Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Carmakers have urged the White House to cooperate with California over US vehicle emissions standards.
‘Climate Change Is Real,’ Carmakers Tell White House in Letter
By Ryan Beene
22 May 2018, 07:37 GMT+10
Automakers urged the White House to cooperate with California officials in a coming rewrite of vehicle efficiency standards, saying “climate change is real.”
The plea came in a May 3 letter to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget from the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, the industry’s leading trade group. It said carmakers “strongly support” continued alignment between federal mileage standards and those set by California. General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co., Daimler AG and nine other carmakers are members of the Alliance.
“Automakers remain committed to increasing fuel efficiency requirements, which yield everyday fuel savings for consumers while also reducing emissions — because climate change is real and we have a continuing role in reducing greenhouse gases and improving fuel efficiency,” David Schwietert, executive vice president of federal government relations at the Alliance, wrote in the letter, which was made public Monday.
…
“Operating under two or three sets of regulations would be inefficient and disrupt a period of rapid innovation in the auto industry,” Schwietert wrote, adding that fractured rules could have negative consequences for the roughly 7 million people employed directly or indirectly by the American auto industry.
…
The Auto Alliance site is down, so I have not been able to locate a copy of the letter.
The obvious question, if auto manufacturers want uniformity, why not build automobiles which comply with stringent Californian standards, regardless of national standards? Surely vehicles built to stricter Californian standards would also satisfy more relaxed national standards?
I suspect the answer is many car buyers would not choose of their free will to buy the kind of automobiles Californian standards will demand. Without President Trump’s backing for national standards which satisfy Californian lawmakers, auto makers will be forced to build vehicles for Californians which satisfy their ridiculous fuel economy standards, and build real automobiles for everyone else – or lose business to competitors.
California compliant national rules for auto manufacturers would be great news for the manufacturers – not so great for everyone else.
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Alternatively, car manufacturers would quite like some regulations to keep out cheap-and-cheerful Chinese imports which are not a problem for them yet but can be expected to become so at some point
They could always make Trabants for California and Cadillacs (or equivalent) for the other 49 states …
what’s wrong with that?
The good old “Trabbi”. Its energy consumption was lower than that of most cars produced and produced in the West. Everything has it’s price. However, you could drive the Hochtauernstraße in Austria with a Trabbi only once in a lifetime. After that he was flat.
Its energy consumption was lower than that of most cars produced in the West. The thing weighed 600 pounds and consumed about 5 liters / 100 kilometers and that with a lawnmower engine.
A potential buyer of the Trabbi, however, was also flat when he finally had this mobile pedestal. Mostly it took with new car order until shortly before the pension until one was the proud owner of the Trabbi.
A car fire was not allowed to happen, because then the energy balance would have been devastating, after the Trabbi was almost entirely made of plastic.
Be careful, you might give the Californian government new ideas… 🙂
So, the Channel Stuffing scam didn’t work out to well and they need another bailout?
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-06-11/channel-stuffing-economy-there-has-never-been-more-cars-sidelines
There is usually an evil, contemptuous motive behind these things and you don’t need to stand on tippy-toes to see it. Automakers are weary of competing with themselves — their old selves. Until 2007 I drove an ’85 Econoline van. Until 2016 I drove a ’93 Corsica. Now in ’18 I’m driving an ’04 Malibu. Affordable, reliable and customer-serviceable used cars are a scourge that must be eliminated. By adopting California standards they could consign a third of all vehicles on the road to the scrap heap, and reduce the credit-challenged caste to transportation poverty.
This is NOT a politically motivated game, it is come down to the city folk versus country folk. It is the city-folk that buy into profit oriented fake altruism and other scams. Populous urban areas are now cancers metastasizing with Marxist useful-idiots. What had begun as a cute provincial attitude towards rural areas has, with the emerging democratic majority of their fecund numbers, become directly threatening. The only thing at this point that might restore the balance would be a Mini Ice Age and a long, sustained Winter’s purge.
Have a nice day.
“Because climate change is real and we have a continuing role in reducing greenhouse gases”
If the motor industry really wants to reduce greenhouse gasses they should just stop making cars…
It’s all about the Benjamins. California compliant vehicles will be much more expensive thus profitable. The problem is with national standard otherwise identical vehicles also for sale it will be obvious just how much more expensive.
Tesla owners are experiencing rising insurance rates. The aluminum bodywork is very expensive to repair and insurers now have enough data to adjust accordingly. The economics of “fuel efficiency” is entering the steep part of the curve.
This could be virtue signalling, but more likely the California rules are seen as barrier to entry. Perhaps they will hurt foreign producers more, and are thus beneficial. Their logic is transparently stupid. “We need to follow a national standard, so let this one particular state set the standard.”
Having no pollution standards at all is a bad idea. There needs to be sensible standards that are supported with open science data and meaningful economic data. For motor vehicles, there is very little environmental benefit beyond unleaded gasoline, catalytic converter, and fuel injection.
Automakers have a problem today… the average age of the average automobile on the road will soon reach beyond the decade marker. This means growth of sales is going to dramatically slow… the automakers want the government to tell people to buy the new cars coming off the line which will otherwise languish unsold on the lot.
Cars are too expensive and too reliable and too fuel efficient for the market to support itself. So, the inane and unreachable emissions targets are meant to force the market to buy the new vehicles which no one wants and wouldn’t buy.
They still have to build to the standards (or lack of standards) in every other country in the world. Why hurt American consumers outside of California?
This is helpful. From Wiki
“Notable absents include Asian manufacturers Honda, Nissan, Hyundai and Subaru.”
Four companies dedicated to pleasing the consumer and not government.
Four companies that have moved up a notch on my preferred supplier list.
Will those restrictive California standards keep people from buying cheaper cars with less restrictive standards in other states, then moving to California? If not, the natural outcome is that NO cars are sold in California, and customers travel to Nevada, Arizona, or Oregon to buy their cars.
They can buy them out of state, but they can’t register them in CA until they meet the emissions standards.
Clearly we need to empanel a Special Prosecutor to find out exactly who is coercing these companies and just what type of blackmail/extortion is being applied.
Trump should tell them to get out of the country if they don’t want to build vehicles that the people actually want, and at a price they can afford.
Jags are British
Bloomberg does fake news.
Yeah, I always take what I read from Bloomberg with a (large) dose of salt. Since all that salt is not good for ones health, I tend to avoid reading from Bloomberg as much as possible.
Why do the car companies need ever increasing government standards to meet? They can meet whatever standards they choose, government imposed or not. There should be basic standards and if the companies choose to do better they can use this as a selling point. Does everyone need to be hand held by the government?
Without the government mandate, the public would have obvious choices.
Example:
I need a 4 seated automobile to take long trips in so I go shopping:
Manufacturer A makes a really efficient car matching all these stringent engineering requirements and gets 50 mpg on the highway. It rides nicely and fits my passenger needs well so I consider it.
Manufacturer B makes a really nice car meeting a less expensive but still pretty impressive set of standards and gets 44 mpg on the highway. It rides equally as nicely or maybe slightly better and fits my passenger needs. It costs 35% less than Manufacturer As very nice product.
Most people are going to pay the 35% less up front for Car B if it is available. Manufacturer A is now in bankruptcy because they invested in the more expensive technology that they can not sell. Ten years later, all cars are equipped with the better technology because the costs of manufacture has come down. If government mandates that only Car A was available, I would continue driving my 15 year old car until it finally dies.
“Why do the car companies need ever increasing government standards to meet?”
to be a barrier to competition entering the marketplace.
There’s nothing stopping these “automakers” from going ahead and building all their cars to CA standards if that’s what they want. Heck, there’s no law preventing them from exceeding the CA standards.
(as you know doubt know) It’s not about them meeting CA standards or not, it’s about putting up barriers to their competition.
CA or any other single state cannot be allowed to dictate to the entire US.
It looks like CA uses its large power on markets in a harmful way. Like a monopoly.
Can monopolies still be broken up?
AGREE!!!!!!
CA is free to set local rules. Tesla is an example of a car OK for California. True, it is for rich customers only. CA is going to make everybody rich, in the best traditions of progressivism. Pity that has not yet happened.
California is not free to set local rules. Many years ago the Federal government granted an exception for California. Government can easily take it away – and probably should because the purpose has been served and it is no longer valuable.
Appearance management is not real news.
Meanwhile….
Auto Makers Miss Deadline for Repairing Explosive Air Bags
NHTSA sent letters to 12 car manufacturers seeking information on their progress
Self-driving cars are scaring more people
More Americans say they wouldn’t ride in a self-driving car than those surveyed in 2017, according to AAA.
The report attributes the increased concern to highly publicized accidents involving self-driving cars.
Wait so Trump wants one standard for efficiency and emmissions – not the fragmented 2-3 standards approach we have now but to this auto association having 1 standard with Trump equals 2 or three during a time of great innovation.
I think this is a read between the lines comment. Auto industry has invested billions in wasteful technologies due to the government and see that money and additional subsidies they were promised flushed away if the new standards are imposed.
“Because climate change is real and we have a continuing role in reducing greenhouse gases”
So, if that’s true, and that’s really your motivation for pushing the CA standards on the rest of the country, what’s preventing you from meeting those standards all on your own without the force of a government gun to your head?
Answer: because that’s a load of bull, and the real reason you are pushing those standards via government is to be a barrier to prospective competitors.
Forcing every car maker to follow the same standards prevents some upstart from horning in.
If the big automakers voluntarily build all their cars to California standards, it will open a market for real cars that someone will step up to fill. They’ll undercut the big guys, which will force them to start making real cars again to compete.
Interestingly, that’s exactly how the free market is supposed to work. When there’s a demand, someone will step in to fill the supply…for a price.
This is nothing more than protectionism. Corporate welfare at its finest. They want the government to prevent their competitors from being able to innovate and compete with them.
Well put, Sailorcurt. And precisely accurate. This is what government is supposed to protect us against…not aide and abet!
rip
Gee, think someone’s getting paid on the backside?