But a truly free market requires consumers to have a choice, for the last few decades which American car companies have had vehicles that got >20mpg as offerings in this country?

I thought I'd indicated that I didn't think there was any real use in continuing this conversation either way several posts back.. maybe I wasn't clear enough, if so, I apologize and clarify: I have no real interest in furthering this discussion for several reasons, the most practical is that it doesn't really belong on MudBytes to begin with in my opinion.

I dunno, ask the Europeans. (Or buy vehicles from other manufacturers.) For some reason, Europeans were able to exert their market power and shape the market toward more fuel efficient vehicles. Americans could have; I posit that they didn't think it was an issue worth pressuring automobile manufacturers over. The only other explanations are things like monopoly forces, government intervention, lack of ability to pressure, etc., none of which seem terribly likely in the US. (That said, the EPA's recent (in)action on emissions control is kind of interesting…)


I thought so too, until you replied again. :wink: No offense taken if you're not interested in the topic.


That hasn't stopped us before… :lol:

Well I distinctly recall having said all along there's no competition in the oil market. You seem to be arguing the position that there's competition in the vehicle market which is an entirely different entity and I would agree with you 100% since the car companies in the US are not a cartel like OPEC is. The car companies have to respond to supply and demand issues. Right now the supply of gas guzzling SUVs far exceeds the demand for them. And this shift happened so rapidly they weren't ready for it and have been caught short on the supply of more efficient vehicles.

Again though, I must point out that there's a hell of a lot of people who have cared all along about fuel efficiency ever since the embargo in the 1970s. It's just that our media hasn't been paying much attention to the issue until it became politically convenient for them to.

There is one simple reason why Europe and Asia differ greatly from the US in the cars that they drive and thats culture. US culture has been built around a principle of freedom to do whatever i like, be whatever i like and live how i wish to live, of conquering vast untamed lands, of cowboys and guns. The American dream is to have the biggest and the best of everything and to be the biggest and the best. (I don't mean any offense to anyone either if any of that sounded condescending)

Also the roads are narrower in EU and space is premium and a limiting factor in the choice of vehicles that can safely use the streets, also the distances people travel are a lot less, as well as better performing mass transit systems. If you look at places like England, where your lucky if you have space to park a car at all, the road systems were designed in the 1700's for horse and cart and have not changed since then. London and similar cities have so much history in its buildings that they are never torn down to make way for wider roads, compared to many newer cities where houses get removed to make way for better road systems.

The size of US cities and urban sprawl sort of dictate that cars will be used more, will be more of a necessity and will be bigger. Even here in Australia our cars are somewhat bigger then those use mostly in EU, but still smaller than those used in the US. Again the reason for the larger cars is the distances we travel, but there is a trend to the use of smaller cars as people are turning away from the daily commute and are using public transport more, with there being lots of free onsite parking at rail stations and what are called Park and Rides for buses.

You're correct that the oil market is not free, but indeed I wasn't trying to argue that the consumer can affect prices much. The only thing the consumer can do is invest in other things and reduce the need for oil; if the demand goes down, the price will (probably) follow, eventually.


And that is precisely what I have been getting at: the demand for SUVs dropped dramatically, or put another way, sales plummeted. (The discounts they're selling SUVs these days at are impressive.) Why did this sudden change occur? Did family sizes drop all of a sudden? I posit (it wasn't my idea) that it is because people have started to care more about efficiency, and are shying away from particularly inefficient vehicles. If you have another idea I'd be very happy to hear it, but there are many indicators that it has to do with not wanting to buy gas guzzling vehicles.


That should be a factor making fuel efficiency less important, because you don't need as much gas.

It's worth asking why these systems are better performing…

UK motorways are plenty big enough for SUVs (and some people drive SUVs). Urban roads might not be, but then again even in the US, the urban segment has never been the primary SUV market.

I think if you looked a bit deeper you'd find the trend was already on its way down. A lot of the people I worked with bought SUVs during the 90s when it was all the rage. Then they bought practical cars as they realized they didn't need the headaches associated with having an SUV. So I'm asserting that the gas prices going through the roof only accelerated a trend that was already underway for awhile now. The car companies have even said so themselves, and had been making plans but everyone was caught off guard by OPEC's shenanigans.

So again, many people have cared about efficiency and smaller cars all along. The media is only paying attention and publicizing it because there's political fallout to be had for the bad guy Republicans who caused all this. Even though that's all a load of shit, but that's the country we live in.

This seems like as good a place as any…


I hereby announce my entry into the running for the President of the United States of America. I pledge to dissolve the current congress and senate (both of which are full of lying, cheating, stealing, bureaucrats) and replace them with people who think about the people they were put there to represent. I also pledge to open the white house up to the general public and include a cash bar in the over office, a strip club in the Lincoln bedroom, and negotiate a lowering of Gas Prices with OPEC. (Aggressively if required.) And Uh.. <insert whatever you want to hear about the other issues I have no idea about here.>

[Edit:] I should so have gone to bed before posting this…

Um, I believe you're still under the age requirement, shall we discuss it again in a dozen years?

I don't care about an age requirement. By the time I get to that age, I'll be as corrupt and retarded as the rest of the politicians.

Maybe that's the point of the founding fathers having put that requirement in there. :tongue:

Sorry to bring this thread back alive, but over the last few days the price of oil has dropped by $11 a barrel, which, when the savings are passed on equates to about 40c a gallon at the bowser. The reasons given by the experts for the drop has been from a sharp drop in demand from consumers the US and that if demand continues to fall at the current rate, we could see the price drop back to $100 a barrel, this information was on my local TV news, taken from a US based news agency.

I think that is good enough evidence to support the statements i was making about how consumers can have a big effect on the cost of petrol by not using it.

Alas, OPEC does not respond to demand the way you think. Even if it were so, a sharp drop in US demand would barely make a dent given what China and India are both making sharp increases in demand on the same supply. The net effect should be a continued rise, but that's not what happened.

Even in a cartel, oil is subject to the influence of speculators. There's been a lot of talk over here that the speculators are largely responsible for the out of control rise in oil prices. If this is true, then like any other commodities trade, it reaches a sell point and they all rush to cash in. Combine with the fact that the dollar is gaining strength again, the price will be forced to correct eventually. OPEC won't let it spiral down out of control though. They'll exert their influence to make sure it's a long slow steady decline when it happens.

Oh, and btw, we'll never see that 40 cent drop at the pump. Every sharp rise in gas prices has more or less stayed in place even when oil eventually dropped. Our gas and oil companies are just as much to blame for the prices being sky high and they resist with all their might when local demand on refined fuel tries to force the price down. They tend to invent crises to keep the prices artificially high. A refinery will mysteriously catch fire, or a storm will do catastrophic demand to a drilling rig even though the storm wasn't that powerful.

OPEC does respond to demand, it's just that (as you said) the demand is spread out over the whole world, so a given country can't do a lot. But if the world demand dropped, OPEC is extremely likely to follow suit.

As for US gas companies: the one making off like bandits are the ones who have their own oil supply, because they don't have to pay OPEC prices, they just get it themselves. The ones who buy oil from others have to pay the high price; the ones who make it themselves just charge the same as the other guy. :sigh:

Yes, and if gas refiners who buy from local suppliers are charging the same rate as though they bought it from OPEC, that more or less proves there is no competition doesn't it? That's called collusion. It's an activity commonly employed by cartels. If those local gas companies really wanted to make a difference they'd drop the insanity and lower their prices, which would at least exert an influence on the other guys and perhaps finally motivate them to lobby Congress for drilling rights to our local oil supplies we already know are there.

I'm not sure it's collusion; the ones who don't produce it have no choice but to raise prices if their suppliers raised prices. The ones who are their own producers can follow suit without actually colluding (following the dictionary definition of collusion). They have no incentive (besides being nice) to drop prices when they can charge more and get away with it due to market conditions. Now, that's not to say that there is no collusion ever in this industry, but in this case I don't think it is. It's taking advantage of being in the strategic position of not relying on OPEC as a supplier.


I think they've been motivated to do that for a while already… :wink: Otherwise it wouldn't have come up as it did.

But the real lobbying should be for moving towards independence from oil entirely, not just pushing the problem to the next generation…

I agree we need to get away from oil. But that's a long term plan. What should we do in the short term? Sit around and get ass raped by OPEC every time we turn around? Or should we extract the local reserves we have and lessen our dependence now, while we still can. A good strategy has both short and long term plans. To ignore one while pursuing the other is lunacy.

Well, if only it were so easy to just go drill in the local reserves. A good deal happens to be in national parks; the decision to put in industry should not be taken lightly at all. The US could subsidize gas prices if it wanted to help consumers (not that I think subsidies are necessarily a good idea). The government could also implement or subsidize electric vehicle plans, much like what Israel is doing (they're doing some kind of import tax exemption for electric cars, which means a lot given their import rate). Basically, there are alternatives here than always going after oil, and not all of them are only long-term solutions. Electric cars have been viable (for not all but a lot of driving circumstances) for a rather long time. It would be interesting to see what contributed to preventing widespread usage…