Zoomi Life

The Department of Energy has $25 billion slated for loans as part of the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program.  Aptera is angry because these funds are available only to licensable, FMVSS-compliant vehicles (i.e. cars) and not to 3-wheeled enclosed motorcycles (the Aptera).

Aptera is protesting this, claiming the 3-wheeled route they took was for efficiency, not to bypass safety requirements.  They don’t mention that they’ve kept costs and weight down by not ensuring they meet Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, however. UPDATE: Aptera is indeed engineering their vehicles to meet FMVSS.

I have two thoughts on this subject, so hear me out.  First, the Aptera is a great car and if I could afford it (and lived in the Kommunist Republik of Kalifornia, haha) I’d get one.  So the question is whether the DoE should make an exception for alternative vehicles like the Aptera (which could be a slippery slope) or should the safety rules be ignored altogether?

My firm vote is in that second option.  Many of the automotive safety standards we have now are ridiculous and are dinosaur rules from ages past when vehicle weight and efficiency meant little.  Often, these rules were lobbied for by the American automotive industry itself in an attempt to push out upstart and foreign competition.  Why not just dump the regulations altogether?

Of course, proponents would decry this as “third world” and will point to a huge increase in accident fatalities as the ultimate result. There is a major problem with this argument: it assumes that consumers are too stupid to consider the safety aspects of the vehicle they’re about to purchase (if they consider safety a concern).

Are we such a nanny society that we think forcing rules for the greater good of “safety” is really a national perogative?  Why not allow insurance companies to regulate safety by using the free market?  If you buy an unsafe vehicle, your insurance rates get higher for it.  If your vehicle is so poorly-made that you’ll be killed in spectacular, exploding Corvair fashion, then the insurance company could refuse to cover it (or your medical expenses) at all.  Or require live cameras and television rights.  What’s wrong with this solution?

Those are my thoughts on this issue and I sincerely wish Aptera the best in their endeavor.  I also expect that they’ll fail.  Opening up loans to them would crack open a large can of worms for the DoE and I doubt they want to go there.

Source: AutoblogGreen