Detroit Claims Getting Better Gas Mileage Will Cost You and Them
VELSHI: Welcome back. Christine is on vacation. Our friend Pat Kiernan is sitting in. Anybody that knows him knows he's the gadget guy.</s>KIERNAN: I don't know about, but I wired this thing up last night because I know we were talking about compact fluorescent light bulbs, this is not a compact fluorescent but this is the kind of light fixture that they love to install in everybody's houses now.</s>VELSHI: They are smaller, they fit into the --</s>KIERNAN: You can recess them. You can have a whole strip of them. I was in the Home Depot a couple of days ago and I saw now that they have the MR-16 bulb, which is the little bulb in a compact fluorescent. They managed to shrink a fluorescent light bulb down. Here it is, here is what it looks like. You can see the little fluorescent tubes that are winding through there. The thing about that now is that you can, in the space that you thought you could only have one of those energy pig incandescent bulbs, you can put one these in and you can make the planet a greener place.</s>VELSHI: All right. So your houses, your apartment will be greener. When Christine is here she often reminds me that I can reduce my carbon footprint by unplugging the VCR when I leave the house.</s>KIERNAN: Hold. You still drive that truck?</s>VELSHI: And the problem remains that I drive the truck and the truck gets 17 miles to a gallon. I suspect that's a problem that I share in common with many Americans.</s>KIERNAN: Because you did that carbon footprint thing.</s>VELSHI: I measured my carbon footprint and for all of the bulbs and VCRs and all that, the problem is my truck. Some of that is my problem. Some of that is with the folks who make cars. There's a bill in the Senate right now that will increase fuel economy standards for the first time in 20 years. It's not a big increase in fuel economy but Detroit says it will break the industry or whatever part of the Detroit auto industry isn't already broken. Detroit is pushing for a watered-down version it and our resident myth buster Jennifer Westhoven joins us now to clear the air as it were about that.</s>JENNIFER WESTHOVEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well we really want to look at some of the claims here that Detroit, they haven't been explicitly saying this number but there was a big "Forbes" article where they talked to the automakers. And it sounds like what they were hearing was that it would cost $8600.00 more for you to get the same American car with this better mileage. So their argument was Americans are ever going to pay $8600. When we talked about this on "Headline News," almost all the e-mail was, I'm not paying $8600, that's too much.</s>KIERNAN: You didn't ever believe when they started with the hybrids, the first time we went for a drive in a hybrid was five years ago. Now they're everywhere. People are catching on to it.</s>WESTHOVEN: Hondas and Toyotas that are comparable don't cost $8600 more.</s>VELSHI: They don't cost $8600 more. What's the problem?</s>WESTHOVEN: Exactly, what's the problem? That's something coming up. While Detroit has been fighting tooth and nail they've also been putting up these ads, I don't know if you have seen them, that are basically, they are kind of scare tactic. The way that I am going to phrase it is they basically say bye-bye Expedition, hello Yugo, we're all going to be driving tiny European cars if this passes.</s>VELSHI: We heard this argument from the American automobile for a long time that the reason they make all these big cars is because Americans like to drive them.</s>KIERNAN: Yeah, that and the difference between the truck category and the car category. They can actually play some games with the fuel standards.</s>WESTHOVEN: That's been the big thing. In the meantime while they've been playing games with the fuel standards, Americans are increasingly, right, buying Asian made cars and they are getting better mileage over there. A lot of Senators are arguing, look enough is enough; all of this stonewalling is essentially crippling Detroit. As long as we've been listening to you and leaving the mileage standards alone, they've actually slipped and gone down in some of the years that we've watched. And Detroit has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs.</s>KIERNAN: These targets they're talking about are 15 years out before they get to the final goals.</s>VELSHI: Their average is, it's not like they need every car to get 40 miles to a gallon or something. It's the whole average of all of the cars that you build has to slightly move up. So if you're Toyota and your Honda and you have these hybrid cars, you're ahead the game.</s>WESTHOVEN: In this new amendment they may get more time. They're looking for those exemptions for the pickups and the SUVs. Maybe they'll get them, but it's very interesting to watch them play this game to try because these SUVs, they do eat up so much gas mileage. The Senators are saying, look we've got to worry about pollution, too and our dependence on oil. It is not just what people --</s>KIERNAN: We have to be accountable ourselves. There's that Census Bureau survey that came out, 9 out of 10 workers commuted to work by car in America, 77 percent are driving alone. The public transit average for community work in America 4%. That's not good use of fuel.</s>WESTHOVEN: It's not.</s>VELSHI: Getting out of my truck will do, again as I say, more than the compact fluorescent. If we can learn some better habits out of this thing.</s>WESTHOVEN: But they've got to make public transport better in many cities.</s>KIERNAN: We have to stop building our cities that everybody is ten miles from public transit.</s>VELSHI: Jennifer, good to see you. Thank you so much for that. We're going to take a break. When we come back we'll tell you why Wall Street has been reaching for the Dramamine this week.