Today’s cars are both fuel efficient and powerful. Just 30 years ago, the world’s most powerful cars were pigs because of all the pollution abatement equipment they had to carry. Today, the pollution requirements are more stringent, but cars can be incredibly powerful. The new GT500 Mustang is currently the most powerful V8 available at 662 HP and 631 #-ft of torque. That’s amazing. We’ve come a long way, and it seems to me to be a great time for automobiles. What do you think?
15 to 23 mpg is more than I would have expected. I imagine that varies and if you can spend 50k+ on a car a few burnouts would be not of concern for tire life.
And you don’t have to spend the big money to get the good technology, the V6 Mustang has 300 hp these days, much better than any Mustang you could get in years gone by, with great mpgs - 19/31.
All that horsepower and clean too. Seems the big 3 and likely all the other auto makers fought pollution standards and foretold that such standards would destroy the automobile. Hum.
Excuses,excuses-its only one of the few instances were government meddling has actually benefited the populace in general.Except for the price increases these changes have actually helped the buyer somewhat,Madison ave responded quicker then the market to to convince us that the old ways were better-Kevin P.S -Ive lost my ability to start a discussion,what gives? cant find the post discussion area on my site any where.
kevin, you have to call on the web lackeys to get help.
@cdaquila, Kevin has a problem. Carolyn is an excellent czarina and will answer promptly.
I’m also in favor of pollution abatement. Even the mainland Chinese are getting on the band wagon. I remember when the steel mill in my Mom’s home town had no pollution abatement equipment. No matter what color our car was when we arrived, it was red when we left 2 days later. A little more than a decade later, I worked at a different plant for the same company and had a business trip to Mom’s home town. The area was much cleaner than before; the quality of life was much better IMO.
When driving into Los Angeles in 1969 visibility was less than 1/2 mile. I drove there last summer and it was as clear as Flagstaff. But back in 1969 the Big 3 and their legislators were warning of the doom that would result if EPA regulations were to be dumped on them. Corporations have no concern for anything except their own prosperity. Hooray for the EPA.
Dare one make the claim that the air coming out of a modern vehicle just might, in some areas, be cleaner than the air going into the engine?
I can remember then the farmers were not allowed to use the land for a certain distance from the road due to the lead getting into the food chain.
Today they can still measure the lead pollution by the highways, but it is far less.
Technology has helped.
There is still a buffer for farm land. But now, it is to reduce runoff of fertilizers and pesticides. Another good deal.
Thanks JT-Kevin
Yes, I do like to breathe, to see a horizon through the smog, and call myself a “pragmatic environmentalist”…so yes, hats off to the EPA for their part.
The problem now is that…much like a police force without any “real crime” to fight, the green police are creating hassles chasing diminishing returns.
Case in point: anyone have anything good to say about vent-free gas cans? Whatever trivial level of VOC pollution they prevent surely is undone by the fuel spillage resulting in actually attempting to use them. How about the money spent on OBDII evap codes relative to the vapor leakage…or lack thereof…associated?
I like to imagine that the “VOC push” is spearheaded by a humorless apparatchik who (ironically) wears offensive amounts of perfume/Cologne 
Imagine how much power we’d have today without the need for emissions standards on cars.
#devilsadvocate
Did you ever notice that the better ICE engines become, the closer and closer they get to performing like electric motors ? In reality, there has never been a conflict between pollution standards and performance; just an unwillingness to look beyond next week’s bottom line…Clean air (and water) goes hand in hand with economic growth, jobs and great cars. Just need a little foresight to see it.
I have a smoke detector in my garage. I can start my cars in the garage, with the garage door open of course, and the smoke detector won’t go off even if the wind is blowing into the garage. However, I can start my single cylinder 4 stroke push lawnmower outside the garage and if the wind is blowing the exhaust into the garage, the smoke detector will go off. I’m certain that cars before the mid 1970s had exhaust emissions that were worse than the lawnmower, so we have come a long way.
I think it simply points out that the more completely and effectively we’re able to burn the gasoline is the more performance we’ll get per gallon and the fewer emissions we produce. Cleaner burning and more power per engine litre do, in fact, go hand-in-hand.
I also think the EPA truely has served us well. But they no longer are. I visited LA in '71 and it was not a pretty picture. The air in urban areas was horrible, and many of our waterways ran brown. I also believe that ib order to remain in existance and broaden their powers, the EPA like all regulatory agencies has gone well beyiond benefitting us and into being a detriment. When we can’t build a needed (for safety) new highway, or we have to add millions of dollars in cost to avoid tha possibility of displacing a snail darter or an eagle’s nest, or we can’t buy lightbulbs that can’t be disposed of without hazmat protocols or toilets that flush with one pull, they’re then hurting us rather than serving us.
And environmentalism has become an industry of itself. Yet the same people that are exploiting it are major contributors to the environmental damage as they go about exploiting it. When Al Gore goes to speak on the issue, his cavalcades of Escalades and his private plane do far, far more to exascerbate the problem than he does good in speaking. I’d bet that his “grounds crew” puts more pollutants in the air every day keeping his estate looking pretty than i’ll put in the air with my car over the course of the rest of my life, even if I live to be 100.
I must agree that the environmentalist activists are often running amok and the EPA seems too easily influenced by the extreme tree huggers with little concern for practicality and plain good sense. But American politics is far too dependent on getting and keeping constituencies that are centered on highly emotional issues and common sense be damned. My state, Mississippi, just went through a crusade of sorts by anti-abortionists who demanded that the state pass a “personhood” law. Every politician facing a ballot seemed to be all for the bill. Luckily it failed the popular vote but the far right, self-proclaimed evangelicals won the majority of both houses and now we must deal with several years of the worst of Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson Republicanism.
We get to see the EPA at it’s worst publically which in general is infrequequent. At it’s best at another level that I have seen by supporting state environmental agencies,it has been instrumental in educating a lot of people and protecting same against corporate pollution. As a lake dweller and river traveller I have seen a lot of good come from EPA mandates on out boards which were huge polluters for years and industrial controls which have brought rivers to safer levels. The economy improves more when pollution is held in check. IMO, the biggest problem with the EPA has been it’s too infrequent involvement and not too much. Like a lot of federal agencies, it gets politicized by the administration in office responsible for it’s funding and execution.
Though some look at the EPA with distain when it does become involved, in reality, there are times when it does not become involve enough or too late. Automobiles has long been one of those areas. And I have to disagree that environmentalism is running amuck or some how we are kissing up to too many tree huggers. In reality we are selling our environment away at an alarming rate in the name or profit. The kind of profit that looses jobs, not gains it. Corporate influence in govt. has seem to that.
Corporate pollution has killed thousands over the years and has remained protected by those of us who think environmentalism is misplaced. Corporations stonewall and bribe their way from responsibility and they have obviously played the game well enough to have many think that elected officials, govt. agencies are the bad guys, and corporations who profit on pollution are the good guys. Corporations actually calculate the number of people dying at acceptable levels in the name of profit and how best to absolve themselves from responsibility. But they are the good guys and the encironmentalists and the EPA are the bad guys ?
MJ75 you ever tried to pour gas out of the OHSA cans,they are even worse then the “vent free homeowner cans " Big brother reaches a point of"diminishing returns rather quickly”-Kevin