Rant: Tempering Auto Enthusiasts' Disdain for "Regulations"

The 2009 NYIAS GM/Segway Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility (P.U.M.A.) concept (photo by GM, Segway)

This is the full text of a mini-editorial I sent to Peter DeLorenzo at Autoextremist.com yesterday. He generally publishes a small sampling of submissions each week; presumably the most pertinent, agreeable and occasionally just funny. Usually he also shares pertinent counterpoints. I've had numerous submissions published but this time he printed only the second half.

The context of the discussion - summarized here since AE purges topics and articles from public view after 5 weeks - is the "pro" of a higher Gasoline Tax to keep prices inflated to the $4/gal benchmark, versus the "con" of vehicles designed and influenced to meet proposed fuel-efficiency (CAFE) regulations - an extreme example of which is the GM/Segway P.U.M.A. concept shown above.

Mr. DeLorenzo has long argued in favor of the Gas Tax, and against CAFE-influenced design. Personally, I can see where he's trying to come from: Fuel prices are typically two to three times higher in Europe than in the U.S. due to taxes, which means most cars sold there are high-mileage utilitarian fare. Yet most of the world's true supercars are nonetheless designed, built, and sold in Germany, Italy and even Britain - taxes be damned. Even the journeyman autos available in Europe have a certain flair and sophistication - even shades of performance - that's generally lacking in the US C-car markets.

But regulation is regulation, regardless of what form it takes. It's not so cut and dry... My response below:

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I understand the tone of your rant, and at a core level sincerely agree with what you’re saying. And yet I can’t help but feel that it smacks of doublespeak.

Your argument is that government mandated (or perhaps more accurately, coerced) vehicle development and specification will force consumers into vehicles they don’t want, so the “green agenda du jour” of resource conservation can be met.

Yet a fuel tax is somehow better than this? It’s just the same shoe on a different foot. We’ve already seen that excessively high fuel prices will force consumers to consider the same vehicles they formerly abhorred. If the government enacted an artificial cap on fuel, it would be the same reactive force to modify and influence consumer behavior. And you can bet that as the “natural” price of fuel increases over time, the cap would not shrink in proportion to retain the same cap, but rather just stay the same surcharge (if there’s anything we’ve learned, it’s that government can rarely be weaned of revenue).

I don’t see how you can argue for one form of government coercion over another. Coercion is coercion. If the government wants to force behavior, it can be said that’s a bad thing. But if you want to retain the unfettered freedoms such as we’ve customarily enjoyed, well… you can see the price of those: the days of both having your cake AND eating it are coming to a close.

A comprehensive energy policy is a very critical need, but a fuel tax is nothing more than a panacea. If people can’t afford the gas to drive the cars they actually want, even the GM Rickshaw (or should I say RickWagon, as in born under his watch… but I digress) would suddenly seem like a sensible choice. At least until even that fuel runs low or expensive and it’s time to change for the next green thing once again.

Instead of false mandates, in addition to an energy policy, an equally urgent need is to overhaul civil engineering and development standards in this country. Parallel urban blight and suburban sprawl is the ultimate symbol of wasteful hedonism. The lack of viable mass transit options in most cities is a shame, but the chronically underfunded ones that do exist are even worse. And nobody has ever given a single good reason why many new developments lack sidewalks of all things!

If that last paragraph makes me sound hypocritical, well that may be the case, but it all has to be on the table up front. So in that discussion, would you rather have the government (which people forget they can influence) mandate what you can drive, or mandate where you can live? Given today’s economy illustrating how essentially bankrupt we are, how long can we as a society honestly afford to continue pretending to have our cake and eat it too?