My Way To Save the American Car Industry…And the World
Americans don’t like small cars, traditional ones like the CRX are often looked at as starter cars for the financially marginal and certainly not for a (small) family or a well off individual. One of Ezra’s commenters points out that it’s different in Japan and Europe where “Small cars…are outfitted much better (more expensively and more profitably) because they’re seen as the family car, and not as basic transportation for recent grads.”
In so much as there are small cars sold in the United States, there is some sort of gimmick to elevate them over a standard, larger vehicle. Toyota’s Scion brand is putting a premium on good design and stylish, functional accessories. BMW’s A series, which is coming to the US soon, will be the best performing small car on the market, while the Prius has an advantage from it’s high technology and consumptive virtue derived from buying it. If gas prices are getting higher, and small cars are going to get more prevalent, US companies are going to have to find a niche.
My suggestion is diesel, or even better, biodiesel hybrids. Diesels get better gas mileage, and their emissions and noise issues have been mostly fixed. Even better, biodiesel is essentially carbon neutral — the carbon that’s emitted from burning the fuel is the same that’s taken in during the photosynthesis of the plant matter. Make it hybrid, using GMs new hybrid technology , and you’re likely to get better gas mileage than Priuses and the like due to using diesel instead of normal gas. Also, we should all be driving plug-in biodiesel cars eventually, and if GM could do a big roll out, they could change American attitudes towards diesel and small cars and make them more palatable for an American public. Of course, if GM were a rational entity, they wouldn’t have all these different brands, but that’s a story for a different time.
