I have my doubts that regulators would ever allow GM and Ford to merge, just because it would lead to consolidation of 3/4rd ton and 1 ton pickups down to two brands -- Ram and Ford-GM. There really isn't a lot of competition left for the big trucks, and they are some of the most profitable vehicles for the automobile industry.
Urbanists have long looked at cars as the scourge of great places. Jane Jacobs identified the automobile as the “chief destroyer of American communities.” Cars not only clog our roads and cost billions of dollars in time wasted commuting, they are a terrible killer. They caused more than 40,000 deaths in 2017, including of some 6,000 pedestrians and cyclists.
But in the United States, the car plays a fundamental role in structuring the economy, our daily lives, and the political and social differences that separate us.
Last week, I posted an article about some of the disadvantages of going car less. Here are some of advantages to kicking the motoring habit.
It’s always good to look at pros and cons before proceeding down any particular path, and I will look at the pros of going car-less in a future blog post, and how much money I could save and invest towards a better tomorrow.
Are you in the market for a vehicle? During the 2007-09 recession, new-vehicle sales plunged to their lowest levels in nearly 30 years. They have since fully recovered as people replace their aging vehicles with shiny new cars, trucks, vans, and sport utility vehicles. Prices of new vehicles, however, are at all-time highs, leading many buyers to look for used vehicles. It can be a challenge, though, for buyers to figure out whether they are getting a good deal. The seller generally knows far more about the vehicle. Even with careful examination, the buyer still likely won't know everything the seller knows. When one party knows more about the product than the other party, there is "asymmetric information." In the case of a used car, the seller has more information—and the advantage. The opposite can also be true in a transaction—the buyer can have more information and the advantage.
If you’re driving a late model car or truck, chances are that the vehicle is mostly computers on wheels, collecting and wirelessly transmitting vast quantities of data to the car manufacturer not just on vehicle performance but personal information, too, such as your weight, the restaurants you visit, your music tastes and places you go.
A car can generate about 25 gigabytes of data every hour and as much as 4,000 gigabytes a day, according to some estimates. The data trove in the hands of car makers could be worth as much as $750 billion by 2030, the consulting firm McKinsey has estimated. But consumer groups, aftermarket repair shops and privacy advocates say the data belongs to the car’s owners and the information should be subject to data privacy laws.