Thanks for the clarification
But I’m not sure it would be fair to prohibit those box trucks from driving on the freeway
If they can at least go the minimum freeway speed limit, perhaps they should drive in the far right lane, where the slowpokes are supposed to be
Those little trucks are always in the 2 right lanes on the 4 lane highway. Actually, the slowest traffic tends to be in middle-right lane on I-95. There’s an interchange every couple miles and they don’t want tocontendwith merging traffic. The rightmost lane turns out to be a passing lane.
When the gov’t mandates a safety feature, like electronic stability control – that’s a mandate for all new cars, right? — it does have an important advantage of allowing the manufacturer’s to take advantage of the economic principle of “economy of scale”. Since all of the manufacturer’s cars have to have the feature, the feature can be added for less $$ per car than if only a few of the cars they made had it.
There’s a sale on Toyota Corolla in the newspaper. A brand new “LE” can be had for $15,300. A 2013 Corolla has all these safety features, but when adjusted for inflation a new Corolla probably costs less than a 1993 version. Plus you get AC included at no add’l charge, which you didn’t in 1993.
It’s like those $10 electronic calculators you can buy at Target. There may be close to a million dollars up front cost to design and manufacture, but if you can sell a million of them for $10 each, and make them for $8 each, you can still turn a handy profit.
Still, I think there is a sizeable new-car market in America for a econo-box car with good mpg numbers that would have fewer of these mandated safety features, presumably be more reliable and cost less to repair, and in return would sell for $10K or less. It’s not possible to prove it though, as no such new car exists for sale in America.