The Big Three Learn a Thing or Two about Making

The Big Three Learn a Thing or Two about Making a Fuel Efficient Car

The automakers aren't happy with President Obama. As if things weren't bad enough before, the government now goes and holds them to a deadline. The new law is, all automakers selling cars in this country need to get the average fuel efficiency across their range of cars up to 35.5 miles per gallon. That doesn't mean that each model of car has to be that fuel-efficient. How would they ever sell super cars then? It just means that if GM wants to make a Camaro and a Corvette that will do 16mpg, that is fine with the government just as long as they make every one of the rest of their range a very fuel efficient car that can balance the muscle cars out. It won't be enough if the rest of their cars do 35.5 mpg. To balance out even a moderately high performance car like the Pontiac Solstice, they will need to drive down the thirst in even their ordinary cars so far down, it'll be a real challenge. The new fuel efficiency rules don't just count the number of models a company has across its range. The rules count the number of units sold of each model too.

And auto designers and engineers are now being forced to move out of the American Car headspace, to look for better car design philosophies, materials, and cultures from around the world. America is no longer so rich and successful that it can ignore all the rules. This isn't such a great cross to bear; Asian and European manufacturers have been doing it for years ever since they found their fuel prices too high and their road space too low. American brands like Ford and Opel have been makers of small fuel efficient car models in Europe themselves. They just never brought the fuel-efficient show over to America. Sometimes, GM's small cars are just rebadged versions of a product from some company it owns in Asia. For instance, the new Chevrolet Spark, already a big hit in places like India, used to go by the name Daewoo Matiz; until GM bought Daewoo. The Aveo has Daewoo parentage too.

America certainly has some catching up to do; everyone is used to a full-sized cars; in an era where car companies have to toe the 35.5 mpg line, Americans are going to get pretty chummy with the hatchback, a very familiar form the rest of the world around. American automakers just need to study the hatchbacks and subcompacts made over the rest of the world to see how to sell these to Americans, without taking away any of the luxury they're used to. The entire culture of the class of American auto designers is looking at revolutionary change. It used to be that everyone got their kicks from making the loudest and brattiest engines out there. If the rest of the world didn't understand what that meant, they could "go sit with the girls" (as Mark Twain says in Tom Sawyer), was the attitude. That will not cut it anymore in the world of the 35.5 mpg fuel-efficient car. America's designers will just have to sublimate their tastes in loud cars, and express themselves in other ways.