Quote:
Originally Posted by kach22i
I see where you are coming from, I'm not sure who takes responsibility for the way things are, western culture?
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More like those at the top of the socio-economic hierarchy directing and manipulating Western culture to their own profitable ends. The unholy alliance between the mainstream automobile manufactures, the oil industry, and government and the people at the top of those institutions for the past century would be a good place to start. They've forced a paradigm of planned obsolescence with the purpose of deliberately wasting resources in order to keep people spending more money than necessary for a given level of living standard.
If consumers had the option of a minimal or no-sacrifices 70+ mpg diesel sports car or 4/5-cylinder economy car or even a 35+ mpg V8 gasoline land-yacht of a musclecar during the 70s fuel crisis, with minimal or no cost penalty, they'd have been on it like flies on crap. When the cost is split over tens of thousands of units, aerodynamics is cheap. The performance benefits from a focused emphasis on streamlining would have been so obvious that the vehicles afterwards of the 80s and 90s and later would thus no longer have been in a position to ignore streamlining and would have had to retain it and improve upon it to remain competitive, even if the vehicles got larger. Many billions of barrels of oil and many gigatonnes of CO2 would never have been released as a result. The 1st world consumer class would have given up NOTHING, and in fact benefitted greatly by having more disposable income from not spending it on fuel. And those who can't afford to buy new cars would have benefitted the most, as these depreciated vehicles would have trickled into the 2nd hand market, which would have made any fuel crisis not nearly so devastating to their pocketbook. It would also make EV conversions a lot less expensive and more viable a proposition(less battery per mile of range needed).
Instead, we have people sacrificing their grocery money at the gas pump so they can make the commute to work in the crappy 15 year old 25-30 mpg 4-cylinder sedans they could afford to buy used, as they live paycheck to paycheck, and can't even dream of affording a Tesla.
Speaking of Tesla, without them, we probably wouldn't have EVs available at all. They rode on the coattails of technology that was developed in the 1990s and was "good enough" then, except the mainstream automakers dragged their feet and didn't want people to have access to it. The mainstream automakers claimed people didn't want EVs, which was false. Tesla came onto the market and production has constantly lagged behind demand, and now all the other automakers are trying to catch up lest they lose their marketshare. The mainstream automakers could have been doing in the 1990s something akin to what Tesla started doing in the 2010s.
This current situation is not accidental. It's the result of deliberate policy decisions engineered to keep people spending as much money as possible. Those who caused this are not the ones suffering the consequences of it, but have benefitted immensely.