I make it a practice to start reading the auto section of the
newspaper whenever the car I am driving clears 100,000 miles.
This allows ample time for detailed research on various options
out there since I routinely drive a car well past 130,000 miles
or more. In fact, my odometer is already registering over
160,000. You could call me a Detroit nightmare.
Since all but one of our children, a college student, has flown
the nest, my wife and I no longer drive the big boomers we used
to, an extension van or a full-size station wagon back in the
days of soccer leagues and cross-country vacations. We pretty
much stick with the basic sedans, which are priced right and
reasonably fuel efficient, a plus in terms of our budget.
This means that we will probably not be availing ourselves to the
latest congressional porker program, “Cash for Clunkers,” which
will reward the worthy owners, say, of a 1998 Mercedes-Benz
M-Class sport utility or a 1992 BMW 8 Series if Kendra Marr of
the Washington Post is to be believed (“You
Call
That
a Clunker?”). Evidently, mileage is the key determinant of
the government’s largess which, therefore, rewards gas guzzlers
who did not read the memo on fuel-efficiency or carbon
footprinting.
A billion dollars are being thrown at this effort to promote
fuel-efficiency, which is a drop in the bucket in terms of the
total automobile stock of high-mileage cars and trucks out there.
But, hey, who said federal legislation had to be cost efficient?
Approximately 250,000 sales may be generated by this program out
of reduced total car sales of 10 million this year. Still, that
leaves a quarter of a million voters, plus the UAW, what’s left
of the Big 3 and the congressional delegations of Michigan and
Ohio, who will be pleased. Unlike a gas tax or a revenue-neutral
carbon tax, this accomplishes nothing significant, either
economically or environmentally. It simply optimizes political
symbolism and constituent loyalty.
As to my research on a new vehicle, I read a perceptive review of
the 2009 Toyota Yaris S, a little bulldog of a car that provides
basic transportation in the city and suburbs at a pretty
reasonable price. The review in Sunday’s Post, “What
We Say We Want, Not What We Really Want,” by Warren Brown,
quickly veers away from the subject at hand into a perceptive
analysis of Americans’ stubborn refusal to buy these smaller,
efficient, cheaper vehicles.
Despite the calls for more fuel-efficient cars and numerous
complaints whenever Mr. Brown files a review on a new truck,
sports car or luxury automobile, he is deluged with complaining
letters, calls and e-mails.
“You [the readers] say that such automotive reviews are
meaningless and bordering on consumer insult in our deepest
economic downturn in decades,” reports Brown. “You urge me to
review more practical, affordable vehicles. I have and will
continue to do so.”
But maybe his readers can’t stand the truth, to steal a line from
a Jack Nicholson character. Says Mr. Brown: “But here is what for
many of you will be a hard-to-swallow truth: Fuel-sippers such as
the Yaris are selling in numbers well below those of the Ford
F-series and Chevrolet Silverado pickup trucks.” He then details
the Automotive News Data Center top-10 rankings for the first six
months of 2009:
The Ford F-Series trucks hold the top sales of 179,632. The
Toyota mid-size family sedan comes in second with 150,242; and
the Chevrolet Silverado pickup — “in a year when GM, its parent
company entered and exited bankruptcy” — is a close third with
sales of 149,949.
As for “genuine fuel misers,” including the Prius hybrid with
sales off by almost half compared to last year, “it’s been an
awful retail season.” The Yaris, which Brown claims is built with
“legendary Toyota quality and reliability,” and is priced in the
$12,000 to $14,825 range, has retail numbers down 40.4 percent in
the first six months of 2009. Given the widespread interest in
substantially reduced fuel consumption, as expressed in readers’
reactions, the media and through the political process, there
appears to be cognitive dissonance, writ large, exhibited in
consumers’ actual behavior.
Warren Brown believes “the problem is us.”
“We want cars such as the Yaris and Fit when gasoline prices are
high, or when gasoline is in short supply. But when gasoline is
flowing at prices that make us smile, which it usually does in
the United States, we’d much rather have a Chevrolet Camaro SS
with a 6.2 liter, 426-horsepower V-8 engine,” says Brown.
“Strange as it might seem in these hard times, Chevrolet isn’t
having any trouble selling that one.”
Cheap gasoline is either a blessing or a curse, depending on your
views on consumer choice, national security, and the role of
carbon emissions in a changing climate. American automobile
companies are caught in a cross-fire between conflicting consumer
and policy choices and will find it difficult to survive unless
politicians quit focusing on them and either offer relief from
regulatory mandates on fuel efficiency or shift their focus to
the price of gasoline, which is at the root of consumer
preference for “muscle” cars, big trucks, and SUVs which are
great fun, often a practical necessity and, evidently, still
affordable for a big part of the automotive market. Focusing on
the price of gasoline would still allow for consumer choice while
fundamentally altering demand in favor of greater fuel
efficiency. It might also save a domestic industrial sector on
the brink of extinction.
There is no certainty either way. But a gas tax would be a more
“market-oriented” approach than the current approach. I confess
to a certain ambivalence here, but clearly the sales of “fuel
misers” were more robust when gas was closer to $4/gallon. As
things stand now, domestic auto manufacturers face the worst
of all possible worlds: regulatory mandates to sell cars
Americans don’t want to buy.
