I recently saw an
article in the USA Today about the rising tendency of American car buyers to consider gas mileage as an important factor when choosing a new car. (The article is a couple weeks old, but its just a typical example of numerous articles I've seen in that paper recently.) I like to see evidence of Americans finally growing up and starting to consider the real costs of their purchasing choices, but reading the article was appalling in a couple of ways. First, I should know better, as the USA Today has more and more over the last couple of years become just another right wing rag, but still, sometimes I hope even the right-wing apologists will occasionally face reality.
But nope. The article is mostly about how the new trend in buying is hurting the American car companies. What struck me as particularly stupid was the fact that it barely even mentions the companies that have done some work in recent years to provide vehicles with good fuel efficiency, Honda and Toyota. Instead, we get this dreck about how GM is "scrambling to find ways to play up fuel savings."
Not that they're actually doing anything to really provide fuel savings! Even at the "But we never saw this coming" $3 per gallon gas prices, all the American car companies have to offer are idiotic marketing campaigns!
An example of General Motors' massive efforts to ramp up fuel efficiency?
engineers are eliminating the radio antenna mast in the next-generation Chevrolet Tahoe being unveiled Tuesday. By imbedding the antenna in window glass instead, the full-size SUV will save a tiny-but-every-bit-counts 0.001 miles per gallon of gas.
Just for the record, the Chevey Tahoe is listed on the Consumer Digest site as 16mpg (city) and 20mpg (highway). (Strangely, it's hard to find mileage figures on GM's own website.) And that's for the SMALLER engine option! Fucking idiots. WOOOOoooo, good thing they brought that antenna inside . . .now I can get a whole 16.001 miles per gallon when I go pick up my kids at soccer practice! Don't I feel responsible!
Granted, Chysler and Ford both seem to be making a bit more substantive efforts at improving fuel efficiency, but the very fact that the article mentions that:
The problem for automakers is they can't turn on a dime. New models take years to design. Until they arrive, automakers are limited to tweaking their existing lineup and trying to find clever ways to get consumers' attention.
"I think any manufacturer will split hairs for a tenth of a mile (per gallon) if they can," DeLorenzo says. "And now it becomes a marketing issue."
This raises the question, why should I ever even consider buying a GM car again? They need years to turn around their product offerings, so they have to plan years ahead to offer what the market wants. EVERYONE knew that Peak Oil was at least a possibility, a possibility that meant dramatically higher fuel costs, and yet here we are, in 2005, with the big 3 at least 10 years behind both the Japanese and the Germans on building more fuel efficient cars. And make no mistake, after this blip of a sales summer when GM managed to sell lots of their bigass SUVs by offering Employee Discounts (at an average loss per car of about $1200 . . .good business model, that) the company is going to suffer one holy hell of a hangover, meaning, sales for the next quarter will drive off a cliff.
This is the last straw. I might have considered a GM auto purchase at some point in the past, if they had managed to somehow come out with an original and cool car design, but why would I trust a company who's very survival depends on proper planning, and they screw it up royally? They've been guiding the company with blinders on ever since the 1970s oil crisis faded from memory in the early 80s. The rules are: oil is cheap, people want tanks to drive, nobody cares about fuel efficiency, and bigger is always better. And by insisting so loudly and so persistently (along with their lackeys in the Car and Drivers and USA Today's of the world) they've created a self-fulfilling reality. But they were wrong, perhaps disastrously so for the lives of all those workers who build all those big American SUVs. Everybody else in the industry has gotten into the bigger, wider, less fuel efficient game primarily because GM insisted that that was how you sold to fat Americans. But they didn't realize that GM is the Michael Brown of the car industry. Caught unaware, looking the wrong way, too busy trying to judge horsepower, instead of noticing the ominous storm clouds forming on the horizon.