Small Is Practical
Earlier this year, I wrote about how US consumers are responding to high gas prices by moving away from light trucks & SUVs towards smaller cars. The trend continued in April:
Of equal concern to automakers, buyers defected from high-margin trucks and SUVs to cheaper and more fuel-efficient cars more rapidly than expected due to high gasoline prices.Cars accounted for 53 percent of sales in April with light trucks near 47 percent, a nearly complete reversal of the share of the categories a year earlier, according to Autodata.
The market shift toward cars has favored Japanese automakers with more established small car offerings.
By contrast, the trend has pummeled the truck-heavy lineups of Detroit-based automakers with the average price of regular unleaded gasoline punching above $3.62 per gallon on Thursday, a record high, according to AAA.
The three Detroit-based automakers had just a 48 percent share of the world's largest vehicle market in April, down 5 percentage points from a year earlier.
Let's hear it for the oft-maligned US consumer. Common sense decisions are a possibility in this country, if given the right incentives.
These news reports make it clear to me that the problem in this country is not with the end user. The problem is with the program. Americans would eat alternative energy up if given the (sensible) opportunity. This was covered in detail in the movie Who Killed the Electric Car?, which is a stunning documentary about how environmentally-conscious Californians wanted to buy electric cars, but weren't able to do so because of corporate interests & weak government.
How do we fix or change the program is the question. I'm not really sure how that gets done sans crisis or some major problem or negative event. The corporate interests control the government & they have zero incentive to cede control. Control will have to be taken ... which implies organization & inspiration.
As this political season is showing, the people are nowhere near as empowered as they need to be to make change happen. People just don't care enough to get involved at the level required to make real changes happen.
There's a glimmer of hope out there in some of these news stories ... but the light is very faint. I still hold that it will take pain, crisis, bad shit to get people moving in the right direction.
