Why Is It That We Cannot Build Fuel-Efficient Vehicles?
timothy on Jan 27th 2012
Around one third of new car customers in America thought of fuel economy an important factor.. In 1992 previously General Motors built a vehicle that got 100 miles to the gallon – and all these years later on one of people’s major concerns on top of global warming and pollution is dependence on foreign oil. Another vehicle, the GM TPC, which looked a lot like the Geo Metro, weighed only 1000 pounds and could get 75 miles per gallon. Balanced growth of the vehicle, the engine that had 3 cylinders, was dropped because, in order to meet American safety principles, it had to be reinforced which added 200 pounds to its weight.
This was not the only protype built by GM which ended up on the scrapheap. The GM Lean Machine of 1982, which could obtain 80 mpg, as well as the GM Ultralite which reached a fabulous 100 mpg, were two of these vehicles. GM was offering cars to the buying public in 1992 that did 20 mpg, while Honda was getting 50 mpg with their Civic VX, but right then GM already covertly had cars doing 100 miles per gallon. If cars that were capable of doing 100 miles per gallon had already been developed way back then, why is it that such cars are not being sold today?
It is just a weird phenomenon that some companies promote traditional vehicles in the US, but sell different, more efficient cars in other countries. Customers in Japan and Europe have for several years now had the opportunity to get cars that do 70 miles per gallon and more. A case in point of a vehicle never offered within the US and capable of 78 mpg, is the Lupo by Volkswagen. An automobile referred to as Jazz elsewhere in the world was brought to the States in 2007 as the Fit. You can get economy-boosting features with the Jazz in Japan, say for example a smaller engine and other ways to reduce consumption, but not so with the Fit in the US.
In North America the manufacturers claim they have to build big cars mainly because that is what the American public wants. Building a small commuter type vehicle doesn’t make the manfacturer big money, unlike with a large SUV. A Tank on Wheels is the thing to have – that’s the message that the commercials beguile the American public with. Fuel-saving choices from the large companies are uncommon, so it’s pretty easy to deduce where their motivations lay. Leading the way in fuel economy might have been General Motors, but they opt to often be the leader in SUVs instead. The many other auto producers did the same thing by producing fuel-efficient cars, then again denied them to Americans.
We live in a world that has fought wars over oil, that has been polluted, and car makers have never even given the choice to people in this country of fuel-efficient cars. How many people would have loved having a car that got good gas mileage, and were never given the option? It’s possible that it is the perfect time to get those previous plans back out and build a vehicle that has already been built before.
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