Who hasn't been enraged to read about how Ford and G.M. can make perfectly good little gas sippers in Europe, but just can't bring themselves to make a fuel efficient car for us back home?

Well, now that they need some funding from us, here's an idea.

Let's fund Detroit just to set up their efficient European car factories — back here, where they are really needed. Let's get some better gas mileage out of their money troubles.

Apparently, it only costs $75 million to completely retool a plant, to produce an efficient little car instead of the gas-guzzling behemoth they were fobbing off on us fools all these years.

Detroit needs money, and we need efficient vehicles. Let's make a deal: We taxpayers will provide the funding to retool their factories to build just the specific models that are in the Common Good.

We'll fund retooling to build any models that help solve the climate crisis by getting better than 50 mpg, right now. It's a win-win.

To make it super quick and easy, let's forgo NHTSA crash tests on their current European models that already we would die for. After all, that EU is such a nanny state, right, and these gas sippers already passed fussy ECE rules to meet European requirements; so, surely those sissy foreign crash-tests are good enough for us back here in the wild wild west: let's accept their foreign rules.

Small light fuel efficient cars are actually safe enough.

Our NHTSA crash-testing requirements have kept fuel efficient imports out for decades. And not just fuel efficient foreign cars. Even our own "foreign" cars.

It's time to just tear down that wall. This would be a quick and easy way to reduce our heavy carbon footprint. Allowing ECE rules could be achieved with a quick stroke of the legislative pen next January.

Then all we'd have to do, fellow-funders, is decide which models to fund first to finish fossil fuels fast. Me? I'd go for any old Ka that gets 56 mpg.

Image: Wikimedia Commons
Susan Kraemer writes for Gas 2.0 and Cleantechnica. This is reprinted with permission.