Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr. Wyndham
Good they caught this....never liked their cars much...and I don't like cheaters. 
That...and our own vices...
Correct me if I'm wrong....but in the 80s and 90s...when the first CAFE law started producing real results....did American's not choose to go out and buy enormous gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs for 2-person families simply because they could? Did US fuel consumption not continue to rise despite cars becoming more efficient...because people just drove more?!
Honestly, I think CAFE is a pure attempt at something worthwhile...but the entire concept is flawed in believing Americans truly care about fuel economy. All we want is cheap gas and big fuel tanks to put it in. |
Yep, when people got access to more efficient cars they simply drove them more. The net result was that people used roughly the same amount of gas as they did before -thus defeating the intended purpose of CAFE.
The there is only one truly effective way to cause people to use less gas, and its not CAFE. But continuing on that train of thought would be in violation of our no politics rule so I'll end it there.
Quote:
Originally Posted by fielderLS3
I've always believed the the original CAFE was counterproductive. CAFE basically wiped out large sized cars except for lower volume luxury/flagship models. People still wanted large cars, but couldn't get them...so they used the truck loophole to get the next closest thing. So when CAFE went to 27.5, instead of buying cars that would have gotten low to mid 20s, they were forced to buy trucks that got mid to high teens (at best).
It didn't hurt that gasoline dropped to an inflation adjusted all time low in the 90s, either.
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Yeah, the explosion of SUV sales in the 90's & early 2000's was due largely to cheap gas and a loophole in CAFE that was intended for commercial vehicles. If it wasn't for that, station wagons and minivans would have been more popular (not that the minivan wasn't popular ... it just would have been more popular). If it weren't for that loophole, automakers would have done more to control the supply of their SUVs.
The loophole was that if the vehicle had a gross vehicle weigh rating in excess of, I'm going to say 6500 lbs (could have been 8500), it didn't count towards an automakers CAFE score. Like I said, this was intended for commercial vehicles (pickups for farmers, vans for work crews, etc). But there weren't any restrictions on it, so everyday people began buying them -much to the automakers delight: high profits & no CAFE penalty, win-win.