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It's the government stupid.Many environmentalists, including me, hate to see other
people driving around in huge gas guzzling Sports Utility Vehicles (SUVs).
They waste fuel, take up parking space and, although safer for the driver
in an accident, are more dangerous for anyone they hit. I can understand why some people might be so rich, worried
about their own safety and unconcerned about others, that they choose such
vehicles of their own free will. I’d
be the last to try and stop them. However
there are so many SUVs around. Is
something else pushing people to buy them? Could the government be to blame? Well it might. The
United States’ CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) laws, introduced in
response to 1970s petrol crises, require car manufacturers to achieve a certain
number of miles per gallon for the average car they produce.
There is a separate lower requirement for small trucks. It must have seemed a good idea at the time, and at first
it probably kept the average car’s mpg higher than it otherwise would have
been. However it was enacted at a
time of high oil prices, and when they fell, people could afford bigger cars
with lower than average mpg. Before
the CAFE laws they would have brought station wagons, but CAFE made that
difficult. Station wagons had
higher fuel consumption than smaller cars so if the automakers sold too many of
them they lowered the average mpg below the CAFE limits. The trouble was petrol prices kept on falling, as they have
for the last hundred years or so, and people kept on getting richer and wanting
bigger cars. They wanted them for
comfort and for safety. The car companies had increased fuel economy to achieve the
CAFE limits partly by making cars smaller.
Unfortunately smaller cars are less safe in accidents - quite a lot less
safe. Economists had calculated
that in 1989 the CAFE laws had caused about 2,000 extra road accident deaths. Fortunately there was a way out. Buy small trucks.
The permitted CAFE average was only 21 mpg for trucks, while cars had to
achieve an average of 27mpg. Truck
sales started increasing. It did not take car makers long to realised that people who
would normally have driven a station wagon, but were now buying trucks, did not
really needing the load carrying capacity of a truck. What they wanted was
comfort and safety and to get around the CAFE standards.
So they developed SUVs, vehicles that were classed as trucks but, drove
like, and were as safe as, large cars. It is no exaggeration to say that the SUV, the bane of
environmentalists everywhere, came into being largely as an unintended but
direct side effect of environmental legislation designed to reduce fuel
consumption. We’ve had similar unintended side effects in England.
Many local councils lay sleeping policemen (road bumps) in residential
roads to reduce speeding. They often limit the bumps to the centre of the traffic lane
to allow the wheels of large vehicles, such as buses, to pass either side and
avoid wearing out their suspension and shaking up their passengers. The problem is that car drivers also care about their
suspension and dislike being shaken about.
The solution - buy a SUV, although in England we call them 4X4s because
the early ones were four-wheel drive. They
are nearly as large and gas guzzling as American SUVs, but their wide wheelbases
pass nicely either side of road bumps. Not all the 4X4s in England are brought for that reason, and there would be some SUVs in the US, even without the CAFE laws. But there would not be so many. Next time a posh woman with big hair blocks your way in her
SUV, don’t get angry with her and blame capitalism. Get angry with your government, and blame those foolish
voters who believed that politicians would make things better with their
environmental regulations. Jim Thornton. Leeds. 4 Jan 2002 |
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