Auto Industry Proposes Nationwide Emissions Standard
Automakers strive for economic viability. Here’s how a little bit of common sense and a lot of innovation can power the auto industry of tomorrow.
First, a frank assessment of the facts: no matter which way you look at it, we’re headed for a low-carbon economy. Most consumers seem aware that gas prices will not always be this low, energy security is an increasingly important strategic concern, and technological progress is opening incredible new opportunities.
It’s obvious that we must innovate, to ride the wave rather than be crushed by it. The changes happening now are a big demarcation line between the past and the future of the auto industry. So now is a time for looking forward. It’s foresight and innovation that will allow us to profit, to create and preserve jobs, and to make the auto industry a dynamic, efficient part of the economy again.
The automakers are committed to getting new technologies out on the road. We’re rolling out new technologies and cars all the time, and many more are already being developed in our laboratories. But R&D takes time. Right now, we have people working on products for 2015. We have to think at least that far ahead. That’s the nature of the industry.
Be sure to forward this to Martin O’Malley (MoM for short),
crown prince, er Governor of The Peoples Republic of Maryland. He’s so enamored of how things (don’t) work on the LEFT coast of Kalifornia, he’s wants to institute similar emmission standards here in our littele slice of heaven on the Chesapeake.
We don’t need such regulations. If they think the market will need less-carbon cars, then make them. If you’re right, you’ll wipe the floors with your competitors. Worried about CA? Stop selling cars there! This is a State that depends tremendously on vehicles. They also need the sales taxes. Screw ‘em. Go John Galt on them.
Of course auto emissions standards should be standard nation-wide. We should also have 1 or 2 gasoline “blends” across the country instead of all these regional blends that drive up refining costs.
While we are at it, lets make the taxes on diesel fuel the same as gasoline – diesel cars use less fuel and emit less carbon (for those of you who believe in Global Warming nonsense).
Dear Sir,
With the proclivity of the US Government to abrogate contracts I’m afraid that the plan wouldn’t be worth the paper it is written on.
Regards,
Roy
Dear Dave,
If you want you’re automobile companies to be profitable (I can assume you work for the American car makers) then make good cars. American cars suck and until you guys make a car better that I currently have then I will not be buying American cars anytime soon.
You swallowed that one hook, line, and sinker, too. Let me ‘splain the fax of life: once the government starts getting a piece of the carbon action, the last thing they will want is low-carbon. Once they get their cap-and-switch (er…trade) boondoggle in place, they’ll have every incentive to increase carbon consumption, because the more C, the more $. If they enact c-n-t, you can kiss low carbon goodbye.
You have to be kidding. There’s a constitutional issue with forbidding the states to have more stringent standards, and given the propensity for politicians, particularly in states like California, to hot-dog, there’s no way that certain states aren’t going to pass more stringent restrictions. It’s just too irresistible to grandstanding politicians.
I say let’s have one standard: Ban Cars. Queen Nancy should fly me to work in her private jet!
“It’s foresight and innovation that will allow us to profit, to create and preserve jobs, and to make the auto industry a dynamic, efficient part of the economy again.”
SAY WHAT? You’re kidding right?
The unions are not going away and the legacy costs of those retired aren’t either. Until that paradigm changes, which it won’t, the auto industry will not be ‘dynamic’ nor an ‘efficient part of the economy again’.
Have you tooled around Detroit, Pontiac, and Flint lately?
I can buy a NEIGHBORHOOD of houses.
Blaming the regulatory environment is disingenuous. Your foreign competitors are mopping the floor with you under the same regulations. That particular playing field is level.
The auto industry has repeatedly failed to show any kind of ambition to reduce emissions. Unless the industry comes up with some very aggressive emission standards in short order, those standards will be written by others.
The auto industry has fought change for too long. Tougher emissions standards should have been gradually implemented throughout the 1980′s, 90′s and 2000′s – now we have wasted thirty years and need to play catch up.
Build a small car with an efficient internal layout, provide it with a small and efficient powerplant, and 75mpg is not at all unreasonable. Heck, my 15 year old vehicle still gets around 40mpg with almost 300,000 miles on the odometer.
Where’s the innovation? Where’s the efficiency? The auto industry needs to redesign more than the cars – the industry needs to re-imagine the design and manufacturing process to improve and succeed in the new century.
It should not take 5 years to get a new model onto the streets – more flexible and adaptable manufacturing, and more intelligent design systems could cut that time to one year – and that is what needs to happen to make innovation practical and affordable. Our design and manufacturing processes, as well as many designs, are still essentially stuck in the past.
It’s time to rethink the fundamentals.
Peace.
DS
“We don’t need such regulations. If they think the market will need less-carbon cars, then make them. If you’re right, you’ll wipe the floors with your competitors.” Mr. McCurdy is dissembling. I like Marc Malone’s idea better. If you think this will all come to pass, innovate, make the vehicles you think we ‘need’ and take your chances in the market. My guess is that people will still make their own choices on vehicles and you’ll be wrong. But then again, so what? You can always plead “good intentions” and expect the government of our formerly fair land to bail you out. No risk, right? Go ahead, I dare you.
“What we propose instead is a single nationwide emissions standard administered by the federal govenrment, planned out multiple years into the future, giving us a predictable regulatory environment that takes account of economic realities.”
Dream on. The federal government past or present can’t plan anything out multiple years in advance, nor do they have any ability to account for economic realities. I would suggest you round up 1/4 billion dollars to hire someone who has such qualifications and knowledge of the auto industry (preferably from Japan). Anoint this person king of the United States and give them particular authority to direct all policies pertaining to automobiles in the United States.
Alternatively you can get into the carbon trading business. I hear it is another invention of Democrats that claims to pull trillions of dollars of wealth out of thin air. It’s always smart to get in quick before the bubble bursts.
To posters here, the Alliance of Automobile Mannufacturer represents more than the Big Three. It represents 11 manufacturing groups from the US, Japan and Europe.
The biggest problem Dave McCurdy’s proposal will have is with the California Air Resources Board (CARB). This organization has run amok in so many areas it is hard to count them. The long and short of it is they just want California to be different. If every one of their standards were adopted nationally, they would add ten more for California. Like any bureaucratic organization their primary purpose is to exist. If there is a single national standard, there would be no reason for CARB to exist.
I presume Mr McCurdy’s reference to emissions includes CO2, which in essence means mileage standards. It is difficult enough to predict CAFE, because the final figure isn’t as much controlled by what is put on the market by the manufacturer, but what is bought by the consumer.
CARB’s ZEV mandate of the 90′s that 10% of all cars sold in California be electric (the only technolgy available then). What they were really mandating was 10% of consumers must buy limited range electric vehicles. And that was impossible.
If the regulations are unreasonable and the end product too costly, consumers will simply keep and repair their existing vehicles and drop out of the new car market. That will kill the manufacturers and our streets will eventually look like Havana, with 50 year old vehicles tooling around.
You have to think at least six years ahead, Mr. McCurdy? If that’s true, then you must have been planning the taxpayer bailouts of 2008 at least as early as 2002. If the U.S. auto industry thinks six years in advance, then they must have known six years ago that GMAC would declare itself a bank in order to get in on the bank bailout. You knew six years ago that Chrysler and GM would go on corporate welfare, so why should you take any measures to avoid it?
Dave, you do realize that I can simply choose not to buy the new “low carbon” cars. People buy new cars because they offer performance and features that are generally unavaliable on rebuilt old cars, but cars can outlast car manufacturers if customers stay home. We already have a partial boycott of Chrysler and GM that will probably push those companies into bankruptsy. Wouldn’t now be an especially bad time to piss off your customers?
What legislators fail to consider when they decree specific performance standards is the fact that the customer is the final judge. They buy what they like, that which meets their needs. They respond to price signals in the vehicle, its fuel cost, its performance and who knows what else.
The CAFE standards have been a noose around the automakers neck. They have to average a specific performance across their fleet mix. That leads to distortion of the market, and distortion of the product profile. They are forced to make unattractive vehicles at below cost prices to meet the CAFE mix.
#5 Christopher Smith: “American cars suck”
No, they don’t. They approach and in some cases surpass foreign vehicles. You have not been very observant if you continue to maintain that viewpoint.
#10 KZ: “That particular playing field is level.”
No, it is not. CAFE does not apply to foreign manufacturers. Their cars may have to pay a ‘guzzler tax’, but their ‘fleet’ average does not apply. When was the last time you saw a 40 mpg Rolls Royce? Oh, wait! They don’t make one.
#11. David S.: “Tougher emissions standards should have been gradually implemented ” Just what do you want regulated? Vehicles operated in the LA basin are actually producing cleaner air than that which they use for combustion.
“It should not take 5 years to get a new model onto the streets ” It does not take 5 years, but if you enact laws without paying attention to the laws of thermodynamics, you cause delay in putting the impossible as the enemy of the possible. Where is the car you designed using your ‘flexibility and adaptability’? Where is YOUR efficiency and innovation? Show the rest of us plebeians how it should be done.
15. Jack Olson: “You have to think six years ahead…” No, he didn’t say that. If you had to invest tens of millions of dollars in product design and planning, wouldn’t you like to know that you were making a product that would be legal to sell? Apparently you have never done anything that is regulated and costs money that is never recouped if the laws are changed after you make the investment, or you’d re-think your statement.
Lots of people are too ignorant of how things work, but too smart to want to learn. They become lawyers. .. and stock brokers or bankers. Or they become politicians, who are not regulated by the laws of physics and thermodynamics like the rest of us.
fooey.
tom
David S writes
Between the 1960s and the 1980s, emissions were reduced by about 90%. From about 1990 to about 2000, there was another tenfold reduction. This means that during most of its operation, a modern car produces just one percent of the carbon monixide, oxides of nitrogen, and unburnt hydrocarbons that a 1968 car produced.
In addition, crashworthiness has been improved immensely. Any car built before 1970 was a deathtrap in a 40mph crash or a rollover–with the exception of cars from a few specialty makers like Mercedes-Benz. Back then it was hard to buy an American car that cost as much as the cheapest Mercedes-Benz; today there is a very large overlap in price.
Back in 1960, a backyard mechanic could soup up a car easily and cheaply. There was a lot of room for optimizing the engine. Today the engineering is much, much more complete. The onboard computers monitor dozens of inputs and tweak the mixture, timing, and EGR through dozens of regimes.
The time has not been wasted. Maybe more could have been done, but if you remember how badly cars ran in the last couple years of the first ten-year emissions plan and how much things have improved, you should realize that there was a lot of engineering work done to make it all happen.
Only rarely does an automaker introduce a wholly new engine or a wholly new transmission. Getting these right from scratch is an enormously expensive and time-consuming exercise. We take for granted the enormous engineering history that today’s cars have.
I have long legs and my big butt adds to the legroom I need to operate a car without getting leg cramps. (You can tell now that I drive a lot; when I walk my right toe points out more than my left.) Cars have become far more space-effient in the last twenty years, even as crashworthiness requirements have added weight and controlled explosive devices (airbags) have been added not just in the dashboard and steering wheel (where they interfere with the view of the instrument cluster) but also in the doors and frames (where they are a potential hazard to rescuers who have to pry the cars open). In 1970, most people had room to work under the hood, or to stow things under the dashboard or in the spaces in the doors. Today there is hardly a cubic inch unused anywhere in cars. Batteries have been pushed into fenders, where they are vulnerable in crashes, for instance, while the steering gear has been arranged so that a collision will not turn the steering column into a spear.
Things have changed. You haven’t been watching.
As to engine efficiency, you are up against the laws of thermodynamics and of chemistry. The best way to improve efficiency is to raise the combustion temperature; the only way to hold down the oxides of nitrogen production is to limit it.
The best hope, from a theoretical point of view, may be the two-mode hybrid. (The two-mode can operate as both a series and parallel hybrid; the series mode is efficient at low speed and the parallel at high speed. Work out why for yourself. Hint: those superefficient diesel locomotives that CSX advertises have immensely heavy generators and motors.)
A car that can’t merge into a traffic stream smoothly risks the lives of everyone around it on the road. Given that the anti-car forces will only give us limited chances to create longer acceleration lanes, and that many drivers don’t know how to use them–they wander into the traffic lane at 35 mph–these underpowered econoboxes should be considered unroadworthy.
Balderdash. Engineering takes time. Yes, we can do things better, but most of the gains have been made. Changing the laws every year with no sense of the time that it takes to make things work only slows the process down. Changing the expectations for the number of vehicles to be produced changes the balance of money to spend on improving production.
It’s time to understand the fundamentals. It is only in science fiction that geniuses turn out working designs with no errors, no cycles of refinement.
I wish you wisdom.
This is the same industry that wanted to monitor themselves on safety standards when people started noticing in the 60s and 70s that the Big Three were making unafe cars.
Now they want national standards even though they have fought emmision standards every inch of the way for over 30 years now. Let me guess, they want to set the standards too.
Back in 1970 there were four major American auto makers (Yes, four. My first car was a Rambler)
Now there are two (and Chrysler).
Maybe we need this number to shrink down to one. That is if the survivour can make good quality safe cars with high gas milage and low emmisions.
Otherwise the number of car companies here will be slightly less than one.
I see that Mr. McCurdy is an active member of the automobile industry. Frankly sir, your opinion is worth dunk. You miss the whole point by advocating an emissions standard with government oversight. You want to kill an industry? Get the government intimately involved and make sure you don’t keep a handle on labor costs. American car manufacturers – and especially GM – are 100% guilty of ignoring these two lessons; thus their present state of affairs. Yeah, I trust guys like Chuck Schumer to make non-politically motivated decisions when it comes to his part in over-seeing a multi-billion dollar industry. Government is political, and that has nothing to do with making a profit. As for labor, yeah, go enter into crazy, unsustainable contracts with unions who care nothing for the bottom line, only what they can get for their members. GM made a life-threatening mistake back in the 80′s they agreed with the AFL-CIO that they would keep paying union members who were laid off. By 1995 there were over 30,000 union members on “bank employment” – not working for lack of work, but collecting a salary and benefits. Screw the US auto makers, I’m buying Japanese. You’re talking carbon emmission when your industry is on the brink? Your industry doesn’t deserve to survive.
HEY NORTHERN LIGHT: you miss the point too. Go away and don’t post until you understand that the point of business is to make money.
Another problem here is that too many people have an opinion about a business that they have nothing to do with, except to buy the product. I couldn’t imagine how I would keep my business alive if every fool showed up at my door with recommendations. Business is to make money. Period. Government involvement + unions = no profit, which = no incentive to run a business, which = no business, which = 1,000,000 retards with an irrelevant opinions, which = the election of guys like Obama. Yeah! Let’s set carbon standards! Rejects.
@18. njcommuter:
Average fuel economy is effectively what it was 25 years ago. I recognize that emissions have been improved, and crashworthiness has improved immensely – but economy has not seen the same kind of improvements.
When you say “maybe more could have been done”, you are understating the case. Certainly more could have, and should have, been done to improve fuel economy. I’ve simply shared what I think could and should be done to make the improvements I see lacking.
I drive a car that is more than 15 years old, and I can see quite clearly that cars have not become significantly more space-efficient, fuel-efficient or cost-efficient during that time. Yes, some things have changed – but for the most part, the last two decades have been spent on cosmetic improvements and computerization, with very little effort spent on improving fuel economy. There is plenty of room for improvement without violating the laws of thermodynamics or chemistry.
The best hope, from any point of view, is not a hybrid vehicle at all, but a pure electric vehicle, as part of a solar economy. Capacitor and battery technology are coming of age, despite the massive incentives to focus on gasoline as a motor fuel – if the last thirty years had been spent earnestly working toward truly innovative solutions, we would now be reaping the rewards. Composite materials have also been overlooked for too long.
Yes, engineering takes time, but antiquated manufacturing philosophies hamper innovation. Re-engineering the factory itself is where the greatest innovation is needed. To claim that “most of the gains have been made” sounds very similar to engineering professors who declared the impossibility of heavier than air flight a few short decades ago. There is plenty of room for improvement in the engineering of human transportation systems, and the systems we use to manufacture them.
Nobody is suggesting changing the laws every year – but keeping the same standards for twenty years has wasted the talent of our engineers. It is time to challenge ourselves to take the next step in weaning our society away from fossil fuel sources. It’s not about genius – it’s about common sense. Tying the future of the auto industry to wasteful fossil fuel vehicles is a poor policy.
Peace.
DS
Calling fossil fuels “wasteful” without any scaleable viable replacement is not realistic. No one controls the engineers but the engineers so saying the “we” have “wasted their talent” assumes things not in evidence; the first being that engineers are merely societal drones awaiting proper orders from the “smart” people before they can work towards a certain goal. IF you don’t think that motor vehicle engineers are always trying to come up with ideas for fuel economy and more efficient motors, you are ignorant and need to educate yourself on business realities because you sounds rather utopean in your thinking. Hint: look up “diminishing returns”, particularly as it applies to fuel economy and the internal combustion engine. There is only so much you are going to get out of it, before you either destroy the engine or you make the cost so expensive the market won’t support it.
David S.,
I’m not trying to be insulting, but you’re an ignoramus. The car companies have spent billions on r&d to reduce emissions and pollutants have been reduced close to 99%. Air quality is much better now than it was 30 years ago in every major US city.
Your notion of designing, developing and building a car shows how little you know about the process. A car has 20,000 parts or more. There’s no way all the design, testing, verification, and production of all those parts in less than a year.
You give lip service to the fact that cars are safer, but most of the added weight in modern cars is directly due to safety. Air bags, side intrusion beams, passenger safety cells, etc., it all adds up.
In 1972, a typical family car weighed about two tons and got about 12-14 mpg. If you can’t see that improvements in efficiency have been made, you’re blind.
David S replies
Because we are at the limits of thermodynamics. If we could turn gasoline into something that a fuel cell could use, working in a limited volume, with limited equipment mass, and without high energy inputs, we could do better. But right now we are limited to combustion.
Space effiency first: you cannot be more than 100% space-efficient. I see hardly an unused cubic inch in my car. I don’t know about yours. Maybe I bought a better car. With regard to power conversion: we’re near the thermodynamic limit. We can run the engines in a better regime, where is where hybrids can help us. We can recover some of the energy braked away–again, hybrids can help. We can even recover some of the energy lost in suspension damping, if you are willing to pay for the suspension components and control systems–and the extra weight and mass they are likely to represent. With regard to cost: the American automakers are paying benefits for ten times the employees they have. This ‘inefficiency’ trumps anything else you can name in vehicle cost. With regard to vehicle weight, the steel used in cars is now generally a better and more expensive alloy to provide the extra strength for crashworthiness. Suspensions and drive train components are often made of very high strength steel. Engines have expensive, hard-to-engineer, hard-to-manufacture light (aluminum) alloy blocks, and forged crankshafts are the norm (required because the shorter stroke of today’s oversquare piston creates its torque through more force rather than a longer moment arm–this also requires stronger main bearings). Again, more expense–and a more compact engine.
Cosmetic changes are necessary to sell cars; without them buyers go to other makers. I don’t like it but it’s true. Computerization has met the emission standards, and kept the fuel economy up in spite of greater restrictions on combustion.
Pure electric requires transmission. We’ve got our transmission systems on the hairy edge of the possible, with phase-matching systems that engineers could only dream of forty years ago. (If you don’t understand reactive impedence and its representation with complex numbers, please go study it before you pontificate.)
Solar requires storage. A lot of ideas have been floated, some obvious, some way-out. Pumped hydroelectric storage has been rules out by the environmental movement; read the history of the Storm King project. (And it only works when you’ve got lots of water to play with.) Other approaches haven’t found investors, and have to pass Environmental Impact muster, which adds uncertainty to both schedules and eventual outcomes. You don’t get investors that way, and the conflicting requirements imposed on utilities by public utilities boards, accounting rules, and the iron laws of economics make it very hard for any utility to risk anything.
As to batteries: improvements are being made. You don’t read about them, you don’t hear about them, unless you are reading the industry journals or a few technology-oriented web sites. But the problem isn’t just making the batteries, it’s making them cheap and light. Ultracaps suffer from leakage, and their discharge curve is almost pathological, as is any capacitor’s. Their stored energy goes as the square of the voltage, which means that you have to be able to charge and discharge them efficiently across a very wide voltage range. With batteries, you have a working range of perhaps 10% of the batteries’ mean discharge voltage. And you still have the problem that to make the motors and generators efficient at high power you have to make them heavy–which is why a series hybrid is efficient at low speeds, and a parallel hybrid at high speeds. The mechanical power train of an automobile, even with an automatic transmission, can be over 80% efficient even under high load; it’s hard to make an electrical motor drive more than 60% efficient under high load, and when you count the energy lost in the batteries’ charge-discharge cycle, you are under 45%. Add the losses in transmission from the power plant and any thermodynamic losses in generation, and you’re well under the efficency of the automobile engine itself.
Easy to say. Prove it.
That would be ten decades ago, now. Not so few. Meanwhile, the industry designs structures, engines, suspensions, and transmission with CAD systems. Collisions are simulated and design changes made without ever fabricating metal. Finite-element analysis shows not only the best shape for a component but the best way to forge or draw it through dies. Spatial similations reveal ahead of time whether mechanics can reach the places they need to reach for maintenance, and whether they can swing the tools they need in order to loosen and tighten fasteners.
The low-hanging fruit has been taken, mostly since 1965.
Combustion of high-energy liquid fuels is a very effective way to power moving vehicles. Internal combustion provides the greatest power-to-weight ratio in the engines, and therefore the vehicle. It also allows fueling for three hundred miles or more in a few minutes. And when you consider end-to-end efficiency, it competes with other approaches very, very well. It does not lose one third or more of the available energy in transmission from a power plant. It does not tax an already overloaded energy transmission system, which cannot be improved because of political obstacles that are buttressed by widespread ignorance and media-fueled technophobia.
Somewhere you write about using composites in automobiles. Ford has used carbon-carbon brake disks, although they had problems with failures. Composites cost several times as much as the best steel, and cannot be readily repaired by cutting and welding, a major lifecycle consideration because a collision that might cost $4000 to repair in $30,000 steel car could force a $80,000 car to be declared a total loss. Composites cannot serve as crankshafts, gears, or bearing surfaces, and unless their thermal expansion coefficients match those of metals around them, they cannot readily be mixed with metals in those places. To my knowledge, they cannot readily replace elastic steel components like springs. Synthetic elastomers do exist and can be made strong enough, but they are far more expensive than steel and their lifespan is far less. (Iron alloys are uniquely blessed with an essentially infinite fatigue life so long as their elastic limits are respected.)
@24. SGT Ted:
Fossil fuel is inherently a wasteful way to fuel cars. Permanently depleting a finite resource for short-term economic reasons is wasteful. Alternatives exist, and should have been the focus of development for the past thirty years.
25. Ronnie Schreiber:
FYI, calling me an ignoramus is insulting – particularly when you apparently don’t understand my arguments. Reduction of emissions and pollutants is fine – but when underlying fuel efficiency is ignored, and alternative fuels sidelined, it’s clear that we’re focusing on the wrong type of R&D spending.
That’s why I’m talking about fundamental change. Did you ever stop to consider why a car has 20,000 parts? Properly engineered systems are not so needlessly complicated. Think about it.
So which is it? Is there added weight due to safety improvements, or reduced weight due to efficiencies? The fact is that safety improvements only add a small amount of weight, and the typical family car is still far heavier than it needs to be because of a refusal on the part of automakers to explore alternative materials. I’m not denying that improvements in efficiency have been made – I’m simply arguing that these improvements have been far too modest over the past few decades.
26. njcommuter:
Internal combustion engines are not being used efficiently. We are not at or near the limits of thermodynamics by any measure.
Space efficiency is about more than “an unused cubic inch”. Power conversion is clearly ripe for improvements (you identify a few). Legacy costs for American car makers are the result of incompetent management planning, and a refusal to think sustainably. Modern materials are also part of improving engineering. A solar economy does require an improved electrical grid – we’ve been talking about this for 30 years without doing much of anything. Finally we’re beginning to see some action with the current administration.
Yes, on the surface the internal combustion engine seems efficient – but externalized costs, and the ultimate cost of not moving to a sustainable system, are not included in these calculations. Factory efficiency is not something I need to prove to you – it is something that even the car companies have come to recognize – they are simply moving too slowly to take full advantage of improvements.
Yes, the low-hanging fruit have been taken – that’s no reason to stop climbing. Your criticism of the electrical grid only reinforces my point that we’ve been spending our money foolishly. A distributed grid is much more efficient and provides a higher level of energy security. Widespread ignorance and technophobia are things that can be fixed – but not when people like yourself continue to deny that there are solutions at hand.
Composites cost more because they are a small part of the market. Increased use of composites drives costs down, and composites are the single most effective way to reduce the weight of vehicles. Brake disks are not the killer application for composites. Modular composite construction makes for easier and more durable repairs, and can replace a large portion of the steel used in cars with lighter material. That’s why composites are so popular in aircraft. We have the engineering skills to make massive improvements in automobile technology – but the focus has not been on making better cars. All of your arguments are old and tired – and in most cases just plain wrong.
It’s time to stop pretending that we’ve built the best automobiles, or the best automobile industry, that we can. There is plenty of room for making the next generation of cars more efficient, more durable, and more environmentally friendly. All it takes is a decision by automakers to try.
Peace.
DS