Ban All Cars Getting Less Than 35 MPG? | Autopia from Wired.com

The former head of Royal Dutch Shell has gone way out on a limb and urged the European Union to ban all vehicles that get less than 35 mpg, saying it is the only way to significantly address global climate change and force the auto industry to build more efficient vehicles.

"We need a very tough regulation saying that you can't drive or build something less than a certain standard," the Telegraph quotes him saying. "You would be allowed to drive an Aston Martin - but only if it did 50-60 mpg."

[From Ban All Cars Getting Less Than 35 MPG? | Autopia from Wired.com]

Either it is a slow news day, or there is more than the usual car related traffic in my RSS feeds.

This reminds me a lot of all the noise in this country about the Corporate Average Fuel Economy regulations. Thanks to some clever math, US car makers can keep building gas guzzlers as long as their overall passenger cars sold average 27.5 MPG, with different figures for light trucks and a shitload of exceptions based on weight and usage.

He is of course smoking crack. The Europeans like their luxury cars and feel no real urge to make them stick to the same conventions as the kind of cars that us common folk will usually drive. Even if such a law is passed, it is guaranteed that it will have a clause that excepts carmakers that sell under X units per model per year. All this means is that the luxury carmakers that have slightly higher sales volumes (like Porsche) may have to break their product lines a bit more to make sure that each model sells within the acceptable cap.

Maybe it is time to force people to buy smaller displacement engines. There are too many cars sold here with big V6 engines that barely perform the same as some of the fancier normally aspirated inline-4 engines. Change the way cars are registered so the displacement of the engine, power and weight are factors. Two identical models, one with a V6, the other one with a much bigger V8, should not cost the same to register unless the V8 is advanced enough to shut down cylinders whenever the engine is coasting or idling.