Basic Physics FAIL! on the part of American Stinker.

Only when they're plowed under by some oblivious asshole in a 16-passenger mega-SUV. Which just happens to be the target demographic for Kool-Ade Drinker.

Isn't this a repeat from the 1970's?

What they really need to do is start putting emissions regulations on large contianier ships entering our ports. It would solve the problem of fuel consumption and it would help keep manufacturing here in the states more cost effective.

/about 20% serious

why are conservatives such pussies? Do any of them even own a motorcycle?

Of course, the other logical extreme is that we should all be driving M1A1s down the highway. Which could be pretty fun.

Oh, and we shouldn't go faster than 20 mph.

I don't know why they call this "American Thinker". "American Reactionary" seems like a more fitting title. There are no new ideas, just old ones rehashed with no attempt to get to any actual truth or clear thinking.

farking terror-stricken, bed-wetting republicans.

Well, I'm certainly scared now.

cwick: Of course, the other logical extreme is that we should all be driving M1A1s down the highway. Which could be pretty fun.

my god - the Grand Old Pussies would be in heaven - a massive SUV with a massive gun on it? even the smallest of wingnut peeners could be compensated for!

No problem, we'll just cap and trade fatalities.

Tahs4Evar: I don't know why they call this "American Thinker". "American Reactionary" seems like a more fitting title. There are no new ideas, just old ones rehashed with no attempt to get to any actual truth or clear thinking.

The target audience:

Or U.S. drivers could learn to be better drivers.

What an insane suggestion...

Cars with a lower gas mileage require bigger tanks to go the same distance, meaning they have to carry more explosive material with them. I understand why al Qaeda supports this, but not "American Thinker"...Unless they're the same thing!

OMFG ! We'll all be killed !!

Free choice means I should be able to choose a car with a gas mileage of 9

Yeah 'masterful job' with that hyperbolic picture.

You could just not slam your car into that back of a transport (camper in the picture?) at 60+ MPH. Those cars have tough little shells, that thing had to be moving.

bulldg4life: Free choice means I should be able to choose a car with a gas mileage of 9

Only if you're polluting your own damn air with it.

I'm amazed by this argument.

There are small cars on the road today, you stupid bastards! For fark's sake, they're incredibly popular because of their fuel efficiency, and their popularity will only increase when gas prices inevitably get high again.

Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Volkswagon, all of these companies make smaller, fuel-efficient vehicles that are ridiculously popular, and that's one of the reasons why American cars have been failing these past 30 years. People don't care about giant retard-driven land tanks as much as they do about fuel efficiency.

Frankly, smaller cars might help make roads safer, because the more aware you are about danger, the more careful a driver you are. In which car are you more likely to be intently aware of your surroundings and heed all rules of the road, a giant POS hummer with which you think you can crush a minivan, or an actual, economical car that, like most automobiles, carry some sense of risk when driving?

bulldg4life: Free choice means I should be able to choose a car with a gas mileage of 9

CAFE standards are for entire fleets, not individual car lines. A company can make a behemoth land tank, but they have to make a similarly highly fuel efficient car to balance it out. And these days, which do you think will sell better?

/Alternate argument: Free choice means I should be able to choose a car that fails its DOT inspection and has no headlights!

Bloody William: I'm amazed by this argument.

There are small cars on the road today, you stupid bastards! For fark's sake, they're incredibly popular because of their fuel efficiency, and their popularity will only increase when gas prices inevitably get high again.

Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Volkswagon, all of these companies make smaller, fuel-efficient vehicles that are ridiculously popular, and that's one of the reasons why American cars have been failing these past 30 years. People don't care about giant retard-driven land tanks as much as they do about fuel efficiency.

Frankly, smaller cars might help make roads safer, because the more aware you are about danger, the more careful a driver you are. In which car are you more likely to be intently aware of your surroundings and heed all rules of the road, a giant POS hummer with which you think you can crush a minivan, or an actual, economical car that, like most automobiles, carry some sense of risk when driving?

Add in that you get more sense of speed the closer you are to the ground; it's dead easy in an SUV to be going 85 and not be fully aware of it than it is, say, a Saturn.

More mass plus more speed equals more dead.

And yeah, I was driving around a Saturn and getting 40mpg out of it for years. Upping the CAFE standards just means more Saturns and their ilk on the road.

I learned to drive in a Dodge farking Omni. It helped give me a sense of danger when driving, and so I'm pretty darn careful when I'm on the road now.

...I did learn stick on a station wagon, though. Subaru Loyale, busted-ass and couldn't go faster than 55 if you tried. Once you hit 45, the damn thing sounded like a TIE Fighter flying apart.

Precious snowflakes who get their own giant douchebag SUVs or learn on their mom's unnecessary land tanks don't get that sense.

The source of this muddle-headed piffle is so badly written as to suggest satire, not least in the introduction of an 8 year old child as judge of vehicle safety.

If your premise is that small cars are inherently dangerous, which has some merit, viewed purely from the perspective of impacts with larger vehicles, it's probably better not to compare an accident in which the driver of a large sedan was killed with one in which the driver of a Smart escaped life-threatening injury (!)

The thing I hate most about SUVs is that's it's like an arms race to have the bigger "safer" vehicle.

What if I want both? A fuel sipper for my daily drive, and the pick up/suv for hauling lots of stuff/people? Don't mandate fuel mileage that will make it impossible for me to replace my pickup when the time comes.

It's my choice what I want to drive.

/2000 Chevy that still runs like new
//and I don't baby it either

WTFDYW: It's my choice what I want to drive.

Apparently people have farking forgotten this in the last week or two because it's the latest Obama Outrage, but...

CAFE STANDARDS HAVE PLACED FUEL ECONOMY STANDARDS ON CAR COMPANIES SINCE 1975. THIS IS NOT NEW.

This isn't some new restriction Obama is magically creating. It's improving CAFE standards. Something that, frankly, has been a long goddamn time coming.

bulldg4life: Free choice means I should be able to choose a car with a gas mileage of 9

It also means I should be able to buy a bread box on wheels with no airbags, but decent passive safety and restraint systems for front passengers, that gets 60 mpg. Due to current regulations in the US, the government says I can't have that. For my own good of course.

/Thinking about getting my Dad's old Chevy Sprint road worthy again.
//Needs a new clutch and 1st gear. Engine is in great shape.
///Imagine the mileage we could get with that if we applied the current engine technology to a modernized version of that chassis.

Bloody William: Frankly, smaller cars might help make roads safer, because the more aware you are about danger, the more careful a driver you are. In which car are you more likely to be intently aware of your surroundings and heed all rules of the road, a giant POS hummer with which you think you can crush a minivan, or an actual, economical car that, like most automobiles, carry some sense of risk when driving?

I always fancied myself a good driver, until I started riding a motorcycle. It changed my driving habits pretty significantly (for the better). I would love for some kind of mandatory program for new drivers, to put the proper fear of God into them.

/NY metro area

Bek: I always fancied myself a good driver, until I started riding a motorcycle. It changed my driving habits pretty significantly (for the better). I would love for some kind of mandatory program for new drivers, to put the proper fear of God into them.

/NY metro area

I'm in NYC metro too, which is... well, why I don't have a car. Between parking and insurance, there's no reason to since I commute every day (and the farking Lincoln Tunnel is $8 each way).

But yeah, wasn't it traditional in drivers' ed courses to convince kids that if they drive like retards, they will die horribly?

This is what 30 50 years of buying legislation will get you. An industry so mired in its own baggage that not only are they incapable of responding to market needs, new and innovative competitors face a nearly impossible obstacle to swooping in and eating their lunches. But waiting in the wings are Chinese companies like Chery, or Indian outfits like Tata or Mahindra, all of whom would love access to the American auto market, and it's they who will bump domestic innovators because they'll kill us in the labor market. That is, unless some liberal genius imposes a tariff roughly equivalent to the difference between sweatshop and union scale. This is probably in violation of the WTO agreements, so it's unlikely at best. No, we'll muddle along and eventually kiss this industry goodbye, like we've done to electronics, small appliances, large appliances, steel, textiles, and most manufacturing.

Can I tow my boat with the new cars? Or should the boat tow the car?

Oh, that right. The last round of fuel efficiency rules made cars unusable for towing, so I had to buy a truck.

Bek: Bloody William: Frankly, smaller cars might help make roads safer, because the more aware you are about danger, the more careful a driver you are. In which car are you more likely to be intently aware of your surroundings and heed all rules of the road, a giant POS hummer with which you think you can crush a minivan, or an actual, economical car that, like most automobiles, carry some sense of risk when driving?

I always fancied myself a good driver, until I started riding a motorcycle. It changed my driving habits pretty significantly (for the better). I would love for some kind of mandatory program for new drivers, to put the proper fear of God into them.

/NY metro area

An excellent point. I started riding a couple of years ago. Since then, I most definitely look at the road much differently when I'm driving. And you're completely right about the obliviousness of many SUV drivers. In the snow or rain, they're the ones you see most often in a ditch on the side of the road.

/4 wheel drive doesn't mean 4 wheel stop, dumbass.

Bad physics, lousy understanding of automotive engineering (small cars or those without frame or chassis protection usually get roll cages).

But hey, why tell the truth when you can lie?

Here's some a picture of HUEG AMURICAN PENIS CARS totally wrecked like the little "putt putt" car in the American Thinker.



It turns out that whether it's a tiny car or a large car, when you're fighting a semi truck (clearly pictured in the article) or a school bus, you tend to lose.

True story: An old friend of mine works (or worked) for Brinks as an armoured car driver. One of their fleet hit a tree. The armoured car was absolutely totaled, and the tree barely bent -- and that was the soil giving way, not the tree. He sent me pics of some of the Edmonton Brinks guys checking it out. Pretty funny.

By the by, those armoured trucks are anything but fuel efficient.

Bloody William: I'm amazed by this argument.

There are small cars on the road today, you stupid bastards! For fark's sake, they're incredibly popular because of their fuel efficiency, and their popularity will only increase when gas prices inevitably get high again.

Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Volkswagon, all of these companies make smaller, fuel-efficient vehicles that are ridiculously popular, and that's one of the reasons why American cars have been failing these past 30 years. People don't care about giant retard-driven land tanks as much as they do about fuel efficiency.

Frankly, smaller cars might help make roads safer, because the more aware you are about danger, the more careful a driver you are. In which car are you more likely to be intently aware of your surroundings and heed all rules of the road, a giant POS hummer with which you think you can crush a minivan, or an actual, economical car that, like most automobiles, carry some sense of risk when driving?

But....how I can place my 67 magnetic ribbons on a small car?

Bloody William: THIS IS NOT NEW.

But, but, but Obama did it. That means it's bad. He's gonna kill us all!

Erebus1954: Can I tow my boat with the new cars? Or should the boat tow the car?

Oh, that right. The last round of fuel efficiency rules made cars unusable for towing, so I had to buy a truck.

Aren't cars today significantly more powerful than cars of a decade ago? I thought that was one of the main reasons (along with increased weight from safety features) that fuel economy hasn't really improved in decades.

pnjunction: Yeah 'masterful job' with that hyperbolic picture.

You could just not slam your car into that back of a transport (camper in the picture?) at 60+ MPH. Those cars have tough little shells, that thing had to be moving.

looks more like the front of a semi

horse-pheathers: Upping the CAFE standards just means more Saturns and their ilk on the road.

idk about more Saturns

bulldg4life: Free choice means I should be able to choose a car with a gas mileage of 9

THIS

attackingpencil:

Aren't cars today significantly more powerful than cars of a decade ago?

That's marijuana.

You want safe drivers? Put a big spike in the middle of the steering wheel pointing right at the driver's chest.

attackingpencil: Erebus1954: Can I tow my boat with the new cars? Or should the boat tow the car?

Oh, that right. The last round of fuel efficiency rules made cars unusable for towing, so I had to buy a truck.

Aren't cars today significantly more powerful than cars of a decade ago? I thought that was one of the main reasons (along with increased weight from safety features) that fuel economy hasn't really improved in decades.

of a decade ago, yes...two decades ago you could be easily towing a boat with a midsize sedan...

Erebus1954: Can I tow my boat with the new cars? Or should the boat tow the car?

Oh, that right. The last round of fuel efficiency rules made cars unusable for towing, so I had to buy a truck.

You can buy tow kits (up to at least class 2) for most cars that are equipped with a mount point on the frame. You can even get them for cars like the Mustang. You can get them cheaply, and right now, by typing words into Google.

In other words, you're a retard.

This is just getting silly now.

Marcus Aurelius: Isn't this a repeat from the 1970's?

Yep. A veritable carmeggeddon was predicted. we were all going to die in those tiny, cramped, un-American little cars. Funnily enough, highway casualties went down instead of up - and continue to do so until this day.
Just more death-rattles from the 20, oops, no 19...oh wait 18 percenters.

Penguin4x4: bulldg4life: Free choice means I should be able to choose a car with a gas mileage of 9

THIS

Free choice means if 50% + 1 of voters elect representatives to legislative and executive positions representing a position that 9MPG is overly ruinous to the environment, people who want 9MPG cars will just have to suck it down, hard. See, cause in a democracy, direct or representative, your choice can't override the choices of others if they're the majority.

Freedom of gas mileage ain't in the constitution, kid.

Is this because Neocons in Hummers are horrible drivers who get drunk and text their ex girlfriend leading to accidents with hybrids?

Ahhh, American Thinker. Featuring the thoughts of chowderheads rather than eggheads.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZzKUt4OtE8

Not a rickroll

I'm kinda worried about the number of people that are going to actually agree with me like I was serious.