The free market really can solve all of our problems. Guess what more and more people want to buy when they go shopping for their next car? Even Americans have started to lose their love for that great big gas guzzling SUV Detroit has been pushing on us for the last two decades:
Americans bought more Toyota Prius hybrid petrol-electric hatchbacks in 2007 than Ford Explorer sports utility vehicles, the top-selling SUV for more than a decade.
The change of fortune, buried in US vehicle sales data for 2007 and unthinkable a few years ago, will find an echo at this year’s Detroit auto show, which starts on Sunday. […]
While Prius sales soared 69 per cent in 2007, demand for the Explorer was less than a third of its 2000 peak. Many Americans are replacing truck-based SUVs with crossover vehicles, which are built like cars, thus offering a smoother ride and better fuel efficiency. Toyota began selling the Prius in North America in 2000, the same year Explorer sales reached a record 445,000 units.
“It’s a combination of an ascending star and a falling star,” says George Magliano, director of automotive industry analysis at consultant Global Insight.
I guess we have George W, Bush to thank for this, so credit where credit is due. His policies of endless war in the Middle East and massive tax cuts and subsidies for the rich and corporations have led to the devaluation of the dollar, frightened commodities speculators and also taken much of Iraq’s former crude oil supply off the international market. In his own inimitable way he has helped push the price of oil (and thus the price of the gasoline and fuel oil we use, too) up into the stratosphere. And by doing so he has finally unleashed the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith upon us.
So I give you President George W. Bush, unintentional promoter of technologies that use less fossil fuels, and help the environment by emitting fewer greenhouse gases. Surely that’s worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize or two. All Al Gore ever did was start a crusade to educate the world about global warming. Bush, clearly a doer, not a talker, has taken the more direct approach. Admittedly, his policies represent a harsher, more deadly, cure for what ails us than what Mr. Gore proposes, but as the man would say himself:
You can’t break a few eggs if you . . . can’t make scrambled if . . . Omelets need eggs, don’t they?*
* The above quote is completely fictional, but it was definitely intended to depict a specific living person.
I haven’t heard any MSM yammering about auto industry taxpayer bailouts yet. When do you suppose the pimping will begin? Wanna do a pool? We certainly can’t expect the poor auto execs to forgo their year-end bonuses.
Japan and Korea will end up owning Detroit. They’ll buy it cheap with devalued American dollars.
Only Nixon could go to China. Only Bush can save us from our addiction to oil.
I read somewhere the reason the Prius was made in the first place was due to the big 3 US auto makers agreeing to develop a hybrid car way back in the early 90’s, and then when they heard about it of course the Japanese makers followed suit, and then the big 3 US auto makers reneged on their agreement (and recalled all the electric cars as fast as they could, I believe), but the Japanese didn’t know they did that (did you or I? Oh, of course not). So Toyota introduced the Prius to the US as soon as they could, around the height of the SUV craze, and it’s been a climb sales-wise, but look at them now.
Good move, Detroit! Short term profits win again over long term stability and sustainability.
The trouble with the free market is that it has about the future planning abilities of a retarded gnat. Consumers buy what is available right now, market researchers tote up what consumers bought yesterday and last year, and in a high-investment industry like automobiles the money needed to introduce a new product goes to something as close to the latest highly successful offering.
Anyone who suggests a major departure from what is currently successful is unable to convince the investors to buy into a competitive market risk that has no history. So the only way to get major changes in the industry is for the government to force all of the auto companies to act at once, so that no single company runs the risk of opening a new market themselves just to have a better funded competitor steal it away just as it becomes profitable. Safety? Gas mileage? Reliability?
You’d think the auto industry managers would want the government to push the way into new products as an industry to lower the risk to any one company, but by the time a man becomes a corporate auto executive he seems to be so sure of his infallibility that he can’t stand to be questioned. That’s the old aristocrat disease.
The Japanese aren’t much better, but they come from a different market that is some ways is ahead of what the American market is going towards. They perfect their products there and then export them here where they face no real competition. American auto executives then blame labor costs or government regulation for their own lack of foresight. Again the old aristocrat disease. Always right, never at fault, blame someone else.
Short term profits are the only thing that exists in a totally free market. Nothing last longer than a retarded gnat’s memory.
That is an absolutely fantasic post Steven. 100% on the money. Great “quote” too.