John Steck wrote:
Just a question to all the pontificators... how is a family of 5 or more to
travel about in this age of seat belts and car seats? Guess what...
minivans and SUVs for many of us are a legislated requirement not a luxury.
Get out of the bubble!
IMHO the issue isn't large vehicles, and it isn't really SUV-style
vehicles, either. Old-fashioned station wagons did much the same job as
SUVs.
The issue is that SUVs are -- or were until very recently -- classed as
trucks by the government as a result of which certain safety, pollution,
and gas mileage regulations which apply to "cars" did not apply to
"SUV"s. One consequence was that many people who didn't need them
bought them anyway, because they were bargains (due to the loopholes
they drove through), and it was easy for the manufacturers to drop big
V-8's into them without worrying too much about fuel economy.
Note well that the much-publicized "rollover problems" of SUVs stemmed
directly from their CAFE-dodging birth as modified trucks. That led to
their body-on-frame design, in contrast to the "step-down frame" used in
cars since time out of mind, and put their center of gravity higher than
it would have been otherwise.
Personally I loved the two full-sized station wagons I owned in years
past. That was long ago and each had a V-8. Our current Subaru "small
wagon", OTOH, has a 4 cylinder engine and a lot of plastic parts to make
it light enough to perform acceptably with such a "mouse motor". (And
it's also 10 years old BTW. I think Subaru has since moved away from
their old policy of selling nothing but 4 cylinder engines...)
Banning SUVs makes no sense -- it's just going to be another massive
distortion of the market. The SUV "problem" was created by one attempt
at sledgehammer regulation; fixing it with another blow of the hammer
isn't likely to produce a good result either. As I've mentioned
previously in this group, I think the CAFE business was misguided from
the first and we should have gone with a stiff tax on gas and let the
market take care of gas mileage, but since we've got regulation instead
of taxation, we should at least see that anything sold as a car -- as
SUV's are -- is subject to the regulations Congress intended all cars to
be subject to.
-j
-----Original Message-----
From: Kyle R. Mcallister [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2006 5:44 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Vo]: SUVs
For the record, I do support not allowing the manufacture of NEW SUVS. But
to take already existing and owned cars? No.
--Kyle
