The LA Times Mistakes the American Car Market, But Then, It Gets Most Everything Else Wrong, Too
From the L.A. Times review of the Nissan Cube:
Here is one of the great unspoken truths about the drive for a more fuel-efficient vehicle fleet. It will be utterly impossible to achieve energy security or to significantly reduce greenhouse emissions unless we are able to lower the average vehicle weight. It doesn't matter if you're advocating grid-charged electrics, plug-in hybrids, ethanol, or fuel cells powered by a glowing hair from Apollo's beard. None of these technologies works as well as making vehicles smaller and lighter.
A good example -- though I hate to harp on it -- is the ballyhooed Chevy Tahoe Hybrid, the 2008 Green Car of the Year [sic]. It has one of the most advanced and powerful hybrid powertrains extant, and it still gets only 20 mpg. Why? Because it weighs like the flippin' Lusitania.
So deal with it. American cars are going to get smaller, and they ought to. The Nissan Cube is a rough but accurate preview. And guess what? It isn't so bad.
Those of you who know how I love the Scion xB (and he has me pegged as one of the box lovers who thought the overweight, fattened 2008 xB was a betrayal of all that Scion was) know that I have no problem with boxy cars. I love them. But the future of American cars? Not a flippin' chance.
There is another great unspoken truth about the drive for more fuel-efficient cars: what is sacrificed in the name of fuel-efficiency is generally safety. A car that weighs less, all else being equal, has less metal providing structural support. A smaller car has less space to absorb impact. And as high school physics tells us, a collision between a small car and a large car does not go equally well for both.
I love my Scion xB. But let's face it: I drive young men's cars. From my first replica MG-TD with a plastic body to the Scion, I've always owned vehicles that would not survive impact with a self-respecting sedan. The 2006 Scion may not quite be a deathtrap, but it's certainly close. Like the Cube, it's a Japanese car designed for roads where no car has seen the sweet side of sixty since the second world war, and where a high-speed collision with anything more substantial than a shopping cart isn't a considerable risk. In America, that's bringing a knife to a gunfight.
Simply put, much as I love the xB, the baby's car seat doesn't belong in it. Once I'm a family man, the car gets garaged for a decade while I wait for the kids to hit 16, taken out for occasional weekends when I feel like reliving my youth.
This difference goes unnoticed by the L.A. Times--note that "safety" never once enters this idiot's review--and continually amazes me about the short-sightedness of American greens. The CAFE standards promulgated in the Ford/Carter era practically created the SUV boom. The short story: CAFE standards mandate fleet wide fuel efficiency standards, but sensibly exempt light-trucks, because there is a legitimate need for certain people to haul lots of heavy equipment around. Before the CAFE standards, the typical mommy-vehicle was a station wagon: large enough for a family and lots of storage, but built on a car chassis, with the performance and fuel efficiency of an overfed pig but relatively safe in collisions. Their target market was parents. However popular, these cars were toxic to CAFE performance, since on a fleet basis they were over the average.
Enter the SUV. While young jocks and college kids liked the Suzuki Samurai or the ubiquitous frat-boy-red Jeep, the truly gargantuan monstrosities and pointless luxury vehicles aimed at target markets with income few college kids could muster. These cars played to their safety features. When Mercedes launched it's M Class SUV all those years ago, the ads featured a baby singing about his "big bad Dad" who "bought the M Class for my protection." Exempt from the CAFE standards, these cars could carry around extra weight (and, incidentally, height) useful in protecting passengers in a collision. The safety market moved to SUVs, and the station wagon died.
Parents are a market that don't go away, and they will pay--in higher car prices, gasoline taxes, or whatever it takes--in the effort to keep their children "safer." They should be free to do so. In a sensible market, we'd scrap CAFE standards and simply tax gasoline such that parents who wish to perceive themselves as protecting their children pay the price for their decisions: extra gas becomes a cost of safety, and consumers who value that more can purchase it. CAFE standards were a coward's way out, a method of making "the car companies" responsible for our choices, while allowing a safety valve so that middle America didn't have to truly sacrifice. But American politics is rarely sensible, particularly in Democratic administrations where it's important to be seen to be doing something about the problem.
That's a very long way of saying that the Nissan Cube, much as I love it, will never be the future of the American car market. It's a great city car, and exactly what I like. Unlike the L.A. Times, however, I'm sensible enough not to project my preferences on everyone else.
Here is one of the great unspoken truths about the drive for a more fuel-efficient vehicle fleet. It will be utterly impossible to achieve energy security or to significantly reduce greenhouse emissions unless we are able to lower the average vehicle weight. It doesn't matter if you're advocating grid-charged electrics, plug-in hybrids, ethanol, or fuel cells powered by a glowing hair from Apollo's beard. None of these technologies works as well as making vehicles smaller and lighter.
A good example -- though I hate to harp on it -- is the ballyhooed Chevy Tahoe Hybrid, the 2008 Green Car of the Year [sic]. It has one of the most advanced and powerful hybrid powertrains extant, and it still gets only 20 mpg. Why? Because it weighs like the flippin' Lusitania.
So deal with it. American cars are going to get smaller, and they ought to. The Nissan Cube is a rough but accurate preview. And guess what? It isn't so bad.
Those of you who know how I love the Scion xB (and he has me pegged as one of the box lovers who thought the overweight, fattened 2008 xB was a betrayal of all that Scion was) know that I have no problem with boxy cars. I love them. But the future of American cars? Not a flippin' chance.
There is another great unspoken truth about the drive for more fuel-efficient cars: what is sacrificed in the name of fuel-efficiency is generally safety. A car that weighs less, all else being equal, has less metal providing structural support. A smaller car has less space to absorb impact. And as high school physics tells us, a collision between a small car and a large car does not go equally well for both.
I love my Scion xB. But let's face it: I drive young men's cars. From my first replica MG-TD with a plastic body to the Scion, I've always owned vehicles that would not survive impact with a self-respecting sedan. The 2006 Scion may not quite be a deathtrap, but it's certainly close. Like the Cube, it's a Japanese car designed for roads where no car has seen the sweet side of sixty since the second world war, and where a high-speed collision with anything more substantial than a shopping cart isn't a considerable risk. In America, that's bringing a knife to a gunfight.
Simply put, much as I love the xB, the baby's car seat doesn't belong in it. Once I'm a family man, the car gets garaged for a decade while I wait for the kids to hit 16, taken out for occasional weekends when I feel like reliving my youth.
This difference goes unnoticed by the L.A. Times--note that "safety" never once enters this idiot's review--and continually amazes me about the short-sightedness of American greens. The CAFE standards promulgated in the Ford/Carter era practically created the SUV boom. The short story: CAFE standards mandate fleet wide fuel efficiency standards, but sensibly exempt light-trucks, because there is a legitimate need for certain people to haul lots of heavy equipment around. Before the CAFE standards, the typical mommy-vehicle was a station wagon: large enough for a family and lots of storage, but built on a car chassis, with the performance and fuel efficiency of an overfed pig but relatively safe in collisions. Their target market was parents. However popular, these cars were toxic to CAFE performance, since on a fleet basis they were over the average.
Enter the SUV. While young jocks and college kids liked the Suzuki Samurai or the ubiquitous frat-boy-red Jeep, the truly gargantuan monstrosities and pointless luxury vehicles aimed at target markets with income few college kids could muster. These cars played to their safety features. When Mercedes launched it's M Class SUV all those years ago, the ads featured a baby singing about his "big bad Dad" who "bought the M Class for my protection." Exempt from the CAFE standards, these cars could carry around extra weight (and, incidentally, height) useful in protecting passengers in a collision. The safety market moved to SUVs, and the station wagon died.
Parents are a market that don't go away, and they will pay--in higher car prices, gasoline taxes, or whatever it takes--in the effort to keep their children "safer." They should be free to do so. In a sensible market, we'd scrap CAFE standards and simply tax gasoline such that parents who wish to perceive themselves as protecting their children pay the price for their decisions: extra gas becomes a cost of safety, and consumers who value that more can purchase it. CAFE standards were a coward's way out, a method of making "the car companies" responsible for our choices, while allowing a safety valve so that middle America didn't have to truly sacrifice. But American politics is rarely sensible, particularly in Democratic administrations where it's important to be seen to be doing something about the problem.
That's a very long way of saying that the Nissan Cube, much as I love it, will never be the future of the American car market. It's a great city car, and exactly what I like. Unlike the L.A. Times, however, I'm sensible enough not to project my preferences on everyone else.