Gasoline and other fuel prices are rising at meteoric rates and a do-nothing government sits idly by and tells us that Europe is paying more per gallon and they are as usual telling only half the truth. The Europeans are paying more per gallon, but their cars are twice as efficient. You can’t purchase cars like the Europeans drive in the United States. It’s not allowed. The Chinese have higher fuel efficiency standards than we do.
We have the best and brightest minds when it comes to manufacturing weapons systems. We’ve won two world wars. We beat the Germans and the Japanese to the nuclear punch and we outdid and outspent the Russians in the Cold War. Two guys from California built a personal computer in a garage in 1977 and since then we’ve put a personal computer in every home, school and business. We put a man on the moon before anyone else on the planet did. There is nothing that the people and scientists of the United States of America cannot or will not accomplish if they are given a free reign. There’s the problem. We don’t have a free reign. Would to God that our market and market forces were really allowed to function as they ought to. Can you imagine how much money you’d make if you could produce a car capable of 100 miles per gallon? It’s possible but the technology is under wraps. It’s kept under wraps by our own government working in concert with the petroleum industry.
We have battlefield equipment that will darn near run on grass clippings because they don’t have fillin’ stations in the middle of the desert, but we can’t get a tiny car to produce more than 35 miles per gallon. That is just pure and simple baloney. Too bad that none of our candidates is really talking about a real energy policy or real alternatives to our present system.
We don’t have an energy shortage. We have an honest politician shortage and a lack of truly free enterprise that would work for the good of the country.
I drive a Scion xB that gets 30 mpg, city or highway. I love it! Our other car is a 10 y.o. Toyota Corolla that also gets around 30 mpg.
ISTM that there is little Congress can do about gas prices. The reason prices are high is the huge demand for oil — and much of the growth in demand is coming from developing nations.
Congress could have implemented stricter CAFE standards, which they repeatedly failed to do over the past decade or more. But we also have to recognize and accept that in the US, the demand has not been for fuel-efficient vehicles, but for very large, inefficient ones. US automakers made their money and in some cases stayed in business for the last decade or two by selling big SUVs and trucks. When gas prices spiked after Katrina, there was a bit more interest in fuel-efficient vehicles, but that quickly dissipated. It will be interesting to see if the current run-up in prices has a significant impact on the vehicle preferences in the US.
There might be some positive things that could come from the high gas prices, such as more companies moving to a 4-day work week and increase in use of mass transit.
I drive a PT Cruiser which would get slightly better mileage if it had overdrive. I’ve been using hyper-miling techniques to improve my miles per gallon and with some good results.