Sep 07 2011
Car hybrids need to be introduced in the US as well
A collegue at a car injury assessment firm was puzzled and rather angry after reading about games the auto industry has been playing on Americans. Forwarding me a series of articles to read through and come up with something sensible, this is what I wrote. I hope this article will convince Americans that they can win this fuel war by getting the auto manufacturers to act.
Fuel economy was thought to be a significant factor in their selection of a new car by a minimum of 1/3 of buyers in America. Due to the preoccupation today with smog, global warming and America’s dependence on foreign sources of oil, it’s actually shocking to learn that as long ago as 1992 a car that got 100 miles to the gallon was built by General Motors. Yet another car, the GM TPC, which looked a lot like the Geo Metro, weighed only 1000 pounds and could get 75 miles per gallon. Unfortunately, in order to meet American safety regulations, the 3-cylinder vehicle required reinforcement weighing 200 pounds, which ended in further development being discarded.
This was not the only protype designed by GM which ended up on the scrapheap. The GM Lean Machine of 1982, which could get 80 mpg, and the GM Ultralite which realized a fabulous 100 mpg, were two of these vehicles. GM had been offering cars to the buying public in 1992 that did 20 mpg, while Honda was getting 50 mpg with their Civic VX, but right then GM already covertly had cars doing 100 miles per gallon. Given that cars have already been built that get 100 miles per gallon, then why are they not being marketed to the general public?
One more puzzling thing is that many manufacturers, while selling fuel-eficient vehicles in foreign countries, are selling traditional gas guzzlers in the US. Cars that achieve more than 70 mpg have been sold in Europe and Japan for a lot of years. To illustrate, the Volswagen Lupo has never been distributed in the united states – this is a car that gets 78 mpg. Honda released to the US sector in 2007, a car known as the Fit, but known as the Jazz in other parts of the world. The Jazz in Japan has solutions to enhance fuel economy and a smaller engine, but for the US, the Fit doesn’t even use a smaller engine as an option.
Auto manufacturers in the united states express to their public that they create big autos because they, the public, love big autos. It really is evident that manufacturers don’t generate a lot of money selling a small 2-person commuter vehicle, but they certainly do selling big SUVs. American folks have been brainwashed with commercials to believe that they simply must have the latest and largest bundu basher. It really is quite apparent where the large companies’ interests lay when you consider that they have never offered options. GM could currently have been in the forefront with fuel-efficient vehicles, but they elected, rather, to champion SUVs. The rest of the auto producers did the same thing by producing fuel-efficient cars, and then denied them to Americans.
We all live in a community that has waged wars over oil, that has been polluted, and car makers have never even given the choice to people in this country of fuel-efficient cars. The question comes up: how many Americans would’ve appreciated the option of acquiring a car with good gas mileage but weren’t ever offered it? Maybe the moment has come to restart building those cars that were developed only to be abandoned all those years ago. That way, we will be able to lower our expenses to just car parts and may be an occurrence of a car accident.
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