Hybrids? The Wave of the future?
Do you remember just a month or so back, when the Big 3 went before Congress? Remember when they were accused of building cars that no body wanted to buy? You know -- all those big vehicles. Of course, with $4.00 a gallon gas everyone is demanding electric and hybrid cars. Oh, now that gas has dropped below $2.00 a gallon, people are less interested. Why not just buy a smaller regular car?
One of the things we see these days is that Americans are fickle. Tom Friedman was suggesting fixing the price of gas at $4.00, with the difference between the cost of gas and that $4.00 mark being used to develop alternative energy options.
Mike Thompson's Free Press cartoon reminds us that right now people don't want to pay $10,000 or more for a hybrid. So, what now?
Comments
Sorry to be cheeky, in all seriousness there should be SERIOUS reservations about government being involved in the business. Particularly around driving demand for a product. History is full of examples where price floors and caps don't work and only make the issue worse.
-Chuck
I think the government should just buy 30 billion dollars worth of American cars and give them away, as foreign aid, to poorer heads of households, etc. The cars can be bought from the poorer selling small car inventory thus giving a huge cash infusion into the car companies and putting people back to work in those plants and justifying the car companies investments into those vehicles.
The government can do this for less cost than the $15k tax credit for new home buyers as those cars will likely cost less than $15k each, especially if purchased at high volume.
John
John's idea isn't a bad one. It would also probably get a lot of clunkers off the road.
I would not want to see us buy cars and give them away. We need FEWER gas burning cars. What we should do is pay the big 3 to retool (like they did during WWII but can't figure out how to do now) and make public transportation like electric buses (you know, the kinds we had all over the country a century ago, but we "somehow" can't figure out how to build now)
Let's solve big problems in sync with solutions that will last longer than the lifespan of one car. Retooling with public money solves both the energy problem and the economic problem as it puts people to work making green technology.
To honestly fix the problem, you need a cheap alternative. So you may say.. raise the gas tax but have FREE public transportation. Of course you kill the car industry, but at least you help on your fuel issue.
-Chuck
I would simply forbid any SUVs from being made and give incentives for people to buy fuel efficient cars--whether hybrids or electrics (I have a Volt on order) or ethanol, etc.
There are problems with all current solutions. The electric car is great, except you have to charge it with electricity. Where are you going to get it? Well, likely for now from nuclear or more likely coal-generated electricity. The current electrical grid system can't handle it.
The reality is that hybrids have it a wall. It will be interesting how the Ford Fusion Hybrid does.
I think that most people will shy away from SUVs, but there is something in between.
As for ethanol. We saw the problem it creates. Unless we come up with different sources of the product, all we do is take corn out of the mouths of hungry people. Additionally, cars using ethanol get much worse gas mileage. This summer I probably got 5-6 miles per gallon less mileage with ethanol than with regular gas. That adds up. Ethanol is likely a deadend, at least if we use corn.