Wednesday, May 20, 2009

The Will to Have Efficient Cars

How Will You Spend Your $2,800?
05/20/09 - CafeHayek by Don Boudreaux

[edited] President Obama has no experience as an entrepreneur or in the automotive industry, but has supposedly designed fuel-efficiency standards that he assures us will save the average car buyer $2,800 over the life of the vehicle.

No one in Detroit, Britain, Japan, Germany, Korea, Sweden, Italy, or France, and no one with decades of experience producing and selling automobiles has yet devised vehicles that are so obviously attractive as the ones now promised to us by the Obama administration.

We can admire Obama for freely offering his idea to the public. If his idea is workable, he could have earned billions by licensing his idea to auto companies. We are certainly lucky that he is simply forcing us to use his idea without charging for it.

+ + + + +

Magic Power
There seems to be a leftist belief that technologists are holding back the cheap, efficient world that they could deliver, if they would just stop being grasping and lazy. Why don't they just do the math and make everything work faster and better? Could the nerds give us cheap power if they wanted to?

Efficiency Breakthrough: Small Cars With Small Engines
The Obama administration estimates paying $1,300 more per car to meet mileage goals. This is absurd. Consumers would need to pay more AND move down a few vehicle sizes. See the European equivalents, engineering considerations, and the financing.

No comments:

Post a Comment

You can use the HTML tags <b> <i> and <a href="">, but not <p>. Trouble commenting? Email your comment or problem to Commerce-Try at Comcast.net. Leave out the minus sign. Mention the name of the post in the email.