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The D3 swear they’re giving their customers what they want. But that’s disingenuous. The automakers have carefully shaped their products and marketing to create the specific demands they now complain of being slammed for filling. Less philosophically, how many F150 buyers ever need or use their truck’s real capacities? Remember the Chevrolet El Camino and Ford Ranchero? They were car-based trucks: station wagons with a cargo bed. They were fully capable of handling the average full-size pickup truck buyer’s hauling needs and wants. We can’t get them any more in America, but Australians still enjoy their safety, efficiency and cost-effectiveness benefits. “Utes,” they call them, short for “Utility.” So, why not here in America?
For years, our market was fully controlled by The Big Three. Now we’ve got most of the world’s brands here, but our vehicle regulations are largely based on standards written by the American automakers. In contrast, European and other vehicles sold around the world conform to United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE or ECE) safety regulations.
The claimed basis for the ongoing bifurcated system: American-spec vehicles are the world’s safest. If that were so, the US might have the fewest death and injury rates by distance travelled and by vehicle registered. But no, we’re sixteenth on the list compiled by Science Serving Society. Canada—with vehicle regulations almost identical to America’s—fares a little better, due to higher seatbelt usage. But neither country tops the list. All the better results are in countries that use ECE regulations.
That doesn’t mean ECE-spec vehicles would necessarily give us better safety. But it does mean that, all things being equal (which they never are, but you gotta go with the trend), American safety regs don’t do a better job than the ECE regs. So there’s no safety basis for banning ECE vehicles. But there is a compelling reason for allowing them: The European fleet fuel economy is just about double that of America’s.
Vehicles deemed safe in the rest of the world are banned in America, so American firms can control which vehicles enter the American market. Tariffs are off limits to protect American jobs. We hide our trade restrictions in technical regulations, spuriously claiming our regulations are better while excluding vehicles demonstrated to be safe in countries like Germany, the UK, and Australia with faster, higher-density traffic, lower fuel consumption and fewer deaths and injuries on the road.
In those countries, fuel is heavily taxed. Consumers have a direct incentive to demand fuel efficiency. Passenger cars, SUVs, pickup trucks and vans, too—not just cute little microcars. It costs millions to certify a vehicle to North America’s different-but-not-better standards. There are numerous vehicles we don’t get in America that consume less fuel while amply serving the needs and wants for which we buy vehicles.
Washington can, could, and should join the 50-year-old World Forum for Harmonization of Vehicle Regulations and say to the automakers “You may no longer hide behind market-specific regulations. We’ll have stringent local-content requirements; you may not ship jobs overseas and import ‘domestic’ cars from elsewhere. The same rules will apply to all who wish to sell cars here. Live or die by them, but either way, you will play by them.”
American makers’ longstanding scornful rejection of such a course means there’s no way for U.S. interests to influence the technical regulations developed by international consensus, and this regulatory fence originally erected to keep others out makes American vehicles uncompetitive internationally.
It’s not just the content of US regulations that differs from ECE norms. The regulatory structures themselves are very different.
US regulations are written ambiguously and refer extensively to documents that have to be bought elsewhere; NHTSA’s lawyers are constantly petitioned by companies wanting to know whether their product is legal. The interpretations are capricious and inconsistent, but carry the force of law . . . sort of. There’s no type approval, so unsafe parts aren’t investigated until there’s a body count.
ECE regulations are generally clear and precise. They’re self-contained and free of charge; there’s nothing else to buy. They contain type-approval provisions that effectively keep manufacturers and importers from cheating; ECE Explorers wearing ECE tires didn’t flip and roll. Developing-world suppliers send the good stuff to ECE countries and the test failures to America.
From small-scale idiocy like American rear turn signals that are allowed to be red like brake lights (everywhere else in the world they must be amber), to the thoughtless American tendency toward padded cells on wheels with only cursory attention to crash avoidance, the ECE regulations tend to create vehicles better able to avoid crashes. And they’ve got pedestrian-impact mitigation regulations we haven’t even begun to mock yet.
The rest of the world has definitively said “no” to deficient, lax American vehicle regulations. It’s long past time to wipe out this virulent infestation of American exceptionalism.
posted by 24.36.111...
, Wed, 18 Feb 2009 18:55:40
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