I’m also reminded that back in the 1970’s (does anybody remember the Arab/OPEC oil embargo of ‘73?) a bunch of engineering students from Ga Tech built a true diesel/electric hybrid using a little Mercury Capri body and rolling chassis, and a high torque 24 volt aircraft starter motor. That little car got a proved 70+ mpg,,, and then faded into automotive history.
Here we are again, reinventing the wheel.
I was reminded of that, too.
From my own place this morning, where I wrote a comment on Brian’s piece:
Most of you weren’t alive, back when this happened last time. I was. We’ve done this before, where American car manufacturers were forced to downsize dramatically so as to meet the supposed oil crisis, which was in fact a foreign policy crisis brought on by Jimmy Carter, along with the last big rise of the enviro-whack-job, which prevented us from taking avantage of the oil and gas we have available to us here in the US. Yes, we’re still feeling the pain from that misbegotten era.
You may not know this, but under Carter’s when the CAFE standards started. That’s what a bunch of liberals.. Carter at their head… got together and decided that they knew more about making cars than Detroit did, and proceeded down the road of micromanagement of Detroit. The left figured they knew more about physics than the car companies and their scientists did, too. They figured all this business about so many miles for so many gallons could be changed by simply passing a law. Of course, such things can’t happen that way, so Detroit went the only direction they could at the time; they went small. It essentially killed off Detroit over a period of years.
You may recall that those vehicles did not operate all that well. The Vega for example. Or, if you prefer, the Pinto. The Chevette. The Fiesta. The Gremlin.
That forced downsizing, in combination the with United Auto Workers overreaching, caused a very serious difficulties in keeping the businesses afloat that once kept the entire nation humming. It helped to kill off both American industry, and American drivers, with it.
It caused driver death rates to skyrocket, as smaller, lighter vehicles tried to make their way among their heavier and more solidly built brothers.
And in terms of killing off American industry, it was the Gremlin that did in American Motors. A valiant effort, the Gremlin, but too much change, too fast both from a design standpoint and the sales. GM and Ford were in a better position financially to deal with the strain placed on them by the federal government. Chrysler, meanwhile, needed a bailout by the time the Carter Administration was pushed out of office by an electorate sick of the incompetance and micromanagement.
All of this carnage, a direct result of Federal micromanagement. It was suggested that the time, and correctly I think, that there were a good number of people who were demanding these changes , who really wanted to see the American auto manufacturing business collapse entirely. And America, with it. They damn near succeeded, too. The reaction to that, thankfully, was a sound defeat at the polls for Carter, and the beginning of the Reagan era.
And does history repeat itself, here?
I suspect it will.
