Will the worlds oil companies let car companies make fuel efficient cars?

no

If only it were that simple. True the oil companies has a lot of influence in the supply for a critical product but manipulating the automobile industry isn't necessary for such a monopoly. Even if we all had electric vehicles today, much of the energy would still be from fossil sources. Oil powers our industry, our economy, it's not just automobiles that it powers. At one point, it was proposed that food be synthesized from crude in order to deal with world hunger.

Whether or not the cars on the market are fuel efficient has more to do with the automobile industry itself and the consumer. On the basis of providing convenient utilitarian transportation, the industry would've been much smaller as the vehicles would be standardized, simple, designed to work on inexpensive guideways and be automated such that instead of being parked most of the time, the vehicles would actually be serving another passenger. This concept of public transit is PRT. As you can imagine, such a model would only require the occasional vehicle replacement or for system expansion. But the automobile like all industries in the current business model have a mandate to provide growth for their investors so they've developed many marketing techniques to encourage people to purchase vehicles more often then strictly needed, they've marketed for the concept of personal vehicles such that most vehicles are now parked most of the time, they've also found that despite utility vehicles being exempt from safety standards, many Americans believe that the larger vehicles are safer even though they are not. Basically, inefficient cars are being made because they have a much larger profit margin and are more easily marketed not because of sinister oil executives in a smoky boardroom.

Depending on what data you look at, only something like 15-20% of oil is turned into gasoline for cars........most by far is used for heating or electric generation followed by the whole plastic and chemical industry...... so while important, gasoline sales are not the big driver of oil company profits....Exxon, Shell and others would still be doing just fine if 100% of the worlds cars ran on electricity or hydrogen or the Mr Fusion from 'Back to the Future'

think about your question for a moment..you are saying that Exxon tells GM and Toyota You cant build fuel efficient cars even if it means you loose sales and maybe even go out of business and GM and Toyota say oh, OK what ever you want........

how could oil companies stop anyone from doing something? As soon as you come up with a real and legal way, let us know, otherwise you are just being paranoid over nothing.

The car companies are making cars that are as efficient as the laws of thermodynamics allow. If you have a more efficient way, then like above, show us.

hey sovei....

Cars made today have twice the horsepower and get the same mpg as older cars, do you see the link????

Oil companies don't control how fuel efficient cars are, consumers do. Nobody wants a car that eliminates enough safety features and modern niceties to get 100 mpg. GM stopped producing the EV1 because they realized that producing a car for which no infrastructure existed and therefore practically no consumer wanted to buy was a bad idea. Most people would still rather have a thirsty SUV, conversion van, or sports car that gets 15-20 mpg than a stripped down subcompact death trap that gets 50-75 mpg and as long as demand continues for inefficient cars, car companies will continue to produce them. People need to stop blaming the government and corporate america for everything because the problems that they have are nobody's fault but their own.

Of course. Oil is used for many things, other than fuel for cars. The only way they could prevent more fuel efficient cars from being made is to buy up the car companies. They can't afford to do that, and it wouldn't be good business.

Oil companies are already rich and established. It ill take oil to dry up for them to worry about companies coming up with efficient cars. So called efficient cars are slower and more expensive. It also has a stigma of not as safe and would probably kill you since they don't have the weight and technology available to gas guzzling cars. There are car companies with efficient cars for a long time now. Gas prices are in the $3 per gallon range and no one is dying to change their car to an efficient one. There are over 100 million cars in the US, and less than 1% of 1% are so called efficient cars. Maybe in 20 years we will see more electric cars. But then again you will need more energy to charge those cars and more likely will come from oil burning plants to power them.

I dont think they will because im shure at some level they have a hand in each others pocketbook. The oil companies may offer auto makers incentives not to do so. Then again the technology that auto makers use for such cars make be so costly that the average consumer could not afford the cars after mark up. Therefor sales would be low and would be redundant to produce such vehicles.

Well up until now they've been blocking fuel economical cars and making slight changes to the fuel to sell more gas, but with the shift in demand for these cars they don't have the money to buy out the designs anymore.

Yes and no.Yes because finally they see the need for it and no because they have a product for sale everyone uses in one form or another.