What Are They Smoking In Tokyo?
Doesn't Guzzle, Says Tokyo
Perhaps it’s something in the exhaust. You have seen the press coverage in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere about Japan’s declaration that the Hummer H3 is “fuel efficient”. Let’s take a look at the back story on this one, for it shows trade policy at work in strange and wondrous ways.
It starts a short while back when Tokyo created its own version of a “cash for clunkers” program. Unlike similar programs in other countries, Japan excluded virtually all non-Japanese vehicles as eligible replacement vehicles. The U.S. program, I’m happy to say, was wide open and Japanese carmakers benefited tremendously from it. The Japanese program, as first announced, was a travesty of home-grown preference – a Buy Japanese law in disguise. No American-made vehicles were included, while 90% of Japanese cars were covered as eligible purchases. Hey, Detroit may have been down on its luck, but not all U.S.-made vehicles are gas-guzzlers. Pretty blatant.
Tokyo argues that American cars just aren’t clean enough at low speeds, which is where Japanese pollution standards focus. Washington didn’t buy this, so now Tokyo has opened things up to allow more foreign cars into their program. All well and good, until you look at the bizarre list they came up with. Apparently, Japan’s emissions standards are skewed to favor higher weight vehicles, so they have now approved the Hummer H3, the Chrysler Voyager, the Cadillac CTS and the Ford Escape XLT Limited – all of which seem to spend a lot of money at my local gas station. One has to wonder if Tokyo is setting things up to allow the vehicles that the average Japanese is least likely to buy.
Japanese trade officials have a long record of thinking outside the box when it comes to import restrictions. They have told American negotiators that U.S. rice and beef weren’t good for Japanese tummies, and the Europeans were told that same about Italian pasta. My favorite was when Tokyo told Brussels that European skis wouldn’t work well on Japanese snow. One has to wonder.
