Perhaps you're making assumption that auto manufacturers are pricing cars at the lowest possible limit, and not artificially high for their pockets.
Maybe not impossible, but how much will it cost to buy an SUV that seats 8 comfortably and has to power to go from 0-60 in less than a half an hour? A little plutonium can go a long way.
I don't know what auto manufacturers are doing other than not running an effcient business and a couple needing the gov't to bail them out. I do know that stricter standards, to the point of 54 MPG (or whatever) isn't going to make the business any easier for them.
Where did the consumers get to negotiate these standards? Did I miss that part of the "negotiations"? Congress didn't even vote on it.
American ingenuity is a great thing. The government dictating the private sectors definition of ingenuity is a new thing. You should be ashamed of yourself, if you're really a believer in free innovation.
You have literally no idea of how the economy works, and what market value mean to a fluid economy. It's really cringe-worthy to read your posts. At least the union hacks like Zags and barfo understand the impact of workers' wages, profits, and how that circulates money into the economy.
Ford is running an efficient business. They are the #1 US auto company, and are running at a profit. They didn't have their bondholders fucked over by Obama, as did GM. Connect the dots...
Whats a Union hack? Right-wingers have been brainwashed into believing the unions are responsible for job outsourcing when the truth is corporate greed is responsible. Kinda sad. Without Unions we would have no workers rights, like paid vacations, 8 hour workday, workplace safety, unlawful firing, lunch breaks, health insurance, etc... We'd all be robots, jumping out of high rise buildings because of depression, like the 'hacks' over in China.
...if you want to start connecting dots, then you'll have to go back a lot further than the last decade. Do you actually know what Henry Ford was trying to accomplish with hemp and biofuels? Seriously, get a fucking clue...to think that today's technology is incapable of such feats is beyond ignorant and willfully naive [video=youtube;54vD_cPCQM8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54vD_cPCQM8[/video]
1000 mpg is easily attainable, but big oil and the Republican party have conspired to prevent it. http://home.earthlink.net/~skunkremedy/home/sk00008.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_Supermileage_Competition
...I don't think the "party" matters in this sector. BIG Oil will always be able to control whoever needs to be controlled to maintain their monopoly, just like the majority of BIG business lobbies and the corrupt policy makers they buy/influence.
It would be the biggest news of the decade if the leader of the Watergate Plumbers admitted that he had been involved in assassinating President Kennedy. The mass media surely wouldn't hide it. Everyone would know. I wouldn't need to link to it 3 times in the last year, with everyone shocked and too paranoid to answer.
Maris, and others, view the world in its entirety by political parties. Anything that could be construed as good is from one party and everything bad from the other. It's called 'narrow mindedness'.
It's easy to vet with the car industry when you fire the CEO and board of one (or more) of them and put your own guys in place. The others are threatened to comply or face a similar fate.
Over 30,000 patents for petroleum based products are filed a year in the USA in the areas of medicine, material sciences, bio-sciences and plastics. But hey, that's not important. It's more important that we burn it up as quickly as we pump it out of the ground. Better allocation of a limited resource? Fuck that!
...it really is a travesty that such innovations have been suppressed over the years, all for evil-doing profit mongers and their absurd affinity for wealth and power at all costs