Well we had a thread a few weeks ago and that was not a welcome comment, the poster that said they bought a older car with out all the tech was lambasted for their environmental impact
You bet your bottom dollar I'm going for the "gas guzzler" - I hate these massive corporations more than I love the earth because they're the ones trying to force me into their ecosystem I can't back out of.
Too bad the barrier to entry for car manufacturing is so high due to the tech involved, the "back-door" deals, etc. etc. - I'm sure a cheaper company selling a well made equivalent of the GNU/CAR meme would be popular if marketed correctly.
You just cannot compete as "not huge" company with other big companies making cheap cars.
They are making their money on service and replacement components, not on new economy car sales (well, pre-pandemic at least)
So you're not getting "cheaper company" nor "well made" because making something well and cheap requires that scale in the first place.
The issue is really that not that many come to dealership and want cheapest radio from the 90s in their new car. People do want at least android auto/carplay and that usually comes with whole rest of entertainment, and as we are in cheap economy car segment, well, the shit that cost few bucks in knobs also get moved to that entertainment.
You can only really start talking about old cars being generally 'gas guzzlers' if you go back to the malaise era in the 70s.
The production of a car produces about 40k gallons of hazardous waste, removing that water permanently from the water supply.
https://www.automotiveworld.com/articles/water-water-everywh...
instead of motorcycles which are licensed, registered and insured, i now see more electric bicycles, which actually look like motorcycles, cost as much as motorcycles, and just ride around willy nilly.
Any small time manufactuer should be allowed to produce road legal vehicles for intracity use, and be allowed to skip most regulations that are onerous. Lighting, fine, brakes fine, but does it need a reverse camera or onstar or lane departure? no probably not.
I also doubt any market for what you're describing exists beyond "15 year old Honda Civic/Toyota Camry"
Reverse cameras are definitely helpful, if not a necessity when driving a behemoth vehicle. This is much less of a concern for a golf cart.
Works OK on a course... would not work so well on a noisy street.
US legislators just decided to not fight the "how small car needs to be to not require backup camera" and required it to be in all of them.
So, no, it isn't only a "giant Canyanero hurr durr" issue
Of course manufacturers immediately saw that they could just make trucks more like cars than make cars more fuel efficient so they started putting modern interiors and such into trucks and modernizing the platforms to create SUVs. Thus the station wagon died and the SUV became the standard family vehicle for a lot of people.
I think we have plently of lessons of how badly things go when the federal government sticks its nose into anything that we can no longer call these as unintended consequences. They are very much intended
We need to stop having the government pick winners and losers, or try to influence the market in any way be favoring one thing over another
regulatory capture tells us these consequences are intended. Intended to keep out upstarts without Musk's cash to back it. There's no reason we couldn't have bespoke car manufacturers producing city-cars for a low total cost.
How do you view the relationship between government-owned, built, and maintained roads and private vehicle manufacturers that use those roads?
Yes
> Regardless of how well it is manufactured and how safe it is for those inside and outside of it?
No. Should have cat, compliant lighting that's not too brigth/dim, working brakes and suspension, ABS and some common sense (like no spikes protruding from it). You know, the stuff proper MOT inspection would fail you for anyway. And maybe pay few hundred to professional mechanic to get thru it and make sure you ain't doing something stupid and get you nice custom VIN for it.
If it is (say) 100+ production yeah probably should have some actual crash testing and rest of the compliance, but if it is one off ? Won't be worse than 20 years old F150 or someone's restored 70's/80's car and we aren't taking those off the roads.
Well, turns out you are in luck because this is all already possible in the US. Pretty much everywhere there are provisions for one-off custom vehicles and getting them inspected. Sure, the paperwork is daunting and the process isn't always easy, but it is definitely possible. See article about an engineer who registered a jet turbine powered VW bug that shot 15 foot flames out of the back of it in CA that surfaced on HN a few years ago.
But we aren't necessarily talking about one-off cars that hobbyists who care about their craft create. We are talking about Walmart popping out $1,100 golf carts without airbags because it's a "city car".
Could the government, by taking no action, implicitly support the current "winner" because that's the status quo?
What do you think would happen to the prices of gasoline, electricity, etc. if the government stopped regulating any and all of it?
What's your view on government regulation around things like worksite safety, meat inspections and other food safety, drug safety?
Should the government prevent your neighbor from installing a radio signal jammer that prevents you from using your cell phone on your property? Or is that picking a winner/loser?
Like the fact only in near future it will be legal for US cars to have adaptive lights. Or how for years [1] near every car light was same ineffective design.
Over-regulation is as dangerous as under-regulation. If car manufacturers have to squeeze fleet averages (which is on its own retarded idea, just tax every model separately ffs) for normal cars. Or how apparently 20MPG sportscar is "gas guzzler" but 15MPG SUV is not
My point exactly. Correct regulation is correct. People who take the absolutist approach on either side of this tend to quickly run into either "now I have to learn to do my own meat inspections" or "I can't buy meat because a cow needs to be exactly 7'11" tall or it isn't legally a cow".
Governments serve a very real and necessary task of regulating markets to prevent abuse by bad actors. Bad actors seeking out loopholes and skirting regs is not an argument for less regulation but rather an argument for more regulation.
Subarus are probably most plug and play but that's because they are small company that build same car for last 20 years... and not exactly super reliable. For example those [1] crazy bastards swapped whole manual gearbox and engine to a different model (that's auto-only) of Subaru and it even had pre-made holes for stuff that automatic gearbox car doesn't have in the first place, cos they used same subframe parts.