
I drive roughly 140 kilometres a day to work round-trip. I also have a car that’s entering 15 years of service. Needless to say it isn’t great on the fuel efficiency, which means I’m forced to go to the gas station frequently, sometimes on concurrent days. I don’t enjoy spending hundreds on gasoline every month, but it’s a reality which I’ve come to accept.
While I’m driving these 140 kilometres every day I have a great deal of time to listen to the radio. Most of the time it’s music, but inbetween songs there are the ads. I tune most of these out, but one in particular got my attention the other day. It went something like this: If you’re in the market for a luxury hybrid SUV at z price that’s more than reasonable, we’ve got vehicles starting from as low as $38,000.
A luxury hybrid SUV. What the hell does that even mean? What’s the point of having a hybrid SUV? So you can be at once selfish and selfless? So your car can be one those sight-obstructing eyesores on the highway, but not at the expense of mother nature? So you can sit on heated leather seats while you save the planet?
After all the political gobbledegook about global warming and the crying and shrieking about excess and waste and the need for better fuel efficiency and a change of our lifestyles from consumption to sustainability, the best they can come up with is a carbon tax on my fuel purchases and a hybrid no working man can afford. Thanks, guys. Nice work. Why don’t you offer home energy retrofits for $110,000 to save 40 cents a week on electricity while you’re at it. Oh, you already are? Carry on then.
After all the blustering and blubbering from the environmental movement, where is the working man’s affordable hybrid? The bare bones, stripped down, basic, no-frills version I can afford so I, too, can feel smug about my contribution to the planet’s well-being? Does it start at the ultra-low price of half my annual salary?
The thing is that I think we all know the charade is over. Nobody cares about energy efficiency beyond how it relates to the bottom dollar. Not unless you can afford to care about it. But it isn’t as though there’s some kind of magic fuel source or alternative mode of transportation sitting there, waiting for schleps like me to take advantage. No, we’re basically being incentivized against using gasoline without a viable alternative. I’m not going to bicycle 140 kilometres to work, and I’m certainly not going to be able to afford that more than reasonable luxury hybrid SUV. Which means I’ll continue to fork over hundreds in gasoline expenses every month, of which the government gets their public transportation and carbon taxes.
People don’t want your bare bones, stripped down, basic economy car hybrid anyway. That much is clear by the return of the market demand for F150s and SUVs again. So, without a free market demand for small cars equipped with hybrid technology, the car companies are smearing lipstick on their oversized SUVs and calling them environmentally friendly. Despite all the hemming and hawing about needing to change people’s habits by pushing them to buy more fuel efficient cars, all that’s really been done is some minor tweaking and catering to the mainstream.
If the governments of the day were really serious about radically changing the automotive industry overnight, they’d incentivize hybrids to the working class by offering subsidies on the economy models. But we all know how that turned out south of the border. It didn’t, because there wasn’t any demand for it. Government interference in the market resulted in a push for people to buy something nobody wanted to buy. So instead you wound up with dealers selling electric powered golf carts under the subsidization program and getting away with it.
Look, I don’t care if I can’t afford a hybrid, and I’ll even stop whining about the commercials. Just so long as we drop all the pretenses about wanting to save the environment and scrap the carbon tax. Scrap these bogus and half-hearted efforts to make the appearance of caring, and just make gasoline as affordable as possible for people like me who wince when we pull into a gas station.
If and when a cheaper, alternative fuel source and car comes along for the masses, then you can start taxing gasoline into oblivion.







