The Automotive

The Detroit project also claims that customer demand for SUVs was artificially created by clever ad campaigns. It would seem that if Detroit marketers could exerts such a hypnotic hold on their customers, they might have used this power to prevent more than a third of them from defecting to imports over the past 30 years. It’s also peculiar that the Detroit project gives a pass to pickup trucks, which are almost exactly the same size and have identical fuel-consumption ranges as SUVs. Moreover, big pickups are much more plentiful than big SUVS—the Ford F-series and the continue reading…

Most glaring logical lapse is the basic notion that anyone driving an SUV is wasting fuel and thereby funneling money to Middle Eastern terrorists. This conveniently ignores several facts.

First, only 12 percent of our total consumption—one gallon of eight—comes from the Middle East. Moreover, only 45 percent of our crude oil is used to make gasoline. continue reading…