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Originally Posted by novaderrik
it's that thing called "bargaining" -the law makers say they want a 35mpg average in x amount of years, but GM and Ford know that they can realistically pull off 30mpg, so they say that 25 is a mroe realistic number. so the lawmakers lower the offer to 30, and the car makers grudgingly say "ok, if you insist" and get it done.
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Its
not all bargaining.
Any changes to automotive regulations are met with opposition by car makers, nor are they unique in doing this, every company fights most of the regulations put on them, mainly because they want to keep doing things the way they've always done them.
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but of course this is all just a show for the public- they actually agree on the new standards well before they have a hearing that is broadcast live on C Span to make it look like the leaders are doing their jobs.
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Which would be true if the changes passsed in a relatively short period of time, which doesn't always happen. CAFE standards in the US haven't changed in decades, while the rest of the world has pushed them higher.
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the car makers know what they are capable of doing, and they know what the general public- including people like me that aren't refined and intelligent enough to live in major metropolitan areas- will buy in large enough numbers to justify them putting in all the $$$ and time to bring to to market.
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Only somewhat true. The US car makers kept churning out SUVs even though gas prices were slowly climbing, while the Japanese were working on hybrids. The foreign car makers are all in good financial shape and have been for a long time, while the domestic car makers are failing financially.
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that, and they don't want to make promises on what they can do until they know they are going to be able to do it.
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You really believe that? The hybrid car was first
invented in 1899 by Porsche,
redeveloped in government sponsored projects in the 1980s and didn't go mainstream until Toyota brought out the Prius (even though the technology had been used to power locomotives for ages before this).
Mercedes has just announced that they're going to install a device to shut the engine off when a car sits at idle. Hybrids have had this since the Prius rolled off the assembly line, and the
technology has been around since the 1960s, if not earlier. Airbags first appeared on cars (as a hidden option that you had to ask the dealer about) in the early 1970s (the Pinto was supposed to come with them standard, but the idea was dropped as being too expensive), but they didn't appear on cars until they were compelled by law to include them.
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all you people that think that the fact that some one off test car back in the 70's got 300mpg under a set of very tightly controlled circumstances means that GM and Ford could build a reliable 100mpg car that everyone would want to buy make about as much sense as the people that think that just because the Hubble telescope can see far away things in great detail it should be able to easily make out Neil Armstrong's footprints on the moon.
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Show me where I, or anyone else, said that folks would want to buy a car
exactly like the one in the OP? Heck, show me where I claimed that even 100 MPG was possible.
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it just doesn't work that way.
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How it "works" is that companies, like people, get stuck into a rut, and don't want to be bothered with expending the necessary effort to get themselves out of the mess they're in. Had US car makers kept up trying to improve fuel economy (instead of simply pouring all their money into finding out what's the optimal number of cup holders), they wouldn't be in the mess they're in now. There is
no conspiracy against building high mileage cars, there is, however, a lot of
stupidity in automotive design. Proof of this can be found in the fact that domestic car makers have been caught flatfooted by the spike in gas prices (many of them are buying their hybrid technology from Toyota) as well as the fact that someone at Pontiac thought that the
Aztek would be a good selling vehicle. It wasn't, and the automotive press blasted Pontiac long before it ever went into production.
Car & Driver editor Csaba Csere in
this NPR interview describes the situation of higher gas prices "totally predictable."