I'm all for better highways...

Javelin wrote: What's next, government regulated and standardized lawn mower controls?

You mean like the deadman switch/cable on the handle that you hold down with a ziptie/rope?

1988RedT2 wrote: They need to leave the bloody roads alone. If I encounter yet another poorly marked impromptu road project that forces me to make a detour and adds painful minutes to my travels, I'll scream.

Every road in Delaware that handles more than 10 cars an hour is currently under construction. EVERY ONE. I'm running out of reasonable routes home. It's a 10-mile drive and it's gone from 25 to 40 minutes, simply because Delaware seems to think it's a better idea to have 500 road projects going on simultaneously for 4 years, than it would be to work twice as hard on half of them for 2 years, then move on to do the other half.

alfadriver wrote: Explain why it's bad that someone would come up with guidelines for pedal placement to reduce the risk of applying the wrong pedal? How it's insulting that if a manufacturer uses push button start that there's a requirement that the driver is able to turn the car off in an emergency situation? How eithier makes the car heavier, more complex, or so expensive? Fun to be anti government, I guess. But I don't get why this would be that bad.

I have to believe that federal regs in automotive are nearly as onerous as those in defense contracting. "One at a time" no, probably not much of an expense.

Over the course of years, there are a tremendous amount of regulations. And all of your estimators, contracts people, and engineering staff spend a large number of hours (i.e. dollars) making sure the requirements are met.

Your production line now has more tooling, more parts to install, requiring additional labor, etc.

I think it was FastEddie who got it right: Let the consumer decide.

If a car is crappy, word gets out quickly, and the manufacturers will have no incentive to build it.

In the land of the free, why do we NOT have the right to buy what is the best performing, least costly product that suits our particular economic or other needs?

Now let's talk about the ever more stringent REGULATED corporate mileage figures, and how it is they will be met with 3000lb COMPACT cars (whose requirements are REGULATED, thus they're 3000lbs)?

Those regulations have added tremendous cost to what were supposed to be small economical cars (both to purchase and operate). I have a hard time not believing that today's $15K cars would be in the $8-$10K range without all the regulated crap that goes in to them. How many more manufacturing jobs would that create?

As far as reducing the risk of applying the wrong pedal: Really? Is the public THAT dumb? Sure, as we've seen from Audi and Toyota, there are some. How many? Even if it were tens of thousands (which it wasn't), in a land of tens of millions of cars and drivers, it's an infinitesimally small number.

And, the economic incentive still applies for pedal placement. Again, if word gets out that a manufacturer's product has crappy pedal placement, said manufacturer will change it.

There is absolutely a NEED for SOME regulation. This is not it.

Sorry for the rant....

PHeller wrote: I still don't understand why we don't have "city car" regulations. I mean, we've got all kinds of regulations keeping scooters off highways, pedestrians off highways, helmets required in one state but not another, 3-wheel vehicles classified as motorcycles or limited to off-highway only. Like mentioned above, I want a small, lightweight, 55mph max car that gets 60mpg.

Ha! You expect logic and government to go together.

Instead of wasting time/money on telling automakers where to place pedals wouldn't it make far more sense to spend at some of that money on teaching people HOW to use the damn pedals they have?. Once you see what training new drivers go thru to get a license in finland/sweden etc you'll know just how ridiculously undertrained north americans are to be let loose on the roads.