CAFE Standards, Cuba and Car Cruises

We rarely make long-term predictions. So, call this a musing, instead, but we read in today’s edition of The Wall Street Journal that Mileage Rules Prompt Backlash, and we wonder about the long-term implications if those rules if they are not rescinded.

The mileage rules prompting the backlash are Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) for auto-makers–if that’s still the correct acronym or initialism. Those things do change as bureaucrats and regulators attempt to sell old, centralized planning as something nice and new. Regardless, those rules require the average new-car fuel economy to increase to 62 MPG within the next 15 years.

In fifteen years a lot can change. Heck, 15 years ago, the Republicans had just taken over Congress after the disappointing first two years of Democratic President’s term. (Oh, never mind.)

Now, it’s quite possible that (1) the rules will be rescinded, or (2) via some miraculous, new technology, an average fuel efficiency of 62 MPG will be achieved for the types of cars that the vast majority of us like to drive.

Otherwise, our prediction is that by 2025, our roadways will start to look how Cuba’s look today or like the parking lots of that All-American, summertime, weekend, past-time known as the “car cruise.”  Shiny (and not-so-shiny) relics from the nation’s automotive past will traverse the highways, byways, and side streets of America (at the expense of new car sales) in greater proportions (and much of the rest of the nation’s roadways will begin to resemble Pittsburgh’s roads today).

According to the article, the EPA and the Transportation Department claim that Americans will willingly buy the new cars and forsake everything that pretty-much has defined the American Car for the past seventy-to-eighty years.

We’re not so sure. Perhaps it’s our mindset: we already bitterly cling to our guns and God. We suspect, however, that rather than drive a Smart Car or equivalent, we, along with many of our fellow citizens, will continue to cling to two-to-three tons of fine, American, Japanese or German steel and leather that we currently own or could buy in the near future. Those vehicles provide the space, comfort, speed, smoothness, power, safety and everything else that we (and they) want–at about 25% efficiency of those future CAFE requirements.

How else could you comfortably load the whole bitter family into the car to get to the target range or Church?

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