[Carfreeliving] Funny car review from LA times

Thu Mar 16 12:25:30 MST 2006

this is a super article. However I take extreme umbrage with the continuing
lefty myth that fuel taxes are regressive. They are not, unless you believe
that charging a flat fee for any product, from a box of Cheerios to ticket
to a baseball game to a diamond ring, instead of a sliding scale based on
income, is regressive. In fact, fuel taxes are progressive and
redistributive of benefits if you consider the population as a whole. It's
a well established fact that people with lower incomes drive dramatically
less and use public transportation dramatically more, thus as a population
are proportionally less affected by a fuel tax. And if the fuel tax money
is even partially plowed into improving public transportation (which it is
in civilized places) or into any public service that poorer people use,
then the fuel tax is doubly progressive. Additionally, lower income people
are far more likely to drive lighter, more fuel effecient vehicles, and
less likely to drive Hummers and other fuel guzzling SUVs, so the amount of
extra fuel tax they have to pay per mile driven is substantially less than
those wealthier folks driving SUVs getting 15mpg. You can't consider the
effect of raising the fuel tax on a single individual. Sure, some poor
people have to drive and some have drive quite often. But as a population,
poor people are relatively benefitted, or at least harmed proportionally
less (which is the definition of "progressive" tax) than rich people, by
increases in fuel taxes.
-j

             "Brinkman,                                                    
             Cheryl"                                                       
             <Cheryl.Brinkman@                                          To 
             McKesson.com>             "Carfree Living"                    
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             nces at livablecity.                                             
             org                                                   Subject 
                                       [Carfreeliving] Funny car review    
                                       from LA times                       
             03/16/2006 10:32                                              
             AM                                                            

Hi Car Freers,   had to post this funny car review from the LA Times.

In between the sadness it made me laugh:
"and never tow anything heavier than the weight of their owner's childhood
traumas."

My other car is a plane
Mercedes' new SUV couldn't come at a worse time. Can consumption be more
conspicuous?
DAN NEIL, Automotive critic Dan Neil can be reached at
dan.neil at latimes.com.
March 15, 2006

THERE'S something peculiarly egregious, something antagonizing about the
2007 Mercedes-Benz GL, the company's new full-size, 15-mpg sport-utility
vehicle, which might be described as a Cadillac Escalade with a hankering
for Czechoslovakia. For one thing, it goes to show that, even though the
full-size SUV market has fallen off dramatically in the last year, there
are still sufficient numbers of selfish rotters out there to constitute an
appealing market segment.

Mercedes-Benz executives offer this wholly meritless defense: Many of its
customers leave the brand because the company does not offer a full-size
SUV that meets their needs, which is to say, a seven-passenger, 17-foot 4x4
with a 9,300-pound towing capacity. At this point in the presentation in
Napa Valley last week, execs showed slides of the GL pulling a 30-foot
boat. So there you have it: Mercedes' audience of water-skiing polygamists
is underserved.

Needs? Did the man say needs? OK, then. I propose needs testing for the
purchase of such a vehicle. You must have a Chris-Craft and three or more
school-age children in the yard to qualify. Your vehicle must do
double-duty as, um, a bookmobile.

Need has very little to do with it. This segment is about want, naked and
unquenchable, I-got-mine-you-get-bent appetite. It's well established that
the vast majority of these vehicles never touch gravel, never carry more
than a couple of people, and never tow anything heavier than the weight of
their owner's childhood traumas.

Most people who buy the GL won't know a Class IV hitch from a Mark 48
torpedo. And I, for one, am not going to congratulate some Bel-Air
singleton for his wise vehicle purchase when it is so patently purblind and
morally retrograde.

Plainly, I'm disappointed that Mercedes-Benz — the company of Gullwings and
500Es, of elegant engineering and F1 cars — has decided to get into
delivery van business. And yet I cannot fairly blame the company, which
being a corporation is doing what corporations do in the absence of
governance: Make as much money as is within its ken to do.

The case for the GL was compelling: As one of three products to come out of
the company's newly enlarged Alabama factory — the others are the
redesigned M-class and the new R-class luxury van — the GL's development
and production costs are shared. The powertrain, suspension, electronics
and auxiliary systems are common with the M-class.

Purely as a piece of machinery, the GL is exemplary. With a unit-body
chassis of high-strength steel, four-wheel independent air suspension with
automatic damping, all-wheel drive, a powerful 4.6-liter V8 and seven-speed
automatic transmission, and a full complement of safety and convenience
features, the GL is a mighty, mellow dreadnaught, roomy, comfortable and —
compared with its Iowa-class competitors — reasonably light. Its curb
weight of 5,249 pounds is several hundred pounds lighter than the Escalade,
Infiniti QX56, Lexus LX470 or the Lincoln Annihilator.

And, while the full-size SUV segment was a lot more tempting five years ago
(when the GL was planned), it is still surprisingly robust. Early returns
on the new Chevy Tahoe and Escalade look good for GM. Audi just launched
its own seven-passenger full-sizer, the Q7, and BMW is in the midst of
taffy-stretching its X5 for the 2007 model year.

Why, in the midst of a slow-rolling energy crisis, an unpopular war in a
region of the world made strategic only by its oil, and the globe's
climbing mercury, should precisely the wrong kinds of vehicles remain so
popular?

One reason is surely the tax breaks associated with 3-ton SUVs: business
owners get a $25,000 tax break on the purchase of full-size SUVs (scaled
back from $100,000 in 2004) and five-year depreciation schedule. For people
taking advantage of this cozy corner of Section 179, the GL — with a base
price anticipated to be about $60,000 — will be virtually free. That makes
your $4,000 hybrid tax break look pretty punk, doesn't it?

The tax code is the most obvious point of inflection between vehicle choice
and public policy. Another knee-point is CAFE — that's Corporate Average
Fuel Economy standards, in case you forgot, and who could blame you?

Last year, the Bush administration proposed raising the light-truck
standard — long frozen at about 20 mpg — to 24 mpg by 2011, an
incrementalism that is marvelously measured, to say the least. Meanwhile,
the administration plans to scrap the current CAFE structure in favor of a
size-based regime co-written by the automakers, with larger vehicles
required to achieve lower mileage.

Incidentally, some SUVs are so large that they transcend fuel-economy
standards altogether. Vehicles with a gross-vehicle-weight rating over
10,000 pounds — such as the Hummer H2 and the heavy-duty version of the
Suburban — are not counted among fleet ratings that automakers need to hit.

We have been told recently that we are addicted to oil, but we seem to be
unable to do much about it. California's clean-air bureaus are trying to
regulate carbon emissions from vehicles and are being sued by manufacturers
and the federal government for their trouble.

Raising fuel taxes cannot be accomplished, no matter the mood of national
urgency and no matter the obscenity of oil companies' profits. Fuel taxes
are doubly problematic: For one thing, they are regressive, hurting
lower-income consumers; for another, buyers of luxury vehicles are less
likely to be dissuaded from their giant purchase.

What about all the alternative vehicle technologies we've been promised?
Thanks to a decade-long stonewalling by Big Oil and the trucking industry,
it has taken until this year to phase in clean-diesel requirements that
will give automakers the slightest hope of meeting 50-state emissions
requirements (diesel-powered vehicles can be 25% to 40% more fuel-efficient
than gas-powered vehicles). Other technologies — bio-diesel, hybrids,
ethanol, plug-ins, fuel-cells — can in the near term only nibble at the
edges of our 20 million barrels per day of oil consumption.

If we were serious about oil dependence, we would dramatically raise fuel
economy standards, impose gas-guzzler taxes on noncommercial light trucks
and lower the national speed limit.

None of that is going to happen.

So, in the face of this enormous governmental and regulatory inaction, this
paralysis and denial, a curious new market equilibrium has arisen. Call it
the marketplace of shame.

SUV owners are mocked. Late-night comics have become scolds. Evangelicals
have enlisted Jesus Christ himself in the "What Would Jesus Drive"
campaign. The crass and criminal Sopranos — Tony and Carmela — drive an
Escalade and a Porsche Cayenne Turbo. If you don't think their characters
are defined by these vehicle choices, think again.

The cultural opprobrium that afflicts SUV owners — often overheated,
occasionally misdirected, frequently ignored — is virtually the only
disincentive in the market, the only defense the rest of us have from these
rolling hot tubs of avarice. People feel slightly embarrassed, even a
little ashamed. Good.

  It's having an effect. Sales of these vehicles are declining, and it's
possible that one day they will align with actual customer need — after
all, if people truly need a full-size 4x4, they should be able to have
them. Meanwhile, the carmakers are finding ways to give people the utility
and all-weather agility they want without the massive steel edifice.

One day, to describe a vehicle like the Mercedes-Benz GL as a very good
full-size SUV — which it is, by the way — will be a contradiction in terms.

*

2007 Mercedes-Benz GL450

Base price: $58,000 (est.)

Price, as tested: $67,000 (est.)

Powertrain: 4.6-liter, dual-overhead cam, 32-valve V8 with variable-valve
timing and two-stage intake manifold; seven-speed automatic transmission;
full-time all-wheel drive (optional two-speed transfer case in off-road
package)

Horsepower: 335 at 6,000 rpm

Torque: 339 pound-feet at 2,700-5,000 rpm

Curb weight: 5,249 pounds

0-60 mph: 7.5 seconds

Wheelbase: 121.1 inches

Overall length: 200.3 inches

EPA fuel economy: 14 miles per gallon city, 19 mpg highway (est). Mixed
mileage 15 mpg (observed)

Final thoughts: Steroid abuse

Cheryl Brinkman
McKesson Corporation
Sr. Product Manager
Generic Rx
415-983-7501
415-732-2699 - fax
cheryl.brinkman at mckesson.com

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