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?

Moller has a whole page dedicated to legislation, but I was not able to find anything related to security and safety. They have a safety link, but it does not go anywhere. Maybe they see the two as similar or even identical.

Their SkyCar plans are a realization of every science-fiction novel or science magazine forecast — personal passenger vehicles that fly. The upsides (pun not intended), especially when you consider the cost and harm of pavement, should be obvious. The downsides….

1. Rules of the road
2. Impact including noise, consumption and emission
3. Insurance and Liability (could you blame a downdraft for an accident? who picks up the cost?)
4. Did I mention noise?
5. Measures of safety (is anyone expected to have a level of survivability?)

But it sure looks cool, and I look forward to the end of the pavement era. Asphalt was a horrible idea, as proven by the ongoing pot-hole and lack-of-timely maintenance culture it created.

As people talk about forcing file sharing users to pay a fair share for network consumption/load, I wonder what ever happened to forcing the largest vehicles to pay a fair share of the space they occupy, the heaviest vehicles to pay a fair share of the pavement repairs, or the most polluting vehicles to pay a fair share of the controls to offset their output.

The Courage Campaign has posted an interesting chart of productive time wasted due to traffic congestion in Los Angeles:

They contend that for every year of work a person does in the office, three weeks worth of time is wasted in a car.

Availability also must be a worry, especially in cases of regional disasters, as congestion can only get worse when everyone has to act at the same time (in response) rather than with the intent to keep their own schedule.