"Like Lemmings to Lex Ave"

In the American automotive scene, marketing guys are calling the shots, and we are doing whatever they tell us. They have every new car buyer thinking that you need at least 200 horsepower to get a Corolla from A to B. and no one is saying "Hold it just a minute, there, Buster!"

While it might be fun and thrilling to go from 0—60 in under 7 seconds, wouldn't we rather just be adequately able to do the interstate merge, or pass trucks on a hill (with say 100hp) and get appreciably better mileage? All the great engineering that presently going into getting lots of power out of little displacement, could instead be getting much more economy out of the same engine size, with 'mosdest' instead of 'monster' power avilable.

The entire industry, in the last ten years, asked, "Wanna supersize it?' and we did not even think about the question. They have us just where they want us.

If we look at the market, we see a reflection of how we went along, voting with our collective purse... but my point is that the voting was uninformed, wholesale, across the American market. We have become uncritical consuming dupes, only pushing for diverse feature offerings in things that are in the passenger compartment or on the outside, but estranged from the workings of the beast that bears us, that cosumes fossil fuels in a heat engine and adds to the greenhouse gas burden under which our biosphere is sinking.

If you are like most in the car market, you now want the mileage, and maybe the pollution reductions, because of the prices at the gas pump. Don't feel bad about your past complicity, but instead start feeling good about your choices going forward. Start by hesitating (instead of caving in) when they offier you 'bigger/faster/more powerful' if you did not actually ask.

Being an educated consumer, rather than an emotion-based buyer, is being responsible to yourself and to the environment.