I disagree with the premise of this post! And when I can find an equally hyperbolic and idiotic counter-point article, I'll send it your way so you can just dismiss it as a idiotic liberal crap!!!!!!!!!!
gas going up to $4+ a gallon has done more for making energy efficiency "cool" than anything the government can do. If they really want to make americans value fuel efficient cars, impose a $2/gallon gas tax.
i would actually love to see this. if companies have carbon credits, why not the american consumer? what's good for the goose is good for the gander! impose the tax on gas to offset their carbon emissions!
The way we drink the liquid gold in this country - they might have to. This, btw - has nothing to do with the issue of loving the earth - it is just cold, hard economic data. Sooner or later all these other countries with a lot more people than we have will increase their oil consumption (we already see it with China - and India will be coming along very soon) - making our economy that much more in a hole if we can not reduce our dependency on it. As for the $2/gallon gas tax - we already pay it to support out troops protecting the Saudi royalty, keep the Iraqi oil machine running and the like... it's just not called a gas tax, it's called being patriotic... At the end of the day - it comes down to marketing, unfortunately. Personally, I have no problems with people driving big trucks for their work and farmers using the oil as needed - but the Expeditions and Suburbans used to ferry one kid to soccer practice are just dumb...
Just for the record - this article claims that the C4C has done more for sales of fuel efficient cars than we have seen even in the days of $4/gallon. Not sure how true it is - but it is interesting... http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090811/ap_on_re_us/us_clunkers_mpg Again, I think that the biggest benefit of this program, long-term, would be in exposing a lot of people to the issue of fuel efficiency and it's benefits. Will it happen? Who knows - time will tell, I guess.
sure, if you only take a one or two month window during a program in which the government paid for people to buy more fuel efficient cars. however, the Toyota prius mania was at its peak when gas was $4-5 a gallon...this is when hybrids went from mere novel toys into mainstream and popular options for cars. not because of "cash for clunkers" because the market already existed. like i said, it was an artificial (or imaginary) demand because the government was supplementing and "creating" a demand due to a credit. once you remove that demand, it will return to the status quo and demand for fuel efficient cars will hinge more on gas prices than anything else.
The article shows that this is the highest fuel efficiency jump since 2007 - well into the Prius mania. The Prius, btw, was nothing more than a brilliant marketing thing by Toyota - it still sold a drop in the bucket and never ever came close to the best selling vehicle in this country - which has been a Ford F-150 since about the dawn of man. Again, I agree that by itself, this program is probably nothing more than a drop in the bucket - but the place where it might be useful is by taking fuel efficiency out of the "tree-huggers" circle and making it a conversation point for the average American car buyer.
fuel efficient cars have been past the granola stage for a while, its now mainstream and its not because of C4C which is basically just the last 2 months. again, when you artificially stimulate sales of fuel efficient cars through a government program that is non-sustainable other than a short-term run, you have to put an * on there.
There is no * to put when it comes to this issue - when referring to your original argument that $4/gallon will help increase fuel efficient car sales more than this program. We had had $4/gallon for most of 2008 - and this is the highest fuel-efficient sales average since 2007 - even when average prices for gas are at $2.57 per gallon. Again - you said: This data shows that it is not the case. No * needed. We, as a country, it seems, are too dumb to pay attention to the details until someone puts a nice marketing campaign around it. At $2.5/gallon the big marketing campaign has caused more to buy fuel efficient vehicles than $4/gallon did. It's a pretty sad statement, actually, as it seems that the majority of this country is living in a financial fantasy and have for quite some time...
Yes, a * is needed. The reason being is that there was an unsustainable government program to skew car sales towards lower mileage vehicles. they were manipulating the market, therefore it is not an accurate reflection of the consumer mindset at the time. If the government was selling 100mpg cars at one cent for one month, and they sold 20 million cars in one month, would you say that is a trend or is that an anomaly? Its the same thing as C4C but on a more extreme scale. The data is faulty because there are non-uniform external factors influencing the market.
FWIW Everything I've seen and read says that Toyota basically sold far more Prius' than they ever expected and probably sold all they could manufacture. The demand was so high for them when I got mine in 2005 that you basically had to accept whatever color they had, whatever options they had, and you were put on a waiting list to get one.
No, you are losing sight of the conversation. You say it is unsustainable - and I agree. You also say that $4/gallon would do better to make fuel efficiency important to people than this program - and the data simply does not support this claim. These are two different claims - one I agree with, the other is not supported by data. Nothing more, nothing less.
I am not surprised. But again, the numbers are nowhere near where the most popular cars or vehicles in this country are - so while they underestimated the number of people attuned to efficiency/environment/whatever - they still did not sell enough to really make a difference in the grand scheme of things for the average American. If there is a saving grace for the C4C program - is that it made energy efficiency a conversation piece for just about anyone buying a new car - where it was not even close to it before.
It speaks to $4 gas driving demand, surely. I don't at all think this was the dumbest program ever. The govt. has many dumber, too numerous to count. This one wasn't a winner in any sense. People didn't spend the money on US made cars, they spent them on Hondas (Honda had a strong marketing campaign, $4500 off plus $4500 from the govt.). The economics of it was a net loss. The govt. strung out the auto dealers, putting them in a cash crunch in the worst of times. And the administration pulled the plug on it before 2/3 of the money was committed.
