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39.2 MPG for europe?!

6K views 36 replies 17 participants last post by  Rev.Hammer 
#1 ·
I know there is different emissions standards, but are euro cars usually that much more efficient then their American counterparts? What could be that makes it so? Tune? different cat?

Focus ST to start from £22k - BBC Top Gear
also the base in europe gets recaros with no leather? - I want that!
 
#19 ·
We have very good roads in CNY. NY State Throughway, 481, 690, 81. All in good repair.

Winters are brutal on our city streets.


On the go - Via TapTalk
 
#27 ·
That, lug, has something to do with the fact that you or I driving a car has a series of external costs associated with it. Road costs, air pollution, etc. There are a lot of ways to try to make people pay the actual costs associated with driving that car, but none of them are or ever will be popular. A gas tax has the benefit of being the easiest yet tried to implement, measure, and to collect the revenue.

Ideally, we'd all pay as we go, but that's hard when it comes to things like road repair or construction. Toll roads might work, but they're inefficient (you have to keep stopping to pay, at least for the moment).

And for the record, the US government isn't "making money" off of gas taxes. As vehicles become more fuel efficient, the gas tax revenue has declined as a percentage of necessary revenue to maintain our roads. Gas taxes are inadequate. They either need to go up or we need to tax something else to cover the costs.

And before I hear one damned word against those options, let me be perfectly clear. It costs a lot of money to build and maintain roads. It is a statement of fact that our current system isn't bringing in enough money. If you want roads, you have to pay for 'em. So do I.
 
#28 · (Edited)
Not arguing about taxation for road work, just pointing out the ludicrisy of the government getting "up in arms" and calling for hearings all the time over the gas companies making their "obscene" profits of about 7% whilst they actually rake in more per gallon than the company that actually provides the product, takes the risk, and does all the work. :D
 
#33 ·
You know it's not a binary "What we have now or $8 a gallon". We could go from a per gallon excise tax $0.184 to a sales tax of $0.184 and it wouldn't be more than what we pay on price spikes when everyone still buys gas anyway, and people still drive 15mpg SUVs for people who neither tow nor offroad. That same excise tax of $0.184 has been unchanged since 1996. And we use less gas per vehicle since then, so the inflation adjusted per vehicle tax receipts have dropped significantly. In other words, we're saving on taxes by a large margin, with less money available for maintenance and construction available in absolute terms, per vehicle, and inflation has eaten away the value of that existing tax base.

Per vehicle taxes payed is important, because the cost of maintaining infrastructure and building new infrastructure is based on vehicles per lane miles.

I tell you whut, $8 a gallon gas really discourages people from saying stuff like "I don't care about fuel economy" :)

I'm just glad I'm buying a car that gets decent fuel economy (almost double my current car) so if they do put a bigger tax on gas, I can afford it :)

Anyway, you get what you pay for. We're a nation of cheapskates, and I'm not immune to it myself. But this why we can't have nice things.
 
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