Let’s Pay Detroit To Bring Their Gas Sipping Cars Home To The U.S.A.
Who hasn’t been enraged to read about how Ford and G.M. can make perfectly good little gas sippers in Europe, but just can’t bring themselves to make a fuel efficient car for us back home?
Well, now that they need some funding from us, here’s an idea. Let’s fund Detroit just to set up their efficient European car factories — back here, where they are really needed. Let’s get some better gas mileage out of their money troubles.
Apparently, it only costs $75 million to completely retool a plant, to produce an efficient little car instead of the gas-guzzling behemoth they were fobbing off on us fools all these years.
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Detroit needs money, and we need efficient vehicles. Let’s make a deal: We taxpayers will provide the funding to retool their factories to build just the specific models that are in the Common Good. We’ll fund retooling to build any models that help solve the climate crisis by getting better than 50 mpg, right now. It’s a win-win.
To make it super quick and easy, let’s forgo NHTSA crash tests on their current European models that already we would die for. After all, that EU is such a nanny state, right, and these gas sippers already passed fussy ECE rules to meet European requirements. Surely those sissy foreign crash-tests are good enough for us back here in the wild wild west: let’s accept their foreign rules. Some hardy soul here has demonstrated that small light fuel efficient cars are actually safe enough.
Our NHTSA crash-testing requirements have kept fuel efficient imports out for decades. And not just fuel efficient foreign cars. Even our own “foreign” cars.
It’s time to just tear down that wall. This would be a quick and easy way to reduce our heavy carbon footprint. Allowing ECE rules could be achieved with a quick stroke of the legislative pen once our first real working majority finally moves in next January. Then all we’d have to do, fellow-funders, is decide which models to fund first to finish fossil fuels fast.
Me? I’d go for any old Ka that gets 56 mpg.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Maybe the car companies have done the research and found out Americans won’t buy the smaller European cars. Whats the point of selling them here if there is no one to buy them. Gas is back at $1.50, people can continue to drive their full size cars they like and enjoy.
Cosmop,
That seems like a short-sighted view… and the same one that got the car companies into the mess they’re in today.
Demand for oil is only at a down point right now, and, unless the world explodes, that will be over eventually. When the world economy comes back, demand for oil will skyrocket again (due to a need in a growing China and India mostly) and prices will shoot right back up. I say we see $7 per gallon gas within 4 years.
If the federal government would allow Ford to sell the European Fiesta “as-is” they could very quickly tool up and have the car in showrooms. However, the euro-car does not meet American bumper standards (created to protect smaller cars from SUV collisions), and the diesel engine sold in Europe(69mpg!) does not meet US diesel emission standards.
I would propose:
1) If a car meets EEU standards, it should be given a waiver until 2012 to meet US standards and be immediately available as-is in the US market.
2) Grant immunity for tort cases brought about by accidents (esp from the bumber standard) and emissions (that diesel thing).
3) Immediately end the UAW “jobs-bank” baloney and grant them unemployment compensation, like everyone else.
4) Raise fuel taxes to keep gasoline to at least $2.50 a gallon, adjusted for inflation to keep it at that level.
5) Eliminate the CAFE standards. Expensive gasoline will accomplish the same goal.
I am suppose to drive that thing pictured on a highway traveling at 60 miles an hour sharing the road with tractor trailers with my son in the back. I already owned a vehicle with a 2.0 liter 4 cylinder engine.
To accelerate I needed to turn off the air conditioner. Never again. Keep the golf carts in Europe.
Safety standards are not an issue. The CAFE standards are what hurt Detroit. If you want a 50mpg vehicle you can buy one. However, if more consumers want to buy bigger, more comfortable, and crashworthy vehicles that is no reason to penalize the auto makers.
How about this, in exchange for scrapping CAFE each of the big three must offer at least one vehicle that gets 75mpg?
Haven’t you hard? Global Warming has now been proven to be the biggest hoax on the planet, except maybe for the Oil-for-Food program run by the UN.
But wait, isn’t it the UN that is so aggressively pushing the Global Warming scam…? Maybe cuz more money in more bureaucrats pockets.
I think it’s a great idea to help our Big 3 by forcing them to give up their best selling vehicles, #1 in USA Ford F-150 and the #2 Chevy Silverado to start. Perhaps we can then insist that they stop making their fastest growth vehicle, the “crossover”. And to hit the trifecta, force them to make little no no profit death boxes that are not selling here.
Thats the ticket–to oblivion.
swift boater,
Actually I haven’t “hard.” Recently I’ve been rather flacid. Can I ask some straightforward questions:
1) Global Warming as a hoax has been proven by whom, exactly?
2) In terms of sales figures for cars, are you using 2005 data? If you talk to the Big Three (which I have), they’ll tell you that the sales numbers for these types of vehicles are off by about 60% year over year. If you think that the F-150s and the Silverados are still the number one sellers, you should take a look at the hundreds of thousands of these types vehicles that are just sitting in the stock lots.
wow …
How obtuse can you people be …
They ARE NOT ALLOWED to sell those cars here due to Government regulations …
wow, clueless …
Jeff,
The whole point is that perhaps they should be allowed to sell them here.
Ford makes a car that can go 60+mpg on diesel. Currently you cannot register a new diesel car in either the State of California or New York. We need to look at our laws as well as our technology. No one is going to build a car they cant sell.