Truck Dealers Association: EPA 'Grossly Underestimated' The Enormous Costs of Their Byzantine Regulations

Gee, this news comes as quite a surprise. And who needs freight hauled around by trucks, anyhow?

A report released yesterday by The National Automobile Dealers Association and American Truck Dealers questions the Environmental Protection Agency's cost analysis of 2004-2010 emissions control mandates. Data collected by ATD shows EPA's cost estimates were off by a factor of between two and five.

As a result, ATD says, last decade's emissions mandates resulted in substantially higher prices for commercial vehicles, which depressed vehicle sales and created massive disruptions in normal business cycles, as well as delaying the environmental benefits that the EPA originally sought.

"While EPA can mandate what truck and engine makers have to build, they can't dictate what customers will buy," said Dave Westcott, vice-chair of NADA... the study sounds a stern warning about EPA's cost projections on the upcoming fuel economy standards for heavy and light vehicles -- which extend out to the 2017 to 2025 timeframe...

The study notes that when the EPA implemented its 2004-2010 rules for heavy trucks, it failed to predict and account for what truck and engine manufacturers had to accomplish to comply with those rules, and how the market would react...

Everything this enormous federal leviathan touches turns to crap.

The EPA can't even figure out ahead of time how much damage their insane regulations will cause the private sector. So they continue anyhow, issuing reams of new rules in their unceasing efforts to de-industrialize America. To centrally manage the economy. To create a Utopian society that can't be and never was.

I can't wait until these geniuses run the entire health care system. It'll be kinda like the medical version of the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, only without the great customer service.