Ban All Cars Getting Less Than 35 MPG?

More efficient cars should mean less pollution. But is a ban such as this a good idea - setting an arbitrary limit for motor car fuel efficiency?

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/02/ban-all-cars-wi.html

On the surface it might seem so. It certainly grabs the headlines and ruffles the feathers of motorcar manufacturers (some more than others). The rationale it forces manufacturers to invest more effort developing efficient car and engine designs than they would do otherwise.

However things like this never tend to be as straightforward as the headlines suggest. One problem with using a stick to beat the auto industry is it fails to offer an incentive to exceed the target, merely to meet it. For example it might be that making a car a little bit lighter is sufficient to do enough to not be penalised. Design changes such as this are unlikely to deliver radical improvements to fundamental car and engine design to produce vehicles that significantly reduce emissions. It’s rather like setting a minimum wage which invites employers to offer little more than the minimum. Driving styles also have a lot to do with fuel efficiency, and this limit will do nothing to encourage better habits. Making cars cheaper to run also makes public transport less appealing. Public transport is (in the UK) already subsidised, and in some cases (such as parts of the railway network) the system needs radical overhaul to expand its passenger carrying capacity. It's hard enough as it is encouraging people out of their cars and onto public transport (if it is available to them), the cost saving often hardly justifies the extra inconvenience. The effects of policy decisions are difficult to predict, and control. And a gain in one area is no good if it turns into a loss in another.

London is one step ahead of many other large cities because they now have an infrastructure that gives them a means to govern the numbers of cars on the roads by virtue of their congestion charging scheme. Car registration plates are scanned by cameras and a levy is exacted on cars within the zone. If too many cars are deemed to be in the zone the charge can be increased to moderate the traffic. One drawback of this type of scheme is its complexity and expense. Many people also resent it for a variety of reasons. For example rather than remove congestion it can just displace the traffic, easing congestion in one area but increasing it elsewhere on the road network such as on the outskirts of the zone. Some also perceive it as simply adding to the tax burden when many are faced with few choices other than the car.

Charging for road usage will certainly help reduce congestion and pollution. In so many other walks of life charging is used effectively to limit demand. For example phone networks, house prices, and so on. Unless it can be applied to all people equally however it is rather limited in value. In this regard. There is one technology that can solve this problem and that is to equip vehicles so they can be tracked by satellite. It can offer universal coverage, and a more relaible method of identifying vehicles. In this respect it cannot come soon enough. This technology raises a whole raft of new issues however. For example the rights to privacy versus the value information to help solve crimes, and the use of such a scheme to regulate and enforce traffic speed restrictions.

If there was simple solution to congestion and pollution it would have been found by now. Having said this, inaction is not a way forward. This ban will help, but it should be seen for what it is not. Magic bullet it most certainly isn't. And many view it as a threat to European jobs, which politically is a hard-sell. It may help if such schemes had a positive rather than a negative slant. For example whereby manufacturers or car owners were rewarded for the creation / selection of designs proportional to the extent by which a particular threshold was exceeded - rather than simply meeting an arbitrary and not much more. Schemes such as these rarely however generate the high profile headlines that the ex-CEO was looking for. And on top of this, without a universal charging scheme for road use, they are liable to increase car usage which is self-defeating.

Perhaps the most effective and positive way to drive efficiency is to have the consumer demand this in the first place, something that higher fuel prices are already starting to do. It is somewhat of a bad reflection on us as a race that we cannot take this initiative on its own merit, and we instead rely on a very base motive - which is the fact that we've gorged ourselves so much on this black stuff we're running out of it.

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