Short-sighted idiots

Do ya think, just maybe, U.S. automakers wish they hadn't been quite so vigorous in their opposition to higher mileage standards nor quite so aggressive in pushing monster trucks?

The F-250 is part of the first generation of mass-market vehicles — along with the Lincoln Navigator, Lexus LX 570 and a few others — to approach the six-figure mark. Now, if you walked into a showroom today and asked to see one of these trucks, the price tag wouldn’t be anywhere near $100,000. It would be much closer to $50,000.

But you don’t buy a vehicle to leave it in your garage. You buy it to drive it. So it makes sense to consider the full costs of ownership, which include insurance, interest, repairs, taxes and, of course, gasoline. If gas remains near $4 a gallon, as many analysts expect, a big vehicle like the F-250 will cost $100,000 for an owner who keeps it for a typical amount of time (five years) and drives it a typical amount (15,000 miles a year). The gas alone would cost about $30,000, up from about $10,000 in the 1990s.

No wonder, then, that Americans are changing their driving habits so quickly. With sales plummeting, General Motors said Tuesday that it would stop making pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles at four of its North American plants.

Similarly, their failure to support Democratic attempts to reform health care in this country is counter-intuitive since health care is their number-one cost. If I were a stock holder, I'd be wondering why the knee-jerk opposition to these things when such reforms would benefit their business in the long run. Weird.