From: BillK (bill@wkidston.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Fri Feb 07 2003 - 09:35:00 MST
Thu Feb 06, 2003 07:09 pm spike66 wrote:
> My brother's Geo has 130kmi and still runs.
>
> Our sadly litigious society assigns blame to whoever has the
> deepest pockets, which is in this case the manufacturer.
> Any accident a Geo driver suffers, the chance of injury
> is high, so the bonehead jury figures that is somehow GM's
> fault. GM decided the little bit of profit they made
> on the Geo wouldn't cover the liability. spike
That is a problem with tiny cars. The driver in a large car has a six
foot crumple zone of metal in front of them when they drive into a tree.
In a micro car there is just you and the tree.
(Gives a new slant to the term 'tree-hugger' :-)).
That is part of what I was getting at when I said that micro cars lead
to a different style of driving. 'Aggressive' drivers won't last long in
a micro. A senior policeman (half jokingly) once said that the best road
safety measure for cars would be a large spike (sorry!) in the centre of
the steering wheel pointing straight at the driver's chest.
Driving a micro car is a bit like that.
Spike's remark led me to some research. And he's right! A few years ago
there was a choice of several small cars in USA, then they all
disappeared. i.e. the Geo (Chevrolet) Metro, Suzuki Swift and Ford
Aspire. The new European and Japanese micro cars are more fuel-efficient
than even these cars, but it sounds like there is little chance of them
appearing in USA in the near future.
I just ran a search at whatcar.com - a UK motoring magazine - for all
petrol engine cars available which average at least 50 mpg and it
produced a list of 24 models (8 cars with varying levels of trim and
equipment). If you include diesels, it returns 100 models which do at
least 50mpg (about 25 cars in various configurations). Purchase prices
start new at around 5,000 GBP (8,100 USD, 7,500 Euros) and drop by about
a third for one-year old cars.
(And I believe car prices are cheaper in Europe than in UK).
So Europe and Japan seem to be embracing wholeheartedly the idea of
reducing oil consumption and coincidentally providing cheap
transportation for the masses.
Looks like the high taxes have convinced the population here.
BillK
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