That's fucking stupid

Posts Tagged ‘fuel’

I am currently holidaying in Florida and while there is a tropical storm brewing off the coast I have not been on the beach or kayacking in the Everglades and have instead been channel surfing during the rainstorms. I made the mistake yesterday of switching over on to CNN and thought I should share this little insight into how they do things over here:

Watching CNN is basically like punching yourself in the face with stupidity; if you ever wondered how Americans were led to believe things like the invasion and occupation of Iraq were a good idea then you just need to watch CNN for a few minutes to see the twisted version of reality they peddle in order to keep the US public fearful. I was watching a debate piece on the news that there may be stricter controls on the fuel efficiency of cars produced for the US market from 2o16 onwards. Let’s just say that last sentence back to ourselves out loud to make sure we didn’t miss anything. There “may be stricter controls”.  “May be”. Maybe.

That’s not “Obama is going to take away your truck”, that’s “if all goes well and this change in policy gets past all the corrupt senators and their oil lobby buddies, the car companies have got about seven years to start making cars that come somewhere near the sort of fuel economy that the world outside America and Saudi has come to expect for absolutely fucking ages”.

On a side note, I am renting a car here and have got a Toyota Prius and it’s totally the perfect car for the stop/start block by block driving in a country too thick to master roundabouts. I’m getting about 47mpg here and that’s while still driving like a cunt and slamming my foot down alternately on the gas and the brake pedals.

So anyway, CNN wanted to illustrate to the cattle what the new economy standards would mean. The target number is 35.5 mpg so they showed three typical vehicles and their fuel economy. In the blue corner, sporting stars and stripes and probably concealing a host of automatic weapons (for sport hunting, honest) there was a big truck, the sort you see all over the roads of suburban or rural America and parked outside every Steak & Shake. In the green corner was the aforementioned Toyota Prius, a car not suited for long distance journeys but perfect for nipping around town or cruising down a three lane suburban street between the traffic lights that seem to be placed every few hundred meters. In between the two, and set to illustrate exactly the sort of vehicle that Obambi wants the red blooded gun slinging american steak eaters to adopt was the tiny Smart for Two.

Now don’t get me wrong, the Smart car is an excellent vehicle and does indeed manage about 36mpg which is near enough dead on the 35.5mpg target they were discussing but it’s tiny and not something that the average fat bastard American could even fit in, let along work out how to switch on. It’s also painting a pretty bleak picture for them if they think that the roads will be filled with tiny cars that are small enough to fit in their trailers.

Surely a less worrying comparison would have been an Audi A4, a car which does 35mpg in the combined urban and highway tests. Maybe a nice Renault Scenic which can comfortably carry several passengers but is also capable of around 35mpg? How about just about everything in the Volkswagen range which can do high thirties to mid forties? The Smart car made a much more dramatic news piece though because it illustrated the extremes that CNN wants the cattlefolk of America to fear rather than the reality of what will happen if the bill goes through. The rest of the world (or at least the bits outside of Saudi and the US) have been managing quite well with cars that average around 30-40mpg for ages and the only reason the US has never bothered to catch up is because they have never had to, with petrol at around $2.50 a gallon at the pumps (that’s around 35p per litre) a car that pisses petrol out the back is still a cheap one to run, as the US government has never had the stones to tax the great American penis replacement they just have to hope that legislation will gradually force the big dinosaurs of car production to play catch up with the technology in almost every European’s driveway.

Of course the cynical would say that asking GM and Chrysler to sort out their fuel economy is as pointless as telling Jade Goody to sort out her elocution, a little fucking late in the day.