No Replacement For Displacement

CAFE is a Lousy Law

The New York Times has an eco-screed by Brent Staples about how we all need to ride in economy cars. This is a real big beef of mine, because the eco-fascists through the Corporate Average Fuel Economy(CAFE) standards have destroyed the market for affordable full size cars, and drove the American public into larger, less fuel efficient, and less capable SUVs. Anyway, time to load up the fiskomatic and fire away.

Though rare today, cars like this littered the streets when I was a high schooler in the mid-1960's. In fact, they defined what baby-boom men would come to expect from an automobile. In the atmosphere of the time, a car was not quite a car unless punching the accelerator resulted in screaming tires and the landscape blurring around you as the needle on the gas gauge dropped like a stone.

I hate to burst your bubble, but they were rare back then too. Not every family drove a GTO, a Hemi Charger or a 396 Chevelle. The Beetle was one of the biggest selling cars in the US at the time. Most people driving a family economy car drove a Dodge Dart, Chevy Nova, or a Ford Falcon, all with inline 6s. Family cars were chevy Impalas or Biscaynes with either a straight 6 or 283 or 327 small block v-8. If you had the performance bug, or needed to tow a boat or camper, you might get a big block motor on your station wagon. And most of the cars that had v-8s more than needed them. The speed limit on highways then, like today, was 70 mph and up, and as anyone who drove on those highways in a VW could tell you, that was a terror-inducing experience in a small car.

The death of the California car song is not what you would call a civic tragedy. Those songs deified the largest, heaviest, dirtiest, least fuel-efficient engines in American history. In addition, the songs were primarily about drag racing, which burned off gasoline as though you'd lit a match to it and sometimes ended with the car and its driver wrapped around a tree. Romanticizing this period will not encourage speed-addicted Americans toward the fuel-efficient cars we so desperately need.

Whether we "need" a market for a fuel efficient car or not is a matter for the people, through the market, to decide. Since the price for gasoline today adjusted for inflation is less than it was before the '73 oil embargo, I would say that there isn't much "need" there. Mercury Marauders and Caddy Escalades aren't exactly collecting dust on the dealer lots now, are they?

The quest for saner cars dates back to the early 1960's, a decade before the oil crisis forced the government to lean on Detroit to produce them. The expansion of the Interstate System fed suburban development, increasing dramatically the number of households that needed at least two cars. Dad drove to work in the two-ton living room on wheels, leaving mom with a smaller, less expensive car for the run to the supermarket.

Again, Brent gets his history wrong here. Dad drove the sedan to work. Mom, having to pick up the kids, buy groceries and stuff, drove the wagon. If anything, Dad drove the smaller car.

These mid-sized cars typically got fewer miles per gallon than light trucks do today. The impulse to make them more economical ran afoul of the quest for an "exciting" car aimed at people in their teens and early 20's who would soon make up the majority of the car-buying public.

Because cars back then used carburetors and distributors. Today cars use electronic fuel injection and electronic ignition, and all functions are managed by computer, even on "cheap" cars. This creates an engine with more HP *and* more more fuel economy. Compare the fact that a 2003 mustang makes more net HP, more net torque, and gets better fuel economy with less engine displacement than its 1966 cousin. As far as the teens and twenties who wanted GTO's in the 60s, they are the same ones who wanted a '57 chevy small block in the '50s a Ford Flathead v-8 in the 30s, and Subaru WRX's today. Putting a hot engine in a small car isn't exactly something confined to 1968.

The battle between environmentalists and the car industry over fuel efficiency and pollution standards has its roots in this same statistic. Car manufacturers over the last 20 years have manipulated the law at every turn to increase car size and engine size, and to maintain the fast start. As a result of all this evasion, mileage improvements have been far short of what is possible and emissions reductions have been disappointing.

This is a lovely bit of revisionist history. Because of CAFE, people no longer drive large passenger cars anymore. Americans want to drive an affordable large car, with good highway performance and good acceleration. Because of CAFE, there are only two sedans that fit that mold, the Ford Crown Victoria and the Mercury Grand Marquis. And these cars get far better mileage than their cousins in the 60's and 70's did.

Instead, people now buy Ford Explorers, Chevy Suburbans, and Jeep Grand Cherokees. All of these vehicles are larger than just about any passenger car made, with perhaps the exception of a 1970 Caddy fleetwood limo. They get worse mileage than the 60's cars. Americans want, a large, powerful automobile. They need the performance on the highway, and they need the flexibility a large car provides. But, because of CAFE, only the very wealthy can afford a large car, but an even larger SUV is affordable by all. Building an affordable large car is impossible because CAFE makes such a car not viable to the general public.

As far as emissions are concerned, just about every car today is a Low or Ultra Low emission vehicle, emitting little more than CO2 and water. The idea that cars today contribute to smog is pure fantasy. The exhaust coming out of a car may actually be cleaner than the air going in. But, of course, Brent didn't bother to do any fact checking before writing this, otherwise he wouldn't have made such a preposterous statement.

American cars are still by and large faster and more muscular than they need to be, especially given that they spend much of their time sitting still in traffic. The challenge that faces us at the moment is how to wean people away from the brute-force hot-rod ethos that Detroit taught us to love in the 60's and coax them toward calmer cars that do not seem as though they are powered by rockets. This will require a change in what Detroit builds, as well as a change in the way it markets what it builds.

Here we get to the crux of the matter. For all the whining of the enviro-fascists, Americans don't want to ride on the interstate on 10 speed bicycles powered by lawnmower engines. Now, because of the moronic CAFE law, that vehicle is a 5000+ lb 4wd truck powered by a 300 horsepower engine. There was a time when people would have bought a sedan that was 1000+ lbs lighter, handled better, and was safer both for themselves(rollovers) and the car they might hit, but the government in its nanny-state perfection shut that market down with CAFE. If Brent put any effort into thinking about it, he would realize that the market will provide the cars that the market wants, and no government or ad campaign will change that.

Posted by John Bono at September 1, 2002 09:10 AM | TrackBack