Gotta love government regulations. Did you hear that they are thinking about imposing up to another 40 cents in gas taxes to work on roads? So gas prices will go up more and the profits for the gas companies will go down. Pretty soon it wont be profitable at all to be in the business and the government can just take over another aspect of private industry. YAY GOVERNMENT!!!

 

You know - I'll say it - originally I was for CAFE...I mean, what harm could a few more mpg do?

This is ridiculous. I've changed my mind. We desperately need an energy policy, but attacking the Car industry is NOT a good plan. Chalk this up with the other 'genius' ideas from our gov't.

The ONLY good portion I can still see of the new energy bill/law (whatever), is the serious demand for the ramping up of Ethanol Production. The article, and Maximum Bob is right, and I've said it for a while now (though...maybe not much on this board). Though Ethanol is not THE solution, but it is a major player in the team of solutions. And it can very easily save our V8's. I can only hope Coskata has another major breakthrough in which it discovers how to do implement it's process faster.

 

We need to lift more government regulations and drill our own oil, lift another government regulation and build more refinaries. I mean hell the US cant dig the oil in the Gulf, but other countries are tapping into it and then selling our own damn oil back to us.

So we have about 30ish years of supply here. We drill it, get off the OPEC jerkoff's dicks, then use the money we are saving to develope alternatives before we run out.

 

LMAO. Nice skewed comparison. You quoted out-of-tune city for the '81, and straight city for the 88, but best highway for the 98.

We can't lift enough oil out of our own soil to supply our habits. If we could, at $100/barrel, we would be. Capitalism and all, ya know.

 

No my 81 had a 350 and auto and got around 10mpg on the highway(probably out of tune though, but that was the miracle of modern technology and better fuel delivery, not out of tune very often). The 88 was a 350TPI auto and got 16mpg on the drive from Florida to NJ. The 98 gets around 24 to 26 almost all the time if I can keep my foot out of it, and used to get 28ish highway before the mods.

No we wouldnt be drilling our own oil, no matter how profitable, the government wont let us. The tree huggers wont let us, and the not in my back yard crowd wont let us. There is enough oil to supply us for at least 30 years. Plenty of time to come up with an alternative and get OPEC the hell out of our pockets.

Funny thing though, my 07 Dodge Caravan only gets about 14 to 16mpg tops. And its a V6.

 

I'm against things like CAFE for a whole myriad of reasons. But I DO see a silver lining here however. That is, it will instill a very needed dose of dicipline into carmaking.

I mean really, things have gotten out of hand here. How many sporty cars - or just cars in general - are hovering around or even surpassing 4,000 pounds. Lots. We have even developed a resident apologist fanclub for ridiculous weight. Lemme see.... oh, they're doing their best. Ummm, it costs too much to reduce weight. Ahhh, you'll never feel the difference.

And to make up for all this weight, manufacturers are forced to use big inch, blown, powerplants - which add even more weight, more cost, more complexity - and in the end, barely run faster than a 1998 LS1 Z/28.

It's gotten WAAAY out of hand, and we've gone beyond the point of diminishing returns.

Like the old street racer saying goes, "when the green light drops the bullsh!t stops". Well guess what? The green light just dropped. Believe you me, every domestic manufacturer is already figuring out how the next gen version of whatever they have, will lose 200-300 pounds. Will we typically have smaller displacement engines? Yeah, probably, but so what. Because there's a big opportunity for better things here.

Besides, me personally, I'd rather have a 400 horse, 3,400lbs ponycar than a 550 horse, 4,000lbs ponycar.

And perhaps without this radical CAFE solution, a deal which I noticed the automakers not fighting very vigorously BTW, we may never have started the process of reigning in ridiculous weight.

 

So you think the government should be able tell us that if we want a 4000lb car we cant have it? I honestly dont think its the governments job to tell me what car, or style or size car, I am allowed to drive. Stop spending my tax money to implement more regulations.

I am not a big fan of a lot of the cars out nowadays, but it is not my decision. If you want a big clunky "HEMI" station wagon family car, you should be able to have it. If you want a little tin can Prius hybrid, you should be able to have that too.

 

Re-read the first sentence of my post.

 

that whole first paragraph is what I am looking at. First you say you dont like CAFE, but then say you think its good for them to discipline the carmakers.

I just have a real problem with how big the government has gotten recently, and how many laws and regulations they are imposing on our freedoms. Our taxes suck, the price we pay for certain things, like gas, is nuts. All due to more government involvement in private lives, and regulations.

Nothing against you, but think about it this way. Every day we give up a few more freedoms in the name of the enviroment, or helping the "poor" people, or helping the lazy, or being politically correct or whatever. When does it stop, when we are bankrupt as a country and we become a Socialist state? I hope not.

 

They realized that if they fought it, CAFE would have likely been worse. There was talk of a 40mpg CAFE and even higher in some corners.

Getting a 35mpg CAFE this year makes a 45mpg CAFE in 2009 (when the house, senate and presidency are all Democrat) less likely.

They're still fighting the California CO2 regulations, which are just CAFE with a different color suit, and which take effect sooner and are stronger (I believe) than the new 35mpg CAFE.

Any smart car company has to have some sort of backup plan should the California regs or higher CAFE regs go through.

 

Let me make this clear:


I AM AGAINST CAFE COMPLETELY

But it's here, and perhaps some positive by-product may result from it.

 

You're not allowed to see a silver lining if you're against it completely.

 

If CAFE kills big-engined cars, it will be because the automakers wanted them to die. There are lots of cars today (a good number of them that we discuss here) that don't come close to meeting today's CAFE, but they still exist.

You also misunderstand the use of "discipline." You are thinking punitive, whereas Z284ever is using in the context of "instilling a renewed focus into the car companies to reduce weight." They need it- when the frickin' barely-midsize CTS weighs in at 3950 lbs with an aluminum V6, somebody needs to start thinking harder.

I'd much prefer replacing CAFE with gas taxes (50c-$1/ gal), and gas guzzler taxes on new vehicles (and lower phased in taxes on plate renewals for guzzlers) that ratchet up like CAFE. IOW, in 2010, anything under, say 24mpg combined, would be subject to gas guzzler taxes, but by 2020, anything under 35mpg combined would be. That way, the onus is on the end-user to control his demand for fuel, or pay up. It would cut consumption WAY WAY faster than CAFE will, I'm certain of that. This is how it needs to be, but neither Americans, nor our elected "leaders" (as if) have the courage to go down this road. Instead, we bitch about the "freedom to drive whatever we want," while we send our boys off to The Sandbox® to secure the region in hopes of stabilizing our future oil supply.

P.S. If your '81 was getting 10mpg highway, and your '88 getting 16, there was something wrong with both. My '81 got 18mpg highway with 3.42s, and my '87 TA routinely got 25, 26 if I kept it under 75.

 

I think you're forgetting how taxes can stimulate or reduce demand for a product.

CAFE is essentially a tax for producing a fleet of cars that fail to meet a standard. There is no benefit to exceeding CAFE, but there is an obvious benefit to meeting it. If a fleet comes in below the standard, there is an implied tax for each car that fails to meet the standard and an implied credit to each car that exceeds it.

Given the truck-heavy fleet composition of the domestics, this new combined CAFE will hit them harder. If Hyundai exceeds the standard, they are not penalized for producing a 4000 pound V8 RWD sedan. If GM falls short of the standard, there is a penalty for each 4000 pound V8 RWD sedan. Holding everything else constant, that means that GM will have to either except less profit (or a bigger loss) for each such sedan they make, compared to Hyundai. And GM will have to take the implied tax into effect when considering whether to build the car.

So I don't think you can so easily dismiss the effect of CAFE on product decisions.

 

I just dont get it that people still think Iraq was over oil. We have not gotten any benefit, oil wise, from any actions in the mid east. If it were about oil, I would think we would be seeing some of that oil over here.

So you think more taxes and regulations are the answer. It doesnt matter that the government allready makes more money off of every gallon of gas then the "big oil" companies. We need to tax them more, and tax the drivers tags more to teach people that they should drive better gas mileage cars. We need to regulate and demand the car companies make certain cars. You know until the 80s, there was a good portion of Germany that did that. I think they called it the Eastern Block.

Come on guys, Government is not the answer.

And I still think a V8 can achieve 35mpg given 10 years and a couple determined car companies.