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Comment by syshum | Hacker News Reader

>>Car manufacturers will always sell budget cars to people with small budgets, because there's a market for it.

I think your definition of "budget cars" and mine are vastly different, Regulations have already priced new car ownership out of the hands of many people.

New car prices have far outpaced inflation for many many years and wages are stagnate for many occupations

>> quite happily sacrifice the health of everyone in the search of profit.

All yes, the evil for profit corporations... Well comrade show me all the innovations that regulations directly have inspired. I would be interested in the that list.

I always forget how must support for communism there is here in HN circles...

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Please don't post ideological flamebait to HN. We ban accounts that do that. We've also had to warn you about this before.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't actually think you're interested in that list, but there is a whole theory with scholarly support describing how regulations inspire innovation. It's called the "Porter Hypothesis" (the Porter of Porter's Five Forces), and like all theories it has some evidence for and some evidence against.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_hypothesis

Very interesting -- I had no idea this was a scholarly domain of study; thanks for posting this.

Here's a survey that might be interesting to you: https://www.itif.org/files/2011-impact-regulation-innovation...

I can't promise that there isn't some bias in one direction or another, I just found it interesting, and the conclusion is very pithy.

> I think your definition of "budget cars" and mine are vastly different, Regulations have already priced new car ownership out of the hands of many people.

So buy second hand perhaps?

I bought my car for £5000 second hand (yes, I can afford a new car, but why bother, they depreciate so fast in the first few years it hardly seems worth it) and it's a nice car. It's way more than I could have paid for a perfectly serviceable second hand car. I checked, £700 was the cheapest of the same manufacturer as mine, and it's 5 years newer too.

>>> quite happily sacrifice the health of everyone in the search of profit.

> All yes, the evil for profit corporations...

Wait, so it's OK to pump shit into the atmosphere as long as you make a profit?

Is the bar really so low for communism that believing that we shouldn't be poisoning large amounts of the population gains you membership?

Corporations and companies are optimised for one thing, profit. They do this at the expense of the climate and the health of people. Hell, this is a comment on an article about how a car company cheated emissions tests so they could sell more cars. Emissions that kill people.

Do you really believe that we would have the current emissions levels if there was no regulation?

> Well comrade

Oh please drop this shit. Resorting to name calling just suggests that you don't know what you're talking about or have no real point.

> show me all the innovations that regulations directly have inspired. I would be interested in the that list.

If you lower emissions limits over time car manufacturers will have to innovate to meet those targets, right? I mean, car companies aren't going to do this themselves are they, see cheating on the emissions tests, again.

> I always forget how must support for communism there is here in HN circles...

I'm not a communist.

The other side of the coin:

In constant dollars, the average cost of a new car from the beginning of the emissions & safety-regulation era (say, 1970..) has about doubled. This is a nontrivial chunk of income. As a brit, you might live someplace where cars are optional. Many Americans have no such choice...

Likewise, the low-hanging fruit has already mostly been picked. A new 1964.5 Ford Mustang, with the engine turned off, sitting in a garage, releases more toxins than a modern car does while traveling at highway speeds. The 90/10 rule absolutely applies, as it does to safety. We're coming close to having to install catalytic converters inside the engine itself to minimize the lightoff time, which is about the only place you can find NOx/VOC emissions to clean up nowadays.

Not only were there upfront costs to recover for emissions & fuel economy, there were the knock-on effects on performance and reliability that took the better part of two decades to solve.

> I always forget how must support for communism there is here in HN circles...

I always forget how libertarians think that anyone who holds views that don't completely conform to their ideology is necessarily a communist (or "collectivist").

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