Russell's Blog

For the first time, I just paid more than $4 a gallon for gasoline. It cost $40.34 to fill the tank on my tiny Toyota Yaris. My commute to UCLA is 37 miles each way, and I get about 38 MPG for that trip. I normally do a little better, but the Sepulveda Pass always seems to wreck my milage. At about $0.11 a mile, one trip costs me $7.77. If I drove in every day, it would cost me about $155 a month. That's almost as much as the payments on the car. If gas goes up another 84 cents, then I'd be paying more for the gasoline than the car just from driving to school.

Ouch.

Meanwhile, a Metro day pass costs $5, and a month pass is $62.00. If you commute in LA, chances are pretty good that your employer will buy your pass for you.

Only a few day ago, I discovered that my wonderful Toyota Yaris probably outranks my mother's (also pretty neat) Toyota Prius in terms of lowest carbon footprint. It appears the Yaris has the smallest carbon footprint of any car available in the United States.

Unfortunately, when it comes to fuel economy standards, what Toyota gives with one hand, it takes away with the other. Thomas Friedman expounds in his op-ed today :

What I don’t get is empty-barrel politics — Michigan lawmakers year after year shielding Detroit from pressure to innovate on higher mileage standards, even though Detroit’s failure to sell more energy-efficient vehicles has clearly contributed to its brush with bankruptcy, its loss of market share to Toyota and Honda — whose fleets beat all U.S. automakers in fuel economy in 2007 — and its loss of jobs. G.M. today has 73,000 working U.A.W. members, compared with 225,000 a decade ago. Last year, Toyota overtook G.M. as the world’s biggest automaker.

Thank you, Michigan delegation! The people of Japan thank you as well.

But assisting Detroit’s suicide seems to be contagious. Everyone wants to get in on it, including Toyota. Toyota, which pioneered the industry-leading, 50-miles-per-gallon Prius hybrid, has joined with the Big Three U.S. automakers in lobbying against the tougher mileage standards in the Senate version of the draft energy bill.

This is one of the reasons it's a bad idea to allow so few companies to dominate such an important market. It virtually guarantees that even the "good guys" to get mixed up in bad business, and no approach actually taken will stand out as clearly the right one. If there were more car companies each with a smaller market share, it would be more likely that at least one of them would hit on the right mix of innovation, marketing and public policy.

Remember, Toyota also makes the unfortunately-named Tundra. Imagine yourself a future history textbook author in a time when there isn't any actual tundra left in the world. Would you pass up the opportunity to bash a company for naming a product after the ecosystem it helped erase from the Earth?