Lack of fuel efficient cars: Just market forces?
Or, are consumers, automakers or oil companies to blame?On today's Behind the Wheel Blog, Phil Lebeau is asking who is to blame for GM's problems. Just GM's, I ask? What about the rest of the auto industry's problems?
There isn't just a lack of quality fuel efficient vehicles from GM, but from all automakers. Even the king of hybrid cars, Toyota, has made hybrid fuel efficiency almost worthless with $3000.00 dealer markups.
And, while consumers, oil companies and government share a great bit of blame, the inability of automakers to realize the future is quite alarming. Yet, scarily, insiders from some of the world's largest automakers have told me that $3.00+ gas prices were forecasted years ago - today's prices were expected. Automakers saw today's gas crisis coming. Sure, maybe they forecasted $3.45 gas, rather than $4.00+ gas, but they saw it coming.
So, why was nothing done?
Labels: fuel efficiency, Hybrid Vehicles
posted by Dahcredyns at
8:23 AM
4 Comments:
At least Toyota had some vision and put a plan in place to deal with this forecast - of course, now they're using that forecast to "screw" customers over. I guess toyota is as much of a pig capitalist as every other automaker.
I say screw them all. Don't buy ANY new vehicles. Let's force them to make quality products, at a fair price. Is that really so hard?
I have to admit that this Toyota fan has become a bit of a Toyota-hater because of Toyota dealerships.
Still, what's the solution? Is the problem capitalism? Is it consumer psychology? Dare I say, is it human psychology.
Are humans, as the Matrix calls us, nothing but a bad virus?
Dahc...
There was no lack of vision whatsoever. The automakers knew exactly what they were doing.
Inefficient products are always the cheapest to manufacture and make.
SUV's are truly the bottom of the barrel of automotive technology. There chassis designs are decades old. Their engines are less expensive because of lower emissions controls. Their suspensions are outdated, steel beam or cheap IRC setups. Their fit and finish are among the worst in the industry (just look at the crap quality of an Expedition or Explorer...absolute crap).
They are cheaper to make, and sell for as much as a truly well engineered car like a Civic or Accord or even much more in some cases.
Nothing but greed and milking it as much as possible was involved..nothing else. Don't think for a minute the automakers were caught by surprise. They knew this was coming but made SO MUCH money on low budget cars like SUV's that they can surely handle it.
Consumers are just too dumb to realize they are sitting on a boat that they think they are controlling but they are not.
Anyone who thinks this is a free market is smoking heavy drugs. People were doing fine without huge cars before, and they would have done fine without them in the last wasteful decade. Contrary to what capitalistic lovers believe, no one was sitting at home thinking of writing letters to GM saying "Please make us bigger cars....that's what we want."
i think you might give them too much credit.
i think automakers realized the possibility, they just didn't know how to react. we live in this rapidly advancing digital age and automakers are still mostly stuck in the past. of course, so too are far too many consumers and automaker shareholders.
additionally, retooling the auto industry isn't easy - it not only takes a massive amount of money, but a massive amount of cooperation from the UAW. that's inefficient in and of itself.
it makes me want to blame automakers, but at the same time it's hard not to still blame consumers, whom were readily buying these products, and politicians, whom refuse to get serious about energy policy.
nonetheless, instead of aiming blame, i'd rather hope that today's 'oil crisis' becomes the impetus for a change in consumer psychology, especially american psychology. a lot of people are waking up from the haze of our cheap gassed existence.
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