[Berean]

Originally Posted by Captain Awesome

The original legislation may have actually HURT the desired goals because of the "Law of unintended consequences".

What happened?

In the 70's they added literally hundreds of dollars in rube-goldberg contraptions (vacuum actuators, valves, hoses, etc.) to cars to meet the standards. All cars shrank in size and had anemic performance. Tiny cars felt "unsafe" to many people, coupled with higher prices and reliability issues caused by the maze of crap they had to tack on to meet the original standards and people figured out that they could buy a nice big powerful and safe feeling SUV or Truck instead of a roller skate.

Everybody bought vehicles that were likely WORSE mileage and polluters than they would have otherwise. Because some egghead mandated a certain mileage for cars.

Over a much longer period of time, microprocessor technology matured and allowed the manufacturers to reliably get the economy that was dreamed of in the 70's (through computer controls and also computer aided design) and now that technology is getting perfected along comes a new set of mandates that will cause the companies to throw a bunch of crap onto every car and increase the price and make them smaller and more unreliable to meet the new goal.

What will happen as a result is anyone's guess, but you can bet it will not be what they had in mind when they started this new push.

Good analysis there.