Obviously you never have had family members poisoned by industrial toxins.
There is no free lunch. Today we are spending billions of taxpayer dollars cleaning up Superfund sites that were created 50 years ago during lax environmental laws. And you know what, a lot of those sites could have been avoided if those companies had just dumped their toxic wastes into the city sewer, instead of into a pond out in the back 40 where it went into the ground water. The city sewer would have probably just dumped it into the river - which would have been polluted of course - but 20 years later after all those industries were forced to clean up their toxins instead of dumping them, the rivers are running fairly clean since they are continually being refreshed with clean water from their sources, but those contaminated aquifiers are still with us.
And all to save a miserable few hundred bucks a month in city sewer rates back then.
In any case even if those companies had done the right thing and dropped a few grand a month into a treatment plant for their wastes, it's still cheaper than the 4 billion or so per site we are paying today to clean them.
This is incorrect. FWD was a design that came out as a cost saving measure, not as a pollution control. I don't know what you have been reading, probably marketing bullshit, but it does not save fuel to put the driving wheels on the front, rather than the rear.
By going to FWD the automakers could assemble the entire engine and transmission as a single unit then just drop it (or raise it) into the body of the car. With RWD you have a driveshaft and a rear differential and axle - two parts, more labor.
FWD also allowed them to make the driveshaft hump in the center of the car a lot smaller which gives more leg room. While this has a side effect in making it easier to make the car smaller, the Datsun 510, 210 and smaller cars of that vintage in the 70's and 80's did not have a problem with RWD in a small car.
The dubious pollution control devices were all the baloney done to the engines to try to reduce emissions before the catalytic converter came out. And anyway, after the Arab oil embargo in the 70's everyone wanted high MPG cars and one easy way to reduce emissions is to make the car burn less fuel, which means higher mpg.
A very great lot of the US comsumer didn't want 5 passenger cars they wanted economy cars, which wern't 5 passenger unless
3 of your passengers were 8 year old children. And the same history is repeating itself today as Detroit still remains fixated on the SUV when everyone is wanting small economy high MPG cars again.The cars today aren't any more efficient than they were 10 years ago.
For now. But would you rather live in Guiyu town in Guangdong? One of the most polluted places in China this is the destination for all the used toner cartridges, printed circuit boards, and everything else in old computers, where they are scrapped out for the metals.
Do you know how they recycle wires they get from the old computers? They burn them in the street until all the plastic insulation is burned off then they melt them down for the copper. How would you like to live there?
Ted