I have often said that US President Obama’s demand that car makers build more fuel-efficient cars is pointless without giving the consumers some incentive to buy them. As long as gasoline is essentially free, why buy a car you don’t really want, even if it might be the right thing to do for global warming, freedom from foreign oil, whatever the Cause du Jour might be?
Greg Young, public relations manager for Mazda Canada, has a wildly different idea which might just work.
“Why not force all cars to get 10 miles per gallon?” he suggests. (To keep our style masters’ noses in joint, that’s 22.6 litres per 100 km. We're talking worse-than-Hummer here.)
“If even a short trip to the grocery store is going to cost you ten bucks, maybe you’ll think twice about using your car to go everywhere,” says the out-of-the-box-thinking Young.
Now, there’d be an interesting experiment.
But it makes too much sense; I’m not holding my breath anybody’s going to actually try it.
Comments