Deroy Murdock‘s latest column explores the lethal unintended consequences of government efforts to mandate better gas mileage:
Team Obama is fueling these anticipated price hikes by boosting CAFE standards from 35.5 miles per gallon in 2016 to 54.5 MPG by 2025.
As they have for 37 years, car companies will follow these new rules by making cars thinner and lighter. Smaller, slighter vehicles get better mileage. But that hardly matters when a car smacks into a sycamore or slams head-on into another vehicle. That’s when most drivers would trade lower MPG for protective layers of thick steel.
The laws of physics are stubbornly impervious to Obama’s green slogans, no matter how abrasively he shouts them. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety concluded in 2007 that “None of the 15 vehicles with the lowest driver death rates is a small model. In contrast, 11 of the 16 vehicles with the highest death rates are mini or small models.”