Fucking hypocritical europeans

The BBQ Pit
1

I was just over poking around in IMHO, and got my hot button pushed in a fairly innocuous thread. http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?postid=2033282
Coldfire couldn’t help it, but he really hit one of those things that pisses me off about europeans.

Europeans bitch and complain to me all the time that americans waste too much fuel, that american cars have motors that are too big, that american cars get lousy mileage, and that fuel is too cheap in America.
Well, FUCK that shit. The cars here are capable of getting damned good mileage, but it doesn’t matter. No one drives them so as to take advantage of it. Germans all have a congenital defect that causes the right leg to stiffen and drive the right foot (with the accelerator pedal) to the floorboard when they sit behind the steering wheel of a car. I would say that they were all born with a lead foot, but it wouldn’t be true - they have absolutely no trouble walking, only driving at reasonable speeds.
I have acquaintances who are so green that the size is the only thing that keeps me from confusing them with frogs. These people go to great lengths to eat biologically grown food, to avoid poisons in their clothing, to use environmentally safe soaps and cleansers, to raise their children to be environmentally responsible, yada ,yada, yada. They miss no chance to tell me how americans are screwing up the world, how global warming is going to get us all and “destroy the world.” They separate their trash for proper disposal (never mind that it usually ends up in the same landfill,) and bitch about how much stuff americans consume. Guess what? Every living last one of them owns a car and drives like a bat out of hell.
One guy designs environmentally safe sewage treatment plants - they use reeds and cattails growing in an artificial swamp of sewage water to filter stuff out of the sewage. Yahoo! I rode to work with him one day - his company asked me to do some work on their computers. He scared the holy shit out of me. He drove 120-130kmh down roads where I wouldn’t get above 80kmh. You can imagine what that does to your mileage.
My wife’s best friend doesn’t like to come and visit us because she burns a whole tank of gas coming over and going home. Jeeessuuss shit, woman! I drive the same route every day to work and only tank up once a week, and my tank is SMALLER and my car BIGGER. This woman is so fucking green she won’t buy flour, she buys “dinkel” and grinds her own flour in the kitchen. Get her behind the wheel, though, and the green bleaches out to be replaced with daredevil red.
Fuel taxes here are high, and getting higher every year, and the germans alltalk about how horrid it is that american gas is so cheap “Well, goodness, its no wonder that they drive big wasteful cars!” Well, crap. You turkeys don’t get any better gas mileage. You don’t go out of your way to save gas because the prices are so high. No, no. You bitch at the oil companies when the price goes up a couple of cents, and cry about the evil gas stations robbing you. Wake up, people. The price you pay at the pump is some 70-80% TAXES.
On the one side you bitch about high gas prices, and on the other you fight against any kind of speed regulation. Lord forbid you should have to leave home a few minutes earlier to get to work on time. No, no. Let’s not save gas by driving reasonably. Let’s just bitch about the high fuel prices and pressure the boss for a RAISE.
Now, that’s a good plan. Higher taxes on fuel==higher wages==higher production costs==companies closing factories and going someplace cheaper. That sure happens often enough, but nobody knows why. “Another company closed and took production off shore some where. Now what the hell are we going to do with the unemployed?”
Maybe that’s the plan. Force outall the companies. No body has to go to work so they don’t need to drive - and since they don’t have jobs they can’t afford a car or gas to put in it. The ultimate Green wet dream - no roads, no jobs, no cars, everybody sitting around starving with the corpses being chopped up and spread on the fields so the weeds can grow better.

Tune in next week for:
“Clueless europeans bitching about America’s role in world politics.”

2

Huh? Half of the criticisms you level at “Europeans” (and, by the way, trying to tar everyone in an entire continent with the same brush is pretty silly) could be levelled at individuals in any modern state. I’d ask for cites for half of the things you assume other people are doing but what’s the point?

3

Um…you know, I think most cars actually get BETTER gas mileage at higher speeds, with the average best being somewhere around 70. Which pretty much shoots down half your argument right there.

4

Yes, but I get pretty shitty milage at 100mph.

Point taken from a personal perspective, though the milage at 90mph is not too dissimilar than that at 30mph, so I suspect that the minute fraction of my driving spent at illegal speeds is rather less than a drop in the pollution ocean. In other words, if bad karma from driving car @ most efficient speed = 1 then bad karma from driving it 20mph faster than most efficient speed = 1.05, or something.

pan

5

Not to mention Europeans don’t wash, endorse terrorism and most don’t understand English even when it is shouted at them.

Mort Furd have you met december? I think you two should hit it off pretty well.

6

I am not assuming a damned thing. This is daily experience, getting passed by little old ladies racing down the highway at speeds guaranteed to waste fuel. This is riding in the car when an acquaintance crosses the dividing line on the road because he is driving too fast to take a curve otherwise. This is listening to my coworkers when gas prices go up. This is watching the daily news on TV. This is losing a job because the factory I worked in was moved from Germany to Ireland because wages were too high here.
About the only thing that might need a cite is the 70-80% tax thing. Well, I am sorry I don’t have one I could show you. I got that from a sarcastic little sign that hangs in lots of gas stations here. It says “We used to sell gas. These days we collect taxes.” Down below the text is a little bar chart that shows the percentages. So much for the fuel itself, so much for profit for the gas station, and so much for the taxes to be paid. Depending on when the last tax hike was, and whether the fuel prices have gone up or down, the tax percentage runs to 75% - sometime more sometimes less, but always in the range to 70-80%.
I am an american, but I live here in Germany. I am not guessing at these things, I am not assuming. I am pissed at americans being looked down upon because they are supposedly more “wasteful” than europeans.

7

Uh, nope.

In every car I have ever driven with an on board computer, best mileage is between 50 and 60 mph

8

well, Mort Furd - here is a European who does not drive a car.

9

One of the few, the proud, the impoverished.

10

Uh, not really, Mort. I mean, Paris, Madrid, and Berlin have huge wonderful metro systems for a reason, not to mention all the interurban rail. Someone must be using those systems, ne? I mean, they were pretty crowded.

11

Perfectly possible to manage without a car. I’ve done it all my life.

Suddenly perks up.

So, does this mean it’s OK for me to slag off Americans, then?

12

Yes, and whose government fucked Kyoto last year, Mort Furd?

13

And here’s another European who doesn’t drive. Neither does my partner. Or most of my friends. Not because we’re too poor, but because it’s not necessary when you’ve got a public transport system like the one in London.

14

I actually know very few people that live in London who own a car. I know the odd Parisien that does, but the majority of my friends & family that live there do not.

I mean - have you tried to drive in the centre of London? I do so only when I have absolutely no alternative. I.e. never.

pan

15

Well, I can’t judge the veracity of the rant (being a lazy, fat, gas-guzzlin’ 'Murrican what’s never been across the pond), but I rate the rant a 85mph out of a possible 100. Well written, Mort.

16

If you can only manage 100 then you’re not trying hard enough.

17

People:
Ease up. There was no personal insult intended to anyone. In general, I don’t have a problem with any one over here. It is just that there are things that get on the nerves of anyone who lives in country that he didn’t grow up in. This is one of the things that gets on my nerves. I’m in a slightly grouchy mood this afternoon, and Coldfire just happened to rub the wrong nerve. I’m not mad at him about it, I am not mad at anyone about it. I just wanted to vent a bit.
For the first nine years I lived here, I didn’t have a car either. I didn’t need one, and I couldn’t have found a parking space for it anyway. I walked everywhere, and ignored mass transportation pretty much - except for those few times I needed to go to the airport to go on vacation. Then I got married and moved out of town. Then I got involved with mass transit, and didn’t like it.
It takes over two hours to get to work if I take the bus and the train (changing trains once along the way.) IF everything goes right. Normally, it didn’t. Since I was locked into the train schedule, I couldn’t make up lost time and kept getting further and further in the hole. There were days when my two hour something commute turned into four hour adventure trips. Fortunately, I can afford a car and fuel so I started driving as soon as I could.
My hour and fifteen minute commute still sometimes turns into something of an adventure (like yesterday with a traffic jam and some closed roads causing me to have to detour over twenty miles on the way home,) but at least I can then stay late and make up for missed time.
Tune in this time next week for:
“Germans and american TV shows: Who is in worse shape - those who produce crappy shows, or those who purchase and translate them for lack of the talent to make their own shows.”

18

Generalisations are never fun - and that goes both ways. I didn’t mean to piss anyone off (well, not this much, anyway) when mentioned:

… as something that struck me about America (which was what the thread was about).

Well then, on to your OP. I don’t “bitch and complain all the time that Americans waste too much fuel”. Hell, I currently constitute a one person household, owning one automobile and one motorcycle, both of which are used solely for private use on weekends and evenings, 0% work related (I use my bicycle or public transport to commute to work). Who am I to judge, right?

Still: there are vast differences between the mileages of the average American car and the average European car, and they will certainly not disappear when fuel in the US remains so cheap.

Now, about your issue with driving fast. I drive a 1400 CC 4 cylinder Peugeot. When I drive it at a constant 120 km/h, I get about 12.5 kilometers per liter of fuel, or 29 miles to the American gallon. A couple of weeks ago, I took the same car on a ski trip. It had three people and all their luggage on board, a huge ski case on the roof, and I gunned it down the French highways at 160 km/h. Fuel consumption for the entire trip, including the corkscrew roads in the Alps? 10 kilometers per liter, or about 23.5 miles to the American gallon. Driving it faster means more fuel consumption, but as you can see, the difference isn’t earth-shattering.

So, my European car gets 23.5 miles to the gallon under the most extreme circumctances I can put it through. A Ford Explorer gets a theoretical 25 MPG whilst doing 100 km/h on the highway. Lord knows what it will consume if you gun it up to 160 km/h, but it’s not gonna be anywhere NEAR that figure.

Sure, an Explorer is not an average American car. And my 1400 CC li’l Peugeot isn’t comparable to that BMW M3 zipping past you at 200 km/h. But it’s not unfair to say that on average, cars in the US consume considerably more fuel per mile driven than their European counterparts.

I won’t even go into my motorbike: no matter how fast I ride it, it’ll STILL get about 43 MPG.

Now, does that mean that those Germans who give you shit over this are right?
Of course not. If they drive fast in powerful cars, they shouldn’t bitch about the fuel prices. And I shouldn’t bitch about our fuel prices either, because I drive my car and bike voluntarily.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t have an opinion on what American fuel consumption is doing to our planet’s resources. Does that make every American a gas guzzling environment-killer? No more than the German idiots you spoke to make every European an uninformed hypocrite.

19

Coldfire:
Wasn’t pissed, not at you, not at anyone in particular. Just irked and in need of a good rant.
Unfortunately the folks I was talking about AREN’T assholes. They are average ordinary people, who are reasonable and polite about everything - except their car and fuel usage.

The car I drive is a large Golf station wagon. I get 4.4L/100km (55mpg or 22km/L.) The car has an on board computer that computes fuel use for the trip and for the last 10000km. The long time average sits at 4.4L/100k. If I drive the posted maximum on the autobahn and the highway (zig-zagging around trucks because they can’t go any faster than about 90-100km/h even on the autobahn,) my mileage for the trip drops to 5L/100km (48mpg or 20km/L.) Since I am driving a total of 150km roundtrip, the difference between pushing it and loafing along with the big trucks costs me right at a liter of fuel. At the prices here in Germany, that is a Euro a day more. A Euro per day and a liter per day every workday. Driving like that saves me a total of five minutes for the round trip, and I am still getting passed by grannies driving little cars like a bat out of hell.

Anyway, it is time to go and expose myself to the hazards of the german autobahn.

Ya’ll have fun without me for a while.

20

4.4L/100km? That’s GOTTA be a diesel. For the record: my car runs on Euro 95 (regular Bleifrei, if you will).