Archangel
12-21-2008, 11:16 PM
I dunno, as far as I can see, American enthusiasts are among the most passionate and best informed in the world. When a subject interests them, they will do their best to find out everything they can about it. Just look at the tons of stats that American sports fans keep in their memories.
And I find that many Americans are rather passionate about cars, from memorising specs, to DIY projects, to racing them. There are certainly quite a few of them here on these boards. One should assume that the millions of American motoring enthusiasts would be aware of what is going on in the world of cars.
So I find it quite surprising when I hear people these days (when fuel economy as an issue has caught up with America) talking about how "there won't be any 50+ mpg production cars anywhere in the near future", when people outside the US don't even blink at the notion of 60 and 70 mpg these days, and 100-200 mpg cars will see production in Japan and Germany in the next 2-5 years. Most Americans apparently simply have no idea that vehicles like the VW Polo BlueMotion or the Ford (!!!) Focus TDCi Duratorq exist, sell like hot cakes, and have been doing so for damn near a decade.
I wonder why that should be so.
One culprit is probably Detroit. I mean, these were the guys who, 50 years ago, said that installing seat belts in every car would bankrupt car companies, and in the 70s/80s told people that a switch to unleaded fuel would be the death of the industry.
So it stands to reason that in order to keep people wanting and buying their petrol guzzling crap (so that they wouldn't have to spend any money on R&D), they would both try to keep motoring news from abroad under wraps, and not turn an unfriendly eye towards journalists and columnists who kept ridiculing anything smaller and more efficient than a Tahoe as, dunno, gay. If your car didn't guzzle petrol at the rate Marcus guzzled jiz... uh, Jim Beam, you were un-American. John Mellencamp would no longer sing for you.
Another factor is that the vast majority of these super-efficient cars are diesels (even though petrol engines like the TSI and FSI are starting to catch up): The last Big 3 car diesels having been the most atrocious internal combustion engines ever built by man, the diesel's image in America was pretty dreadful. The problem is that this prejudice persisted while Audis were winning Le Mans in TDIs, diesel engines were built into luxury saloons and sports coupés, and diesels hit 60% among Belgian private new car sales. The supreme irony here is that Ford and GM's international subsidiaries (Mazda, Opel/Vauxhall, Ford Europe, Subaru etc) were at the forefront of this development, while back home, the image of the diesel as an uncouth stinker was carefully cultivated. Why tell Wilbur and Myrtle that you're building the good stuff for Hans and Claire?
It also obviously didn't help that Americans could A) buy expensive V8 petrol guzzlers on credit, and B) petrol was so cheap that once you had that V8, you could afford to run it. It took oil hitting $135 and a massive credit crunch to disabuse people of the notion of this gravy train's unending nature; all of a sudden, people started noticing that maybe, the H2 WAS an abomination.
It's not all Americans, though, obviously. Part of the blame has to go to Toyota, whose hybrids re-shuffled the deck when it came to eco-friendlier cars.
"Hybrid" became both panacea and window dressing, fueled by aggressive marketing. The problem was that on the customer end, hybrids attracted a certain kind of customer, who didn't give fuel-efficient cars exactly a good name. Self-righteous, smug, and not very well informed (like about the fact that during the manufacturing process, their Prius polluted like a fucking lead smelter), they turned eco-cars into a fashion statement - and those always turn into passé fads at some point.
On the manufacturing end, much gayness happened, as well. People just attached electric motors to the same old crossovers and SUV behemoths, and because it said "hybrid" on the back, customers felt good about buying another 20-foot monster that - mirabile dictu - did 22 mpg instead of 17, which was probably the point. I mean, somebody voted a fucking V8 Tahoe the "Green Car of the Year" not too long ago, and didn't even get the irony.
And last but not least, European car makers. I don't know, maybe they got fed up at having their products belittled, ridiculed, or wilfully ignored at every turn. Maybe they fell victim to old world arrogance, and instead of trying to aggressively market their "blue" cars ("green" has gone out of fashion, apparently) on the North American market, they simply stopped caring, thus failing to secure a head start when the wind turned: Falling victim to the same quick/easy money myopia as the Big 3, they developed and marketed monster SUVs for the American market like the GL and the Q7 - and got caught with their pants down when America's love affair with the SUV went a bit cold.
So what I'm trying to say is, clusterfucks of this magnitude can never be attributed to a single culprit: It takes a lot of ostensibly smart people acting very stupidly to fuck up an entire industry...
But despite all the other factors, I honestly fail to fully grasp the callousness of Detroit. It's one thing to refuse to build superior products, but quite another to black-out all information about those who do; add to that the fact that they were actually building good cars abroad and keeping even those from their domestic public, and I can't but near despair at such short-sighted fucktardery.
Imagine if every major pharmaceutical company in the world had developed a cure for cancer, including the foreign subsidiaries of Pfizer, J&J and Merck, and those same companies kept America in the dark about it.
I dunno, can anyone here think of any other reasons?
And I find that many Americans are rather passionate about cars, from memorising specs, to DIY projects, to racing them. There are certainly quite a few of them here on these boards. One should assume that the millions of American motoring enthusiasts would be aware of what is going on in the world of cars.
So I find it quite surprising when I hear people these days (when fuel economy as an issue has caught up with America) talking about how "there won't be any 50+ mpg production cars anywhere in the near future", when people outside the US don't even blink at the notion of 60 and 70 mpg these days, and 100-200 mpg cars will see production in Japan and Germany in the next 2-5 years. Most Americans apparently simply have no idea that vehicles like the VW Polo BlueMotion or the Ford (!!!) Focus TDCi Duratorq exist, sell like hot cakes, and have been doing so for damn near a decade.
I wonder why that should be so.
One culprit is probably Detroit. I mean, these were the guys who, 50 years ago, said that installing seat belts in every car would bankrupt car companies, and in the 70s/80s told people that a switch to unleaded fuel would be the death of the industry.
So it stands to reason that in order to keep people wanting and buying their petrol guzzling crap (so that they wouldn't have to spend any money on R&D), they would both try to keep motoring news from abroad under wraps, and not turn an unfriendly eye towards journalists and columnists who kept ridiculing anything smaller and more efficient than a Tahoe as, dunno, gay. If your car didn't guzzle petrol at the rate Marcus guzzled jiz... uh, Jim Beam, you were un-American. John Mellencamp would no longer sing for you.
Another factor is that the vast majority of these super-efficient cars are diesels (even though petrol engines like the TSI and FSI are starting to catch up): The last Big 3 car diesels having been the most atrocious internal combustion engines ever built by man, the diesel's image in America was pretty dreadful. The problem is that this prejudice persisted while Audis were winning Le Mans in TDIs, diesel engines were built into luxury saloons and sports coupés, and diesels hit 60% among Belgian private new car sales. The supreme irony here is that Ford and GM's international subsidiaries (Mazda, Opel/Vauxhall, Ford Europe, Subaru etc) were at the forefront of this development, while back home, the image of the diesel as an uncouth stinker was carefully cultivated. Why tell Wilbur and Myrtle that you're building the good stuff for Hans and Claire?
It also obviously didn't help that Americans could A) buy expensive V8 petrol guzzlers on credit, and B) petrol was so cheap that once you had that V8, you could afford to run it. It took oil hitting $135 and a massive credit crunch to disabuse people of the notion of this gravy train's unending nature; all of a sudden, people started noticing that maybe, the H2 WAS an abomination.
It's not all Americans, though, obviously. Part of the blame has to go to Toyota, whose hybrids re-shuffled the deck when it came to eco-friendlier cars.
"Hybrid" became both panacea and window dressing, fueled by aggressive marketing. The problem was that on the customer end, hybrids attracted a certain kind of customer, who didn't give fuel-efficient cars exactly a good name. Self-righteous, smug, and not very well informed (like about the fact that during the manufacturing process, their Prius polluted like a fucking lead smelter), they turned eco-cars into a fashion statement - and those always turn into passé fads at some point.
On the manufacturing end, much gayness happened, as well. People just attached electric motors to the same old crossovers and SUV behemoths, and because it said "hybrid" on the back, customers felt good about buying another 20-foot monster that - mirabile dictu - did 22 mpg instead of 17, which was probably the point. I mean, somebody voted a fucking V8 Tahoe the "Green Car of the Year" not too long ago, and didn't even get the irony.
And last but not least, European car makers. I don't know, maybe they got fed up at having their products belittled, ridiculed, or wilfully ignored at every turn. Maybe they fell victim to old world arrogance, and instead of trying to aggressively market their "blue" cars ("green" has gone out of fashion, apparently) on the North American market, they simply stopped caring, thus failing to secure a head start when the wind turned: Falling victim to the same quick/easy money myopia as the Big 3, they developed and marketed monster SUVs for the American market like the GL and the Q7 - and got caught with their pants down when America's love affair with the SUV went a bit cold.
So what I'm trying to say is, clusterfucks of this magnitude can never be attributed to a single culprit: It takes a lot of ostensibly smart people acting very stupidly to fuck up an entire industry...
But despite all the other factors, I honestly fail to fully grasp the callousness of Detroit. It's one thing to refuse to build superior products, but quite another to black-out all information about those who do; add to that the fact that they were actually building good cars abroad and keeping even those from their domestic public, and I can't but near despair at such short-sighted fucktardery.
Imagine if every major pharmaceutical company in the world had developed a cure for cancer, including the foreign subsidiaries of Pfizer, J&J and Merck, and those same companies kept America in the dark about it.
I dunno, can anyone here think of any other reasons?