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Automotive News & Views Has CAFE reached the end of its usefulness?
507 messages, Last post on Oct 27, 2009 at 11:49 AM
You are in the Automotive News & Views Forum. Your Hosts are steve_ & claires
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Replying to: kdhspyder (Apr 08, 2009 6:19 am) Who paid the salaries of all those fat car civil servants? You cannot tell me that this has not been worthwhile I most certainly can. It has only cost US money. Higher prices for vehicles and another wasteful agency. You cannot show any statistical data that proves it was CAFE and not the consumers own desires to buy more fuel efficient vehicles. The CAFE average has not gone up since 1986 so who paid the wages of all those deadbeats in the agency? Fuel economy increased even when CAFE was relaxed. from 1986-1988 the fuel economy rose even as the price of fuel fell and the CAFE standard was relaxed due to pressure from US automakers I do NOT believe the outcome or the usage of fuel in this country would be any different without CAFE. We are just on opposite ends of the political spectrum. You believe in big government telling US every move. I believe in as little government as we can get by with. |
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Replying to: grbeck (Apr 08, 2009 12:48 pm) Don't forget Corvair. A wonderful little car once GM worked the bugs out. If not for that hack Nader it would have evolved into one of the best of the era. If Nader had treated Honda with the same lopsided misinformation attacks it would have never gotten off the ground as an auto maker. The early Hondas were pure CRAP. I know I bought one of the early Accords in 1977 from a Honda motorcycle dealer in Minnesota. We are in agreement. CAFE is purely a waste of tax payers dollars. |
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Replying to: gagrice (Apr 08, 2009 2:08 pm) In this case CAFE has more than paid for itself. Your two truck examples are the very reason why CAFE is needed. Without the stick we'd be relying on the D3 to give us their best efforts. Well they have shown over and over again that they won't give us their best efforts unless forced to do so ... and then they'll do it dragging their heels. You're pollyanna-ish if you think the D3 and the other would have given us 30 and 40 mpg vehicles of their own accord. In this I'm much more of a realist. Regardless of political leanings, and yes I am a card-carrying NY liberal, the math cannot be refuted.
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Replying to: gagrice (Apr 08, 2009 2:08 pm) That looks like a typo that I'd make. Those fat cars do burn a lot of gas.  With $4 a gallon gas prices still semi-fresh in our minds, do we still need CAFE? Is it time to junk it and let what's left of the market decide?
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Replying to: kdhspyder (Apr 08, 2009 3:00 pm) I am the realist. It is fantasy to think that CAFE had any real influence. Just more Big Brother bullying US. We could have saved the billions paid to the 1000s of non essential CAFE people. They did nothing from about 1985 until 2007. Yet you can bet the agency grew and grew and grew. And the math is FUZZY at best.
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Replying to: steve_ (Apr 08, 2009 4:18 pm) OMG!!! Alan Greenspan somehow just popped up in an auto thread on Edmunds.  This has been our mantra for the past 30 years as espoused by Greenspan. 'The markets are perfectly efficient and will resolve all imbalances. Let the markets decide.' However in front of Congress he admitted that he was wrong, ergo the financial mess we're in right now. He admitted that more regulation was needed to prevent excesses and bubbles. Then two weeks later he changed course 180 deg and suggested nationalizing BoA and Citi. CAFE is a good piece of regulating legislation in that it keeps the vehicle makers on course to continue offering more fuel efficient vehicles. They will NOT do it on their own. This site is an auto enthusiast site peopled by many with influences from the detroiters. The detroiters have hated CAFE since its inception thus the prevailing sentiment on this site is pure hatred. However in the general population if you pose the question 'Do you favor legislation requiring the vehicle makers to make more fuel efficient vehicles?' The overwhelming response is 'DUH??? Why are you asking such a stupid question, of course I am.' How do I know this? I meet the general buying public every day. 95+% are not auto enthusiasts, they couldn't give a hoot. Most don't even know this site exists. But nearly every one of them is in favor of being offered better choices to use less fuel. It's a huge selling point. If it's got to be mandated, Right ON!!! That goes for all colors in the political spectrum, .
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Replying to: gagrice (Apr 08, 2009 8:16 pm) The NHTSA is part of the DOT. It serves a lot of purposes across the nation. The CAFE Dep't can't be 1000's of people...and certainly they're not fat cats. The NHTSA is one of the smallest agencies in the DOT. |
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Replying to: kdhspyder (Apr 09, 2009 4:32 am) Well, you didn't hear it from me. I wouldn't even buy a beater from John Galt Motors. *shrug* 
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Replying to: kdhspyder (Apr 08, 2009 1:38 pm) Whether they fought the standards is irrelevant. The standards were in place; they had no choice but to meet them. Which they did by producing such wonders as the Cavalier and Dodge Shadow. Which proves that the standards, in and of themselves, were not enough to prevent the eventual bankruptcy of GM and Chrysler. You asserted that stricter CAFE standards would have saved GM and Chrysler. This does not hold up when examined what has actually happened over the past three decades. kdhsypder: They made no serious effort frankly until the last two years. Instead of embracing the opportunity they fought it tooth and nail. They downsized their full-size cars and intermediates, brought out new subcompacts (Chevette, J-Cars, Escort, Omni/Horizon) and adopted the "aero" look for the Taurus/Sable and Thundebird/Cougar. We can argue about how good these vehicles were, but the bottom line is that all of them represented significant investments and efforts. The idea that the domestics did "nothing" until recently does not hold water. kdhspyder: Money was to be made in fuel efficient products; Camry, Accord, Civic, Corolla, Sonata, et. al. Not when you are saddled with a UAW contract that basically requires the company to use three times the workers that Toyota and Honda do to build the same number of vehicles, and are responsible for lavish worker retirement and health care benefits. I would like to see proof that the UAW was willing to make the significant concession (not just window dressing) before the past five years. kdhspyder: My contention with them is that instead of keeping a balanced product portfolio that could have reacted quicker to the sudden switch of buyer preferences since 2003 the three of them were left in the dust gasping. Now that they have religion it's frankly too late for two of them. A Cobalt as good as a Civic would certainly be nice, but it wouldn't have saved GM, given that sales of everything are now on the floor. kdhspyder: The CAFE standards were not a tool to force the manufacturers to make good fuel efficient vehicles. Whether they did or not was a managerial choice. Which is what I've been saying, and further proves that stricter CAFE standards would not have saved GM and Chrysler, contrary to your assertion. kdhspyder: What CAFE did do was to save us $Billions and keep us from using billions of gallons of fuel over the last 25 years. In that it served its purpose perfectly. Except its purpose was to reduce gasoline consumption and oil imports, and it did neither. Now it was supposed to save us money, even though, until recently, we had been using more gasoline than ever, and any real savings have been because the price of gasoline has been dropping, relative to income, since the early 1980s. kdhspyder: The price of gasoline varies every year in a very regular curve. Gas Buddy historical chart 5 yrs. Gas prices reach their annual peak just after 4th of July here and then decline through Christmas. Then they begin going up again after Jan 1st. 'Til these last 9 mo's it was only upward, upward, upward. This curve will resume when business recovers. Interesting stuff, but it hardly proves that we are in store for $5-a-gallon for unleaded because of shortages. Nor does it prove that last year's price spike was caused by any real shortage, as opposed to a commodities bubble. Also note that most of the financial bad news didn't hit until September (after Labor Day), which means that the drop in gasoline prices occurred prior to the recent financial panic. The price drop therefore cannot be explained away by simply saying that we are using less because of the recession. (Also note that the price drop was much more dramatic than the usual seasonal fluctuations.) Nor does it look as though prices will automatically rise once the economy improves.
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Replying to: grbeck (Apr 09, 2009 8:40 am) I asserted no such thing. Your prior sentence is accurate. I implied that their intransigence in fully embracing a more balance product line between smaller fuel efficient vehicle and highly profitable SUVs and trucks was a large part of what did in GM and Chrysler. This was a bad management decision in the 80s and 90s among many others. It in fact caused a large part of an two entire generations to avoid detroit products. ********************************************************************************- - **************** Fighting CAFE was one of many sins of the managements. 'nothing' was too harsh perhaps. What they did was 'minimal' and 'ineffective'. No one single vehicle such as a super Cobalt would have saved GM simply because GM's entire product portfolio was out of balance. It was too heavily weighted toward SUVs and trucks. This statement is still accurate.. kdhspyder: My contention with them is that instead of keeping a balanced product portfolio that could have reacted quicker to the sudden switch of buyer preferences since 2003 the three of them were left in the dust gasping. Now that they have religion it's frankly too late for two of them. ********************************************************************************- - **************** Except its purpose was to reduce gasoline consumption and oil imports, and it did neither. Now it was supposed to save us money, even though, until recently, we had been using more gasoline than ever, and any real savings have been because the price of gasoline has been dropping, relative to income, since the early 1980s. That was the rhetoric of the time - but misinterpreted. Apparently still so. I've seen this faux-argument very often on the D3 boards. If in the late 70s each driver drove about 10000 mi annually with a fleet average of about 12.5 mpg thus each driver on average used 800 gal annually. Easy math. If there were 10 MM new units sold each year at that time ( there were ) then the new vehicle fleet each year used 8 Billion gallons of fuel. Easy math. Your contention is that CAFE has failed because it should have caused the usage of fuel to be less than 8 Billion gallons annually. Since we now use 9 Billion gallons for each new model year you see this as a 'failure'. Well the absolute usage of fuel would have dropped to 4 Billion gal annually....IF our population had not grown and IF more vehicles weren't being purchased and driven each year and IF each of us ( on average ) didn't decide to drive more miles each year. This is a huge error in logic because it ignores that we now ( 2006 ) have a national fleet that has grown 60% to 16 MM units annually and we all drive more more miles each year, from 10000 mi to 15000 mi. Thus there's 60% more vehicles being sold and driven every year and we all drive 50% more miles than we did in the late 70's. Of course we are going to use more fuel. CAFE was not intended to stop progress and growth it was intended that each of us use less petro fuel. In that regard it has done so perfectly - on average. When I was an average driver in the late 70's driving 10000 mi at 12.5 mpg I used 800 gal annually. In 2006 as an average driver of 15000 mi in a modern 25 mpg vehicle I used 600 gal annually. CAFE works, whether the detroiters like it or not. The new CAFE 35 in 2020 will accomplish the same benefit; i.e. spreading out a scarce resource over an ever-increasing population. Clearly stated now, this is the sole goal of CAFE.
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