It's bizarre that this has been allowed, and that lawmakers didn't immediately fix this hole in the regulations as soon as they noticed car manufacturers taking advantage of it.
The correct answer would have been to increase the number of companies manufacturing vehicles, not passing laws that constrained a market and possibly lead to an overall decrease. Now we have a market that's almost entirely bound to congressional whim and mostly disconnected from consumer demand.
Agree 100%
>mostly disconnected from consumer demand
Disagree. Sedans are still around (Camry, Corolla, Civic, Accord), but consumers are voting with their wallets for crossovers. Ford killed the Focus and Fusion because they simply couldn't be sold for a profit since most people didn't get the high end models, and to be honest, I'm surprised Chevy still makes the Malibu. The Company Formerly Known As Chrysler doesn't even make a car anymore.
They stopped providing it as a model to the American market. It's based off a Ford platform, though, and other automakers are continuing to use that platform. The Focus also continues to be a model in European markets.
During the beginning of the pandemic there were also parts shortages. Many manufacturers stopped making their lower end vehicles and only produced the higher end ones with the limited parts they could get, because, they can convert those parts into higher profits.
I think these decisions are best viewed as the awful intersection of short term wall street thinking combined with latent and intentionally imperfect measures of consumer demand.
This is objectively true but it’s happening against three decades of marketing pushing SUVs hard and especially the messaging that if you drive a small car you’re putting your safety at risk. I think there’s an arm’s race here which is going to be hard to stop absent something causing gas prices to spike or a shift in insurance requirements.
But you're right that there's far too little choice in smartphones. They're all fragile thin big touch screens. In the early days, you had smartphones made out of steel with sliding keyboards. What happened to that?
Something kind of like this is already done with stickers for electric cars in many states: Doing that for every car is just extending the program. It won't happen though, because a lot of people would be angry to internalize the cost of their choices
Dodge Charger