Last week, I had the opportunity to testify before the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. They're proposing new fuel economy standards (also known as "CAFE" standards)--standards that would essentially destroy whatever remains of the family car.
My first car was a station wagon. Yes, similar to Clark Griswold's "Family Truckster" from the Vacation movies. No, it didn't have wood paneling or come in "Metallic Pea", but it was a land yacht. And I loved it because I could carry all my friends.
Did you ever wonder why the station wagon largely disappeared from the American marketplace? CAFE standards. While the earliest iterations of CAFE standards were enacted to deal with America's gas crisis of the 1970s, later iterations were centered on nebulous environmental reasons. Automakers, faced with a choice of giving up on popular station wagons or being penalized by the federal government, chose to phase them out in favor of minivans and so-called "crossover" SUVs (which can be categorized as trucks).
Honestly, I'm one of those guys that loved my minivans, too. We had two of them over the years, and our second minivan lasted just under ten years and just over 300,000 miles before I had to give it up. As Dan Ackroyd's character in "Sneakers" put it, I always wanted a cool car that I could fit into. In his case, it was a Winnebago. In my case, it was a minivan.
But the left hates minivans. They hate station wagons. I mean, they hate cars, generally, and want everyone on public transportation (everyone else, that is. They love their cars and will keep their cars). If people want control over where and how they go from point A to point B, then they can take bikes--regardless of the climate, the weather, whether they need to transport kids, etc.
Thus these new CAFE standards--which go hand-in-hand with the Biden Administration's electric vehicle mandates. They will kill the family car (and the freedom that goes along with it). This, despite the fact that EVs lose money, their batteries are prohibitively expensive and require slave labor and massive environmental destruction to create. Despite the fact that last year, nearly 80% of new vehicle purchases were either a truck or SUV.
Last week was all about truth telling (please check out my testimony on the Center for Regulatory Freedom's page here at CPAC). In a few months, we're going to ask you to do the same: tell the truth to the Biden Administration that you will not accept their destruction of the family car.
