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Originally Posted by Jim Goose
i dunno if your saying it as a joke or not, but you do realise any new emissions laws are for new vehicles built after the date of the new law? There is no retrospective law in terms of emissions.... or ADRs for that matter...
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Sorry, I should have explained it better for people who didn't know a bit of motorbike history. The Kawasaki 750 triple was a legendary performance bike of the time, but being a very large two stroke, it used a massive amount of fuel. The Japanese makers started to detune it, and lower production of it in the mid seventies because in the biggest export market for the bike, the USA, they were bringing in harsher restrictions on fuel economy and so-on. There was no way this bike could meet requirements and didn't look good for the company, so they eventually stopped making it and concentrated on smaller bikes and large economical four stroke bikes.
Jumpt to today, and here on Oz The Greens are already getting a hard-on over the idea of petrol taxes and "corporate fuel economy averages" to "reduce the use of the motor vehicle", which means, of course, that if they had thier way, a company like Ford or Holden would have to build thier cars in production numbers that would allow thier "average fuel economy" to meet a certain target.
That means making more small cars and less large thirsty cars.
That means if the restrictions were tight enough, it would eventually become uneconomic to build those large thirsty cars, so the makers would wonder if they really needed them. Look at Ford when they dropped the V8's for the old EFI six...they said no one "needed" a V8 as the EFI six was perfectly good for anything you needed.
it wouldn't take much for that sort of reasoning to return again...we've already got a government pandering to whatever the minor parties want...would fuel economy averages be that far out of the question?
It's happened before, it'll happen again...