MSN Autos has posted some notable points about regulations in America that are actually preventing car manufacturers from selling cleaner burning vehicles to people living in areas of the country who need them.
Not only can’t you buy one, but the government says it’s currently illegal for automakers to sell these green cars outside of the special states. Under terms of the Clean Air Act—in the kind of delicious irony only our government can pull off—anyone (dealer, consumer, automaker) involved in an out-of-bounds PZEV sale could be subject to civil fines of up to $27,500. Volvo sent its dealers a memo alerting them to this fact, noting that its greenest S40 and V50 models were only for the special states.
If this is anything like the mind-bending diesel regulations that effectively banned VW passenger cars from being sold in California, then you just have to find a loophole — select one to buy, make sure it starts with more than 7,500 miles, and register it as a used vehicle.
In 2004 the VW dealer in Santa Cruz told me if I tried to bring a TDI into California the State Patrol might issue me a ticket or confiscate my car. The dealer was lying to promote the sale of vehicles they had in their lot, not sell me something I wanted, and they made it abundantly clear to me that they only cared about one thing — money.
MSN brings this up, but only from the consumer side of things.
Another issue: The PZEV cars don’t get any better mileage than conventional versions. Would most self-interested Americans even pay a lousy 100 bucks for cleaner air that doesn’t put fuel savings back in their pocket? “With hybrids, the selling point is fuel economy, so there’s a dollar amount on that,” said William Walton, Honda’s product planning chief for U.S. cars. “We want to give people the cleanest vehicles we can produce, but how much are people willing to pay for clean air?”
These are interesting questions that I ask myself everyday while managing security for a global enterprise. Do consumers understand the value of clean air? How do we explain to an executive that they want a safe and secure network even if it is not putting savings directly back in their pocket?
Worms are the pandora-like topic to make network security discussions seem more grounded. Are there similar environmental examples for high-emission vehicles? A poster-child for death by exhaust from Hummers?