Car homogenization has become something of an Internet meme. It turns out that all new cars more or less look alike. I had begun to notice this over the years and I thought I was just imagining things. But people playing with Photoshop have found that you can mix and match car grills and make a BMW look just like a Kia and a Hyundai look just like a Honda. It’s all one car.
Truly, this cries out for explanation. So I was happy to see a video made by CNET that gives five reasons: mandates for big fronts to protect pedestrians, mandates that require low tops for fuel economy, a big rear to balance out the big fronts, tiny windows resulting from safety regulations that end up actually making the car less safe, and high belt lines due to the other regs. In other words, single-minded concern for testable “safety” and the environment has wrecked the entire car aesthetic.
And that’s only the beginning. Car and Driver puts this as plainly as can be: “In our hyperregulated modern world, the government dictates nearly every aspect of car design, from the size and color of the exterior lighting elements to how sharp the creases stamped into sheetmetal can be.”
You are welcome to read an engineer’s account of what it is like to design an American car. Nothing you think, much less dream, really matters. The regulations drive the whole process. He explains that the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards with hundreds of regulations – really a massive central plan – dictate every detail and have utterly ruined the look and feel of American cars.
There is no way out, so long as the regulatory state is in charge.
Gee, someone should write a book about this sort of thing.
Yes, the bureaucrats are pretending that it’s a required part of returning to the moon when, as Bob Zubrin has pointed out it’s a toll booth at best, and a likely roadblock, and there has been no public debate about its necessity.
It only looks ambitious in comparison to previous plans, not to serious plans. At best, it’s Apollo on steroids. And as he notes, there is no budget, either stated or actual.
They failed the acronym check on that one…
— Jonathan A. Goff (@rocketrepreneur) May 20, 2019
Steve Wolfe has been working on putting this together, in conjunction with the ISDC in a couple weeks. I’ll be doing a presentation there on space property rights for settlers.
A few months ago, I asked him to be on my advisory board for my new company. He thanked me for the offer, but told me he had to decline because there was a potential conflict of interest. But today he announced that he is going to be heading up a much more important advisory council. I think it’s a great choice.
This has been an unusually wet winter, even in southern California. We got quite a bit of rain here early Sunday morning, with more showers expected in the next couple days and this weekend (Memorial Day!). The new growth, including in the burn areas up the coast north of Malibue, is tremendous. It’s still green, and will be into June or July, but it’s going to make a lot of fuel when the rains stop in late summer and fall. If every winter was like this one, we would no longer be living in a desert. That’s the kind of climate change I could definitely get behind. But we’d still be stuck with our crazy voters and government.
It was feckless of the Bush administration to allow them to wage war on us in Iraq with no consequences. And of course, the Obama administration viewed them as allies.