The LA Times Mistakes the American Car Market, But Then, It Gets Most Everything Else Wrong, Too

[condign]

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-

Comments

[dr_bob]

and the station wagon died

As someone who carts kids about and needs a lot of boot (?trunk?) space, but likes to think they have some green inclinations, I'm the ideal market for an estate car (?station wagon). Recently googling the range of hybrids out there, I found it rather distressing that there are several enormous hunks of 4x4 metal (SUV?) that have hybrid engine, but not a single estate - and of the hatchbacks, it's not at all evident whether estate versions of any exist. Being in the UK, I hadn't appreciated that estates were dead, but if it's a global trend among manufacturers, that might explain why our streets are clogged with essentially military and farming vehicles.

[condign]

I don't think that estates are quite the same as station wagons, but I could be wrong. And since, to the best of my knowledge, England doesn't have CAFE standards, that would nicely explain the difference. But I'm not so familiar with the UK auto market, so take that with a grain of salt.

Then again, I'm one of those folks that think hybrids are pretty foolish. You have to hold them for several years before the cost of gas outweighs the extra cost of the car (and that assumes high-priced gasoline). Also, at the end of their life, hybrids have a massive pollutant cost due to their batteries. So I'm not entirely convinced that a Prius is more eco-friendly than my old xB.

[bateleur]

In a sensible market, we'd scrap CAFE standards and simply tax gasoline

And this is why Green politics fails - because anyone who stands up and says "we need $5/gallon" is so profoundly unelectable that they might as well be talking to themselves in a locked basement for all the political impact they'll have.

[condign]

Not entirely true. There's actually a relatively respectable push for establishing a "floor" to gas prices right now, even among the right-wing in the U.S.

It would, however, require a deft politician with a skillful regard for regional sensibilities. The trouble with most Greens isn't that $5/gallon is unsellable. It's that it's generally sold with a hair-shirt/superior mentality that says, "If you don't sacrifice driving a safe vehicle in exchange for the planet, you're a bad person and probably a thug."

This, surprisingly, isn't a winning sales pitch.

Personally, I'd like to own a hybrid (even though, as I said, my Scion is probably greener in any rational sense of the word). They're cool technology, and I could buy one and spend a weekend taking it apart and putting it back together. As one of the first major new auto technologies in years, they should be fun.

The hybrid "brand," however, is now so smug that I'd not consider buying one for fear of having to explain to others that, no, I don't look down on them for

[undyingking]

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

Yes, but I don't think that policy would be a big vote-winner, for either party: and the same is probably true of anything that genuinely attempted to use market effects.

So in the absence of a sensible market, what would be a better mechanism than CAFE? In the 70s (AFAIK) the US govt allowed gas prices to rise sharply following the oil price, and that increased average car efficiency more than any active measure has ever done. Can the current / next administration do the same without paying a fearsome political penalty?

[condign]

So in the absence of a sensible market, what would be a better mechanism than CAFE?

I don't think the U.S. government allowed a rising oil price in the 1970s so much as proved powerless to stop it, but that's history.

I don't know what would do better than CAFE, though, if one didn't just put in a gas tax. We could do a complicated cap-and-trade scheme, I suppose, but there's not that much point, and that's rife for abuse.

[mrlloyd]

Are lighter cars unsafe? The most fuel efficient cars on European roads don't seem to have a problem with the safety standards here, and the traffic safety expert I work with doesn't think this is a big problem. Thoughts on how to protect passengers have come a very long way in the last few decades. However if you want to pursue this a bit further

[condign]

You're mostly right about hybrids.

I may mount that on the wall...

Are lighter cars unsafe?

That's impossible to say. Or rather, it's a matter of personal choice. I love my Scion xB. I consider it "safe," in that I figure I'm probably roughly as likely to be mugged in New York as I am to be injured in an accident in it. I'm not as risk averse in this regard, however, as many people are.

To clarify a host of other points:

• A Nash equilibrium is not a market failure. Certain market failures persist because they achieve a Nash equilibrium, but that's not the same thing. (This is a picky point.) Nash equilibria are just game theory concepts.
  
• As I pointed out, the particular equilibrium that was reached was the result of regulation, not market failure. There were smaller cars out there that were both (a) more fuel efficient and (b) safer than passenger cars, without going to SUVs. Then came the CAFE standards, which were not a market feature, and the SUV behemoth started up. Law of unintended consequences...
  
• The optimum