Smart bombs: Safety rationale tanks
Remember when people used safety to justify their sport utility vehicle purchases? A colleague does and he wonders what’s become of that rationale. It’s a fair point, considering the plunging sales of SUVs and the crummy trade-in prices they now fetch.
For instance, Ford reports that sales of its subcompact Focus are up 40 percent for the year. Meanwhile, SUV sales have plummeted by 53 percent.
Sure, gasoline prices are way up, but what about that feeling of safety that comes from riding high and being surrounded by all that metal? Is it really worth it to put your family at peril just to save some money at the pump?
A non-starter. Don’t feel bad about trading that guzzling SUV for a car; the safety advantages were always illusory. SUVs are susceptible to rollovers, which account for one-third of highway fatalities. Plus, their weight makes it more difficult to stop or avoid others.
Running on fumes. A blog called SUVTruthSquad was created to defend owners against “false attacks by special interest groups, government agencies and the media”.
A post on Dec. 5 bemoaned the coming energy bill for not taking safety and the purchasing preferences of the public into consideration when setting new government mileage standards for vehicles.
The blog’s author, Barry McCahill, is the president of SUV Owners of America. He wrote: “According to one unnamed auto industry source, as automakers begin meeting the tough new CAFE requirements, the thinking will be ‘all mileage, all the time.’”
Looks like that’s the thinking of consumers, too.
By the way, there’s no point in visiting the blog. That December post was the last one.
No fingerprints. Congress’ work on the complicated details of a cap and trade system to limit greenhouse gases reminds me of the unnecessarily complex Corporate Average Fuel Economy scheme it devised in the 1970s to improve vehicle fuel economy and lessen our dependence on foreign oil.
Take such problems to economists, and they’ll reply, “Duh! Tax it and it will go away.” That’s why they tout gas and carbon taxes.
But to politicians, such legislating efficiency holds great peril. I mean, what if a direct tax can be traced back to them? Better to go with CAFE, which is “the sales weighted average fuel economy, expressed in miles per gallon (mpg), of a manufacturer’s fleet of passenger cars or light trucks with a gross vehicle weight rating (GVWR) of 8,500 lbs. or less, manufactured for sale in the United States, for any given model year.”
Translation: Tax automakers, who will then pass the costs along to car buyers.
Would it have been more effective to just slap a big tax on gasoline? Ask car dealers, who can’t get rid of the behemoths on their lots.