High Mileage Cars that are NOT sold in the USA

This morning, I got a comment on another post from Fastcarken who wanted me to watch a video about extremely high mileage cars that are sold in Europe but which are not allowed to be sold in the USA. It is worth watching; here is the link.

The video talks at length about both VW and Ford cars sold in Europe and South America which get in the area of 75 miles per gallon. These are real! They run on diesel engines that get extremely good mileage. As the video points out, the cars are not allowed to be sold in the USA because of environmental rules. The video, however, incorrectly says that pollution in this country is measured by pollutants per gallon of fuel used. Actually, the American pollution standards are measured in grams of pollutant given off per mile driven. That means that for cars that get very good mileage, the amount of pollution should be much less. For these high mileage diesel engines, however, there are certain particulate emissions (characteristic of diesel engines) that do not meet the required standards.

What all this really means is that the high mileage diesel cars cannot be sold in the USA because they would increase pollution from particulates (in other words, dust) a bit when compared to other new cars. Of course, if you compare the emissions from a new high mileage diesel to those from a typical car from the 1990s, the new diesels do much better. Basically, these very high mileage diesel cars offer us a trade-off. America could drastically reduce the amount of gasoline it uses by switching to large numbers of these cars while slowing the improvement in air pollution, or we can stay with the current requirements, reduce pollution faster and use much more oil. In other words, we have a choice between greater prosperity, more jobs, greater economic growth on the one hand and a cleaner environment on the other hand. President Obama has clearly opted for slower economic growth and stricter environmental controls.

Ten years ago, when the economy was chugging along and unemployment was under 5%, the trade off for cleaner air made sense, particularly since gasoline cost less than $2 per gallon at the time. Today, with extremely high gas prices, a limping economy, and large numbers of unemployed and underemployed it may well be time for the government to switch gears.

Finally, I do want to add that the video blames the prohibition of these cars on the need to generate revenues from the federal gasoline taxes. This may sound nice to conspiracy theorists, but it is basically a bunch of hogwash. If the revenue from the gas tax were to decline by too much, the government could easily raise the tax rate to make up the difference.

Hat tip to Fastcarken for sending me the video. And, by the way, another hat tip to Fastcarken for his questions asked during the GasFrac conference call the other day.