[richlevy]

GM bitches about fuel standards.

DETROIT (Reuters) -- A proposal to increase U.S. fuel economy standards would force Detroit-based automakers to "hand over" the market for trucks and sport-utility vehicles to Japanese manufacturers, a senior General Motors Corp. executive said.

Bob Lutz, GM's vice chairman and the head of the company's global product development team, said the proposed changes to the government's Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards would represent an unfair burden on the traditional Big Three automakers.

"For one thing, it puts us, the domestic manufacturers, at odds with the desires of most of our customers, namely larger vehicles," Lutz said in a year-end posting on a Web site maintained by GM.

He added: "That effectively hands the truck and SUV market over to the imports, particularly the Japanese, who have earned years of accumulated credits from their fleets of formerly very small cars."

Lutz, a long-time critic of government fuel economy regulations, compared the attempt to force carmakers to sell smaller vehicles to "fighting the nation's obesity problem by forcing clothing manufacturers to sell garments only in small sizes."

So basically, now that everyone else in the world has shown that fuel efficient cars can be made, it's unfair to actually set better standards. Cry me a river, Bob.