Greetings Kossacks, I was just talking with a friend of mine who told me about something called PZEV, which I had never heard of before, but is basically a super low emissions ratings and vehicles that meet the criteria are CURRENTLY IN PRODUCTION.
He referred me to this article and I was totally alarmed with what I read.
So, just how green is a PZEV machine? Well, if you just cut your lawn with a gas mower, congratulations, you just put out more pollution in one hour than these cars do in 2,000 miles of driving. Grill a single juicy burger, and you've cooked up the same hydrocarbon emissions as a three-hour drive in a Ford Focus PZEV. As the California Air Resources Board has noted, the tailpipe emissions of these cars can be cleaner than the outside air in smoggy cities.
The gas mileage is the same as the polluting counterparts, but the emissions are significantly lower--lower than anyone thought was possible with internal combustion.
You want one, don't you? Well, follow me for information on how you can get yours.
You can't. The article continues...
Not only can't you buy one, but the government says it's currently illegal for automakers to sell these green cars outside of the special states. Under terms of the Clean Air Act—in the kind of delicious irony only our government can pull off—anyone (dealer, consumer, automaker) involved in an out-of-bounds PZEV sale could be subject to civil fines of up to $27,500. Volvo sent its dealers a memo alerting them to this fact, noting that its greenest S40 and V50 models were only for the special states.
That's right, according to this msn article, these cars are nationally generally unavailable because of various conflicting environmental laws, which frankly makes me skeptical. I generally think this sort of thing is a cynical attempt at getting us to petition our representatives to eliminate the Clean Air Act, but realistically speaking, if anyone wanted to buy legislation, they'd just go straight to the reps themselves, right?
At any rate, read the article, do your research, and contact your congressional representatives because there's no good reason to be polluting in 43 states when we could be driving PZEVs for a hundred-fifty bucks more.