Brown: Driving Privilege is Not a Sacrifice Many Americans are Ready to Make

Washington DC January 30, 2006; The AIADA newsletter reported that Warren Brown’s “On Wheels” column in Sunday’s Washington Post argues that despite the conventional wisdom that consumers are thinking more about fuel economy when purchasing a vehicle, the opposite appears to be true.

Moderator for AIADA’s energy symposium “Sustaining Personal Mobility in an Energy Challenged World last Wednesday” -- featuring Mike Jackson of AutoNation, Ed Cohen of Honda, among others -- Brown concludes, “the consensus was sacrifice, the need for Americans to accept that sharing bounty and limiting resource consumption will be necessary parts of their future, if they want to live in peace.”

Among ideas tossed out during the panel discussion, Jackson called for “a federal levy of a dollar a gallon on regular unleaded gasoline, to be phased in over a period of several years or more, "just to send a message to the American people that the cheap-gasoline party is over. We can’t possibly keep going the way we’ve been going.””

While the remaining five panelists discussed possibilities in technology and other issues related to consumer behavior towards alternative fuel vehicles, all agreed, however, that raising the gas tax will be a tough sell to the public in absence of another disaster such as Hurricane Katrina.