Quote:
Originally Posted by JSH
I'm still not seeing how low fuel economy standards are protectionist.
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Allowing automakers to keep seemingly outdated engines, which may not seem so easy to keep up-to-date to emission standards at a first glance, which the tooling and development cost had already been paid-off, seems quite protectionist. And the SUV craze favored by some vehicles that are clearly not a commercial vehicle being certified as a "light truck" just to enable the usage of such inneficient powertrains, which end up not being so favored on export markets anymore, makes it clear that protectionist measures allowed the Big Three to keep dumping gas-guzzlers just because they were cheaper to make and didn't have to pay the same amount of tax as a station-wagon for example. Even though other automakers embraced the SUV/crossover bandwagon in order to benefit from this approach too, rendering uneffective the protectionist bias, it still seems to have been initially a part of a set of protectionist measures.