Slashdot Mirror
Green Cars You Can't Buy
Geoffrey.landis writes "Auto industry blogger Lawrence Ulrich notes that Honda is now making a "Partial Zero Emissions Vehicle" (or PZEV for short) version of the 2008 Accord, an all-new vehicle that is redesigned to meet California emission standards. He notes "So, just how green is a PZEV machine? Well, if you just cut your lawn with a gas mower, congratulations, you just put out more pollution in one hour than these cars do in 2,000 miles of driving."
But the irony is that it's actually illegal for automakers to sell these green cars outside of the special states they were designed for! Apparently, anybody selling one of these ultra-green vehicles out of the correctly-designated venue — which means either California, or seven northeast-states with similar pollution laws — "could be subject to civil fines of up to $27,500. Volvo sent its dealers a memo alerting them to this fact, noting that its greenest S40 and V50 models were only for the special states.""
What the fuck does that even mean?
What possible reason could they come up with to justify such a law? I could see them trying to target the worst (most poluted) states first and limiting inventory to other states temporarily, but to actually pass a law with fines sounds extremely fishy.
Seriously, you Uh-mericans need to get rid of Bush, quick fast and in a hurry! Ron Paul might give you half a chance to get your freedom & economy back... and perhaps environment... Good luck!
I RTFA and the author fails to tell why it's illegal in most states. Just dangles the fact that it is in front of us.
Need more information. Maybe I just dont understand why you can't sell a "green" vehicle anywhere?
So my 2004 Prius has a big sticker on the rear, driver's side window that says "PZEV," indicating that it is a Partial-Zero Emission Vehicle per the standards. Does this article imply that Toyota has been breaking the law selling the Prius around the nation, or are there different versions of the Prius that are "clean" and "cleaner"? It mentions Toyota and the Prius, but doesn't make the connection that the Prius is also a PZEV.
Just like the beef packer down in Kansas who wanted to test all of their cows for mad-cow disease, so they could be certified to ship beef to Japan. The USDA rightfully shut them down, because it would have been unfair competition, giving these guys a competitive edge over everybody else in the market.
:-)
If they let Honda sell near zero emissions automobiles in states where it's not mandated, that might put pressure on everybody else to also make near zero emissions cars, and that's just not fair!
So we should all thank our friends in the Government, for helping ot insure that competition in the marketplace does not create unfair competition.
Sometimes you can't tell spoof from reality.
For some reason, I don't think we're getting the full story here. Usually, there's at least some sort of somewhat-logical reasoning behind something like this. Anyone know the full story? Or is this an example of the rampant corruption that plaguing the US government?
Apart from a little snippet about how it's because of the Clean Air Act, why can't auto makers sell those cars outside of special regions? I'm having a rough time coming up with concrete specifics about the assertion.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
Just stop talking about this fucking article. There's a reason nobody can figure out what is going on here, and the reason is shitty reporting. If the idiot writer can't make any more sense than this, ignore him and wait for somebody with a clue to cover the story.
You cannot have something that is partially zero. Zero is an absolute. This is like saying that something is "partially complete". Partially complete is management speak for incomplete, partially zero is management speak for not zero. More advertising bollocks.
You're right, lets not discuss the assinine laws that prevent green vehicles from being sold in all locales. Let's, instead, get picky over a term. That's more important, isn't it?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Apparently, I'm wrong on a lot of assumptions, but so is a lot of other stuff. Some of these aren't hybrids at all. They don't get better gas mileage or anything. They're just cleaner and more expensive. They still use regular gasoline. I'm really having difficulty finding the issue about why its illegal to sell elsewhere.
This article makes no sense. The writer describes these amazing new super-efficient cars but doesn't say anything about what makes them clean, other than saying that they don't get good gas mileage. Huh? Then he talks about the Toyota Camry Hybrid's 32 mpg as though that was amazing. Then he talks about how these cars can't be sold elsewhere, but doesn't cite the law that says so or give any reason why. There may be a story behind all this, but it isn't in this article.
But also:
The PZEV cars don't get any better mileage than conventional versions.
This is quite telling. If the PZEV cars get the same fuel efficiency as conventional vehicles, then they are consuming the same amount of carbon and putting the same amount of CO2 into the atmosphere.
So how can they be less polluting than a lawn mower? The article must NOT be including CO2 as a pollutant (the same view the Bush administration took of the Clean Air Act). So these vehicles probably emit less sulfur and nitrogen compounds and particulates, but the same amount of CO2.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
The cars are subsidized by the state, so if you sell it in another state you are basically taking tax dollars away from California residents
Logics like this makes me wonder if the whole world has gone mad or just me.
The R&D is done. The money is gone. Whether the car is sold outside the state or not it wouldn't cost more tax dollars. Instead of setting such stupid prohibiting fines, they really should have just made an agreement to tax each and every out of state sale in a reasonable manner and recover some of that R&D cost back for the tax payers.
This article completely ignores the fact that these are gas-burning cars that create just as much CO2 (it mentions they get the same gas/petrol mileage as non-PZEV cars). Localised pollution is in some ways a good thing to reduce global warming, although bad in more general sense, simply because this pollution reduces the amount of solar radiation reaching the surface of the Earth (aka global dimming, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming, but note that there are some interactions between global warming and dimming).
Anyway - pretty pointless concentrating on the less important pollutants rather than on those that may irreversibly change the earth's climate through global warming...
You may now waste lots of time trying to convince me that global warming doesn't exist or is not caused by human activity. (FX: rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.)
That last quote's the big bell-ringer. OK, a car that puts out less emissions by turning off the engine part of the time. And you expect me to believe that it gets the same gas mileage? How, by dribbling fuel out on the road through a hose?
Yes, but a 50Mpg diesel is a Volkswagon Jetta, wheras a 50MPG gas car is a old Geo Metro. The diesel has a hell of a lot more power. A better comparison would be to compare the same car... Ie, a 17MPG Jeep liberty with its 3.9L engine, or a 30MPG Jeep liberty 2.4L Diesel (that they only produced for 2 years in limited quantity, when will they bring them back???) There is more CO2 in a gallon of diesel, but in the same car, the diesel will get you almost 2 times as far, so unless it has 2 times the CO2 per gallon (it doesn't) diesel is the better choice. Then you get into the fact that diesel uses much less "refining", so less energy and chemicals to create it. Or the fact that the engines last much longer, and are simpler, so less waste from the cars "wearing out" and getting replaced, etc...
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Or, that might just be a result of our incestuous news cycle. The fact that all stories (taking what you're saying at face value) have no more information than this one, I'm leaning towards "incestuous news cycle".
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
This logic is very common in government contracting.
It starts from this innocent sounding premise: you can't charge the government more for something than you do the private sector.
Oddly enough, this is why the government pays more for things than the private sector. Private sector purchasers don't think this way. They don't care how much you charge other people, so long as they are paying as little as possible. This means they can buy from anybody, not just vendors who are willing to do the accounting to prove they are charging you the same as everybody else. The government, on the other hand, often finds itself dealing with vendors who specialize in providing things to the government, or provide special versions of products and services that they sell only to the government.
While this case is not exactly parallel, the logic is the same. On the surface, making the sale of these vehicle "fair" to CA consumers would seem to imply making them available at the lowest possible price. It just happens to turn out that "fair" and "as inexpensive as possible" are two somewhat different things. They can't both be the highest priority. So when government money is involved, you don't get the lowest possible price, you get the lowest possible price that is consistent with documentable "fairness".
So, it is probable that in the long term that CA residents pay more for their cars by making sure other states' residents don't "freeload".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
State governments don't want fuel efficient cars. Even some cities and counties are having conniption fits over it. Alternative fuel vehicles and alcohol burners don't pay as much, if any, fuel tax. Governments want that money!! If you start buying less gas, governments get less money. So, while the politicians speak out one side of their face that they're for a greener environment through more fuel efficient cars, better look at those crossed fingers behind their backs. Governments have even gone after people who build their own 100% ethanol vehicles to pay gasoline taxes. In Oregon, for example, they want to start taxing by the mile because of dropping fuel tax revenues. Ah, what a game these pols play with our money.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
The reason why car companies can't sell diesels in the US is because our emissions regulations are a lot more strict. This is why your Jeep Wrangler diesel is no longer produced. I deal mostly with industrial diesel engines, which have a seperate emissions guideline, but diesels will soon be FAR cleaner than gas. In 2011 the air coming out of a diesel engine exhaust pipe will be cleaner than the air outside. This is done with many systems (at serious cost increases to the OEM/customer). There are particulate traps, urea systems, charged air coolers, and more efficient fuel injection that help clean up the exhaust. Currently only one or two of these systems are used to meet emissions standards, but by 2011 (2008 for on-highway?) all of these systems will probably be used. Add low emissions on top of good fuel economy and bio-diesel, and "clean diesels" will be on American roads far sooner than your electric car. -TC
> But the article is lame because it doesn't give any of the reasons why..
No, the article is lame because of WHY they didn't give any details. After admitting the fault is the government's the author uses most of the article to IMPLY that it is all some sort of conspiracy of the automakers. Had the author gave a clear explanation of what sort of government stupidity was preventing 'out of area sales' on these green cars he would have looked pretty daft trying to lay the blame on the auto industry. But because he did actually mention there being a law being against it and didn't outright put on his tinfoil hat he won't be called to account for his yellow journalism. J school students should study this one as a canonical example of how to do agenda journalism. (And since modern journalism is overtly agenda journalism, out to 'make the world a better place' instead of old fashioned 'just the facts'......)
Democrat delenda est
If healthcare was purely capitalist, the doctors, pharmacists, insurance companies and so on would be acting for the benefit of the consumer.
But that means curing people. There's more money to be made in treating symptoms. And don't you dare try to change that! You'll be called anti-business for trying to cut into their profits.
If those sites are what you've been reading then it's no wonder you're worried about the U.S. declining. If find the anti-Bush site particularly interesting. There's a lot of good sound bites in there and there's a grain of truth in every one of them but the author is insinuating a number of cause-effect relationships where there is only correlation. Please, let's not forget about reason. Correlation does not prove causation. It's not just something you use when doing science, it's a foundation of any sound reasoning.
I'm not going to go through everything you posted and rebut each one but I can at least cherry pick a few as examples. For instance, "I set an economic record for the most personal bankruptcies filed in any 12 month period." Or how about, "I set all-time record for the biggest drop in the history of the stock market. " The government does not control the stock market last I checked although they do regulate it. Let's also not forget that when Bush took office we had a highly inflated stock market due to several investors speculating on companies with no serious business plan. But I'm not going to turn around and blame Clinton for that even though that occurred on his watch. Anyone who puts his money into a company with no sound plan is taking a huge risk. Sometimes it pays off. I find it odd that anyone would hold the government responsible for this at all.
Sayers discussed this quite a bit in her excellent book The Mind of the Maker. Why is it that people look to politicians to solve their problems? That is simply not their job. Their job is to keep the government running as in protect the country from invasion and to allow the people in the country to live their lives with as little interference as possible. That's it. If you haven't read The Mind of the Maker you should. It unfortunately gets shoehorned into the theology category so you may find it over in that section of your local bookstore. You can also find various copies of it online since the copyright has long expired. The online copies all have varied levels of transcription errors.
Anyway, getting back to the point, some of the criticisms of Bush are valid. For instance, "I have created the largest government department bureaucracy in the history of the United States, called the "Bureau of Homeland Security " Yeah, he did do that, and I'm not particularly happy about it although I'm not sure that what existed before with various government agencies fulfilling overlapping niches was necessarily better.
Then there's the Olbermann piece. Frankly, I find Olbermann to be as much of a journalist as Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity. He's an opinion maker and there's not necessarily anything wrong with that except for that he tries to pass off his opinion pieces as hard news which in my book makes him a hack.
NBC regularly puts Olbermann on the Nightly News identifying him as a reporter. Every segment he does is absolutely loaded with opinion. Again, there's nothing wrong with being an opinionated journalist but please don't pass it off as hard news reporting. It would be like FNC putting O'Reilly or Hannity on the Fox Report. Not that the Fox Report is unbiased but it is intended to be a hard news pure reporting program, not an opinion/entertainment program. I'm very wary of anyone claiming to do a hard news program. It's impossible for any normal human not to have some level of bias. Better to disclose your bias than to try to keep it in the closet. Sooner or later anyone with half a brain can clearly see what's going on.
Mmm, what is that smell? Smells like a dumb reactionary that believes everything he reads on the internet, even when it doesn't even begin to cite a source. If you believe uncited unexplained claims, then you are just acting like a dumb sucker. I am pretty sure nowhere in any states law does it say, "You can't sell low emission cars 'cause the corporations, big oil, Iraq, Haliburton, and George Bush 666 Ahahaha!".
This discussion has over 300 posts and yet no one has found a single law to explain that stupid and statement in the article that is made without even a shred of citation. When a few thousand Slashdotters can't FTFL (find the fucking law), it probably doesn't exist and this is just a case of shitty/sensational/biased journalism.
Far more likely? California provides some sort of subsidy or mandate for selling the cars and other states don't. The brain dead journalist in question probably couldn't wrap his small mind around the difference between a subsidy in California, and a law BANNING ALL GREEN CARS IN THE US EXCEPT CALIFORNIA!!1!!!!111!
Please, read the crap you dredge off the internet with a critical eye instead of gobbling up every piece of sensationalist crap you run across.