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this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
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Fuck that. The problem isnt that people want bigger cars. The problem is that NHTSA's CAFE standards favor manufacture of larger cars.
CAFE slowly reduces the amount of emissions that vehicles can have, but they fucked it up: the required reductions are greatest on the smallest, most efficient cars, and lowest on the largest vehicles. Manufacturers "comply" with these standards by dropping their smallest cars from their lineup, and increasing the sizes of everything left on the market.
Fix the fucking standards to favor smaller cars, and manufacturers will follow.
It would be great if the standards could be loosened a bit to allow more sedans to exist. A modern crown vic would be awesome, but it's impossible to make with the current rules.
I'd like a new, S10-sized truck, or even smaller, perhaps closer to a Japanese Kei truck. The current crop of "compact" pickups are larger than the "full size" trucks from the 1990's.
Isn't it great that we have to make every single regulation perfect without any possible loopholes because it's just accepted fact that corporations will spend absurd sums of money to avoid having to do anything that might cut into their profit margins?
Awesome stuff.
This isn't a loophole. This isn't an example of inadequate pedantry. It's not even an example of regulatory capture or corruption. This is straight up incompetence on the part of the regulators. They established an easy to meet standard, and a difficult to meet standard, and they went all Pikachu-face when the regulated manufacturers opted for the easier option.
Regulatory Incompetence like this (and malfeasance, like on the part of Ajit Pai's FCC) are why Chevron Deference needs to be severely modified. We should be allowed to sue the NHTSA for this egregious a failure.
Can you not? Are you sure? Honest question. It seems wrong to me, but if you have evidence that's true...
Federal regulatory agencies seemingly get sued all of the time. It's literally the basis for the current case regarding Chevron deference. There are other cases where the Justice Department is a party to the case.
It's not incompetence, it's just the inability to make regulations that are 100% bullet proof, it's impossible because people are very creative. There is a constant conflict occurring between the regulators doing the best they can to create regulations that can't be rendered useless, and greedy, amoral corporations that are doing everything in their power to worm their way through a crack and come up with some (often expensive), convoluted way to render the regulation null.
It's like how DRM in video games kept changing and "improving," because no matter how secure they were sure they made it, there was always some ridiculously intelligent teenager that comes up with a creative, novel way to crack it.
It's an arms race, and said corporations will keep finding workarounds until the amount it costs to dodge a regulation becomes higher than what they would have lost had they just followed the rule in the first place... And even then I'm not sure.
I hate that Americans are so ignorant that we have to re-learn, the hard way, step-by-step as to why regulations that we already have exist. It would almost be funny if it didn't mean that people have to die unnecessarily before they learn the same exact lesson that we already figured out (the hard way).
You can sue anyone at any time and for any reason, but that doesn't mean you'll prevail. Chevron Deference basically says that unless the agency is actually violating legislation, the courts must defer to the agency's expertise. Even if the agency's rule is counterproductive (NHTSA's CAFE standards) or overtly hostile to the public interest (FCC overturning Net Neutrality under Ajit Pai's leadership), the courts can only rule against them on the basis that they are violating legislated law.
I don't see how that's a better solution than taxing heavier cars...? We can tax the sales of the vehicle directly which negatively impacts manufacturers because in the USA each vehicle dealership is brand associated rather than retailers.
For a tax to be effective for such a purpose, it has to be avoidable. They have to actually make a small car. But the CAFE standards as they currently stand prevent them from cheaply producing a CAFE compliant small car. So nobody gets the tax break on the small car, because there are no small cars to be had.
The tax approach cannot be achieved until the CAFE standards are fixed, but once we fix the CAFE standards to favor smaller cars, the problem solves itself.
CAFE works by requiring a certain percentage of the total number of a manufacturer's vehicles to comply. Small cars are currently non-compliant. Only big cars are compliant, so they need to sell more of them. When we correct CAFE standards to favor small cars, they will need to sell small cars, and their marketing departments will get to work at adjusting consumer demand.
If it's cheaper to produce a small car because of the tax, then the tax is effective. Making the bigger cars more expensive incentivizes the smaller cars.
Taxes, fines, and regulatory fees in economic theory are supposed to represent the costs incurred by the general public (in this case the environment as well as infrastructure maintenance) being paid by the parties responsible. This often is not the case in practicality, such as the costs to reverse methane emissions not being covered by the fines associated with flare stacks.
If the companies can't produce cars cheap enough then they'll have to raise the price. If less people can afford cars, that's fine, then more investment will have to be made into public transport, bike lanes, and walkable communities. I do not see any downsides to a tax on larger vehicles.
It is not cheaper to produce the small car. You're not quite understanding this.
The small car does not comply with the perverse CAFE standards. The big cars do comply. If they sell too many of the efficient, but non-compliant small cars, they get penalized. That penalty greatly increases the cost of producing the small, non-compliant car.
Without CAFE standards, your argument is reasonable and valid. With the asinine standards currently in place, your argument is completely irrelevant.
Do not sit there and tell me that it's impossible for a small car to comply with standards. That's ridiculous. Charge them extra for selling a big car so that making a big car is more expensive than creating a small car. You can't just say that this is impossible and deny the obvious solution, this is the clear solution.
Clearly, you do not understand the problem with how CAFE standards are currently implemented, because that is, indeed, the case. The mandated reductions on small cars are too much, and the mandated reductions on large cars are not enough. Manufacturers did the math, and the most feasible solution was to increase the size of cars. Cars are proportionally wider now than they used to be, to maximize their footprint and bump them up into larger classes.
Manufacturers will do anything they need to to avoid violating CAFE standards. With current regulations, that means "sell fewer small cars". If we try to solve the problem with taxes on large cars, manufacturers will simply increase the MSRP of small cars. Add a $5000 tax on large cars, and they will add $5000 to the sticker price on small cars, or otherwise ensuring the large car remains the better value.
Correct the regulations so that smaller, intrinsically efficient cars are feasible, while forcing manufacturers to go to extraordinary efforts to continue manufacturing large cars, and the problem solves itself.