Amazing! Truly Amazing! This magic cafe thing-a-ma-jiggy spurred a private corporation to develop a new, world changing composite material in just five short months!

Be careful No Welfare, keep patting yourself on the back that hard and you're going to need the socialized medicine (to go along with the other overreaches of our government.)

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@Welfare: You forgot more expensive.

@TJ: lawl

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Just great, now we get to use even more oil in the form of synthetic plastics to make up the rest of our cars! Instead of moving away from the crude crud, we're going to use it for even more.

What will we do when plastics are not a possibility because we can't get enough oil to make them?

Sonne Times: Social and Political Commentary
http://jsonne.blogspot.com

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TJ sure the market forced GM to make more efficient engines (along with a quarterly 15+ billion loss) but CAFE will force GM to keep and update and upgrade the technology. You may recall that back in the 80's we had great MPG cars that went away. Well now with CAFE they will stay,= air cleaner, =less wars, =less exxon,=less saudies, = less bin ladens.

Damn that CAFE.

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"but CAFE will force GM to keep and update and upgrade the technology."

This statement alone is laughable at best. Try to apply that logic to ANY industry.

Here we go:

"but government regulations will force ___ to keep and update and upgrade the technology."

Intel? nope. Ford, circa 1910? nope. GE? nope. CocaCola/Pepsi? nope. You can go on all day and not find one instance where government interference resulted in technological breakthroughs. To even present the argument shows that you are not worth the time it took me to respond.

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TJ wrote: "but government regulations will force ___ to keep and update and upgrade the technology."

Off the top of my head, what about vehicle safety in general? Would anyone here want to buy a new vehicle for use as a daily driver, if the vehicle did not have airbags and/or performed poorly in crash testing?

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Pwned.

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TJ is right.

Rocket's comment unwittingly proves TJ's point. "Would anyone here want to buy a new vehicle for use as a daily driver, if the vehicle did not have airbags and/or performed poorly in crash testing?"

It is a valid comment about consumers, which has no government requirement. That should be private manufacturer's ADVERTIZING campaign, not government mandate. And people would demand the safety just the same, without the government inefficiency and cost involved.

Government regulations have just gummed up the works. Airbags, seatbelts, crush zones, and everything else were invented in the automotive industries, and would have caught on in the market anyway. Government just stuck it's nose in and made it cost a bunch of money to do so.

Government regulation expenses have stagnated development of NEW safety designs, (Honda is developing a new airbag in Japan, not the big 3 here in the US. The US companies just tow the line at the regulation limit, they no longer innovate to compete. THAT is the whole problem with every part of the industry.)

They have made crash test certification so expensive that it is cutting back on model diversification.

They have pumped up the weight of cars to the point where they NEED big engines, and small engines struggle to move big cars.

For everything the Government has done, the idea wasn't theirs, and the effects were not as positive as if the market had been allowed to adopt things by customer demand, rather than by government fiat.

Government is not a beneficial overlord, they are a necessary cost that has grown WAY out of control.

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@ Rocket
Don't let the facts get in the way:

-John W. Hetrick of Newport, Pennsylvania, USA invented the airbag in 1952, and patented his device in 1953.

-Airbags for passenger cars were introduced in the United States in the mid-1970s

-The development of airbags coincided with an international interest in automobile safety legislation. Some safety experts cautioned against mandating a particular technical solution, rather than a general occupancy safety standard, which could rapidly date out and might not be a cost-effective approach.

-On 11 July 1984, the U.S. government required cars being produced after 1 April 1989 to have driver's side airbags or automatic seat belts (the automatic seat belt was a technology, now discarded, that "forced" motorists to wear seatbelts). Airbag introduction was stimulated by the U.S. DOT.[8] However, airbags were not mandatory on light trucks until 1995.[citation needed]

-In 1998 dual front airbags were mandated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)



Government legislation mandating airbags didn't come until 32 years AFTER invention, and at least 12-14 years after initial automotive applications, with a five year cushion before the mandate went into effect, meaning 37 years since invention.

Try again. All government intervention has done is raise costs across the board for all manufacturers and consumers. Really, as a consumer, would you prefer a Chevy Malibu 5 star rated, or a Brilliance BS6 for 1/2 the cost? The market will answer that question, not excessive regulation.

C'mon, is that the best argument anyone has? Airbags? That, too, is laughable.

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Hell yes I want a car with no airbags or other heavy safety features. Bring back the days of the light weight cars like the Fox body LX notch with roll up windows and manual locks. Am I the only person that sees the idiocy in trying to make 4klb+ CARS fuel efficient? Damn that kind of weight should only be for trucks and now 2dr passenger cars weigh that. Make them lighter so they have less inertia and you don't have to make them as strong. Oh how much fun a 4100lb Challenger must be. God forbid someone get hurt in a car in any way because they'll sue the car company for not having 15 air bags in it to protect them when they barrel roll it down the freeway at 80mph. Keep the goverment out of this!

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Ohh i love this argument, "If it wasn't for governmental regulation automakers would be spending more money on safety features"-----------------Great, let's remove all pollution laws, let's allow factories to dump chemicals into lakes, that will make factories invest into cleaner technology.

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@TJ: Thanks for copying and pasting the Wikipedia article that I had already read before. Here's something the Wikipedia article didn't mention: Back in the day, when Congress was considering government regulations, the auto industry lobbied hard to avoid putting in airbags, arguing it would cost too much, would not save enough lives to justify the cost, and so on. The industry dragged its feet until pushed by Congress. Fact is, without government regulation, safety technology would have stagnated in mainstream vehicles, and be confined to a small number of high-end luxury cars. Specifically, Wikipedia might be correct to claim airbags were invented a long time before Congress took notice, but I'm old enough to remember airbags were an extreme rarity until Congress pushed for its widespread adoption. You might laugh at safety technology now because you were never in an accident and never needed it, but statistics show everyone of us will likely be involved in at least one accident in our lifetimes. Live long enough, and it will probably happen; then you will be glad the "nanny" government's intervention saved you and your loved ones.

@BoxerFanatic: In my personal opinion, I would trust government crash test results and safety data on vehicles a lot more than the advertising campaigns paid for by the manufacturers themselves. The consumers demand safety, but without government regulation, without government crash testing, what is to prevent a Chinese company from claiming its vehicles are just as safe as, or safer than, all the other vehicles on the road?

@MONTE: There is a common misconception that safety technology weighs a lot. How much do you really expect a few airbags to weigh? Or how about the sensors used in traction control and stability control? Properly heat-treated steel versus low-quality third-world steel? A car designed with careful FEA analysis and crash testing for optimal crumble zones, compared to a car rushed to market without any such considerations? I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

@TJ again: And to digress a little, you asked earlier if government regulation was good for *any* industry. I used vehicle safety because this is Autoblog, after all. But here are other examples I can think of:
• FDA regulation: Without it, our food safety record would be as bad as it is in China. In fact, some would argue our recent outbreaks in E Coli, salmonella, etc., were caused by insufficient government oversight.
• FAA regulation: The recent revelations that Southwest and other airlines flew unsafe planes were blamed on lax government enforcement.
• EPA regulation: Lead paint, asbestos, and DDT. Need I say more?
In each of the above examples, what's needed is more, not less, government regulation. Your argument that government regulation is bad comes up short in many real-world examples.

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I do believe what rocket just did was utterly own everyone.

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Not to mention dents being a thing of the past along with cheaper post-collision repair costs which in turn drives down my insurance premium.

The idea of exterior panels moving to some kind of plastic polymer - one that looks and feels like sheet metal complete with similar gap tolerances - is something I'd love to see in production. Sign me up.

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The Fiero was actually the application a head of it's time...

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Corey, why not go full fledged and talk about early 70's long-snout Vette's and fiberglass applications... or.....(insert almost any non-sheetmetal based vehicle here)

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TJ
Try 1953 Corvette

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