledge, there's another problem, and that problem might not even exist in California, which I assume is where you are writing from, but it's a fact of life on the East coast.
The problem is that if SUVs were the occasional vehicle here and there, they would not obstruct everybody's vision in dangerous ways but, when one out of three or one out of four vehicles in the daily rush hour is a van or SUV, then nobody including the SUV and van drivers can ever see further than one or two cars in front of him, and that is dangerous.
The question is not individual rights. The question is, do you and other SUV owners have some sort of a group right to endanger yourselves and everybody else in such a manner?
Like I say, the guy driving an SUV off road, on a hunting trip, to the beach or whatever does not bother me. It doesn't consume that much gas or cause that much danger. The guy driving an SUV with three or four people in the HOV lanes does not bother me either. The guy driving an SUV as a commuter vehicle with just him, which appears to be most of them, I would tax into tommorrow.
If you're driving close enough for lack of forward visibility to reach the point of being "dangerous", you are too damned close to the driver in front of you. There have always been full-sized pickup trucks, vans, buses and assorted other vision-blocking motor vehicles on the road. When the SUV became popular, all that happened was that the ride height of the average "station wagon" was lifted to be more equivalent to that of the pickups and vans. Small cars have always been at risk of being squashed (Gee, go figure...). If the roads were still chock-full of Ford Country Squires and Oldsmobile Vista Cruisers, the small-car advocates would still be out there, crying: "Unfair! Unfair!" It is by pure happenstance that the SUV turned out to be the automotive "whipping-boy" of choice.
The question is not individual rights. The question is, do you and other SUV owners have some sort of a group right to endanger yourselves and everybody else in such a manner?
That question has been posed to motorcyclists many times. The answer is that everybody makes their own choices, no groups are involved. FWIW, it could also be asked of drivers who prefer sub-compact cars, sports cars, or drivers of older cars with no anti-lock brakes, etc. and so forth. Take your pick, each of them is at risk and is a risk to others. Each of us is, too - every time we pull out of the driveway.
Like I say, the guy driving an SUV off road, on a hunting trip, to the beach or whatever does not bother me. It doesn't consume that much gas or cause that much danger. The guy driving an SUV with three or four people in the HOV lanes does not bother me either. The guy driving an SUV as a commuter vehicle with just him, which appears to be most of them, I would tax into tommorrow.
Who are you, the watchdog for Approved Vehicular Usage? The guys who you see "most of the time" might have dropped off the kiddos at school a few minutes earlier, or be hauling something in the back for a co-worker, or be leaving after work to hitch-up the boat for a weekend at the coast. The truth is, you can only guess at how the vehicles that you see are being used by their owners. Do try to mind your own business when it comes to other people and their money, Mr. "Tax-'Em Into Tomorrow".
You've obviously never driven around the Washington D.C. area. "Too close" around D.C. is all the room you'll ever have for much of the day.
C.M. may not have had the pleasure of driving in the District, but I have. It is truly insane... but then so is L.A., Chicago, Atlanta, etc. Your comment takes the topic off on the "overly-aggressive driving" tangent. I see people deliberately accelerate to block out cars that are trying to merge in front of them - happens all the time. Give me SUVs over those a-hole drivers any day of the week.
What you're really seeing most of the time is people in the left lane closing up to prevent some idiot from trying to gain one or two car lengths by passing on the right; I rarely see anybody trying to cut anybody off from a legit merge situation. That sort of thing is normal D.C. driving.
GIVEN that the traffic is that close much of the day, I would REALLY like to be able to see ten or fifteen cars down the road, rather than just the back of the van or SUV one or two cars in front of me, i.e. have some inkling that I was going to need to use brakes before the brake lights in the van or SUV one or two cars ahead came on but, lo, I can never do that anymore because one in every three or four cars in the mix is a van or SUV, almost invariably with just the one sorry turkey in it. Like I say, don't ask me to sympathize. A $15,000/yr tax for using such a vehicle that way would be about right.
Hah! I do that alot, but what is really.. funny.. is this INSISTANCE on the part of many SUV drivers to actually try and RACE me! On the highway no less! Its hilarious. I think that the low end grunt and takeoff that many SUV's are geared for, fools the drivers into thinking their vehicles are faster than they really are.
Back when I used to be a bad man, I would indulge them, and allow them to try and follow me onto my favorite 70 MPH curve.. oh, did I say 70? I meant is was a 50 MPH curve, which my car could easily take at 70, 80 if I was in a hurry. Seeing one of those beasts tip onto two wheels was enough to stop me from doing that again, I mean, it wouldn't be my fault, but I would still feel terrible if something awful happened.
No offense but anything under 300-325 is still pretty weak. I say to each his own, you drive what you want to drive, and I'll drive what I want to drive. FWIW, you'll never catch me driving an SUV or minivan either
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