“Slovakia has a population of just 5.4 million, yet it is one of Europe’s leading car manufacturers, heavily reliant on auto production and exports to the U.S. Home to five major car manufacturers and more than 350 local suppliers, Slovakia is not only the second-largest E.U. exporter of vehicles to the U.S., but also the biggest car producer per capita in the world.
Slovakia manufactures and exports higher-end SUVs from brands like Audi, Volkswagen, Porsche, Range Rover, and—starting in 2026—Volvo. With SUVs accounting for 46 percent of total annual auto sales in the U.S., the tariffs are likely to hurt models that are especially popular among American consumers.
According to the National Bank of Slovakia, the Slovak economy “would decrease cumulatively by nearly 3 percent” due to the new tariffs, and “would also mean the loss of 20,000 jobs.” The bank projects that Slovakia’s economy will “suffer the most in 2026, when its growth would barely stay above zero” and that by 2027, the automotive tariffs alone could reduce gross domestic product by 0.3 to 0.5 percentage points. The bank’s governor referred to the prospects of a 25 percent car tariff impact as a “small Armageddon.””
“Connecticut allows towing companies to sell some people’s cars in just 15 days, one of the shortest windows in the country.”
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“Many cars are towed not for violating the law but instead for breaking a rule like parking the wrong way or failing to display a parking pass at their apartment complex.”
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“The sales have particularly affected low-income people, who have lost jobs after they were unable to get their cars back.”
“Corral’s reckless chase was in pursuit of someone suspected of soliciting prostitution. The whole business was kicked off by the suspect offering to pay an undercover female cop posing as an adult sex worker.
Police put in danger the lives of countless people in order to arrest someone for trying to have consensual but non-state-sanctioned sex.”
“more than 42,000 Americans die in collisions every year. Based on the above-mentioned research, AVs have dramatically lower bodily-injury rates. If governments slow approval of self-driving cars—or give local governments the ability to stop their use based on anecdotes and irrational fears—then we’ll likely have more deaths and injuries.”
“With an annual toll of 40,000 American lives, the deadliness of secondhand smoke is now common knowledge. But it was only a few decades ago that puffing on a cigarette was defended as an act that affected only the smoker.
In the 1980s, researchers for the first time demonstrated that smoking can kill people who never themselves lit a cigarette. Those findings undercut tobacco industry claims that smoking need not be restricted, because smokers had accepted any health risk arising from their habit. Even if that was true, it certainly wasn’t for others forced to breathe polluted air.
Secondhand smoke galvanized the anti-smoking movement. “You’re suddenly not talking about suicide,” said Robert Proctor, a history professor at Stanford University. “You’re talking about homicide.”
By the end of the 1990s, smoking was banned on domestic flights as well as across an expanding number of bars, restaurants, and workplaces. Tobacco use tumbled: In 2000, 25 percent of Americans said they smoked a cigarette during the prior week, down from 38 percent in 1983.
Secondhand smoke is a textbook example of a negative externality: a product’s costs that are paid by society instead of its users. It’s a framework that helped turn the public against tobacco, and it carries lessons for another product that is as ubiquitous today as cigarettes were 50 years ago. And like tobacco, its use can — and often does — kill innocent bystanders. I’m talking about oversized cars.
Over the last half-century, American sedans and station wagons have been replaced by increasingly enormous SUVs and pickup trucks that now comprise 80 percent of new car sales, a phenomenon known as car bloat. Much like secondhand smoke, driving a gigantic vehicle endangers those who never consented to the danger they face walking, biking, or sitting inside smaller cars. Although not widely known, car bloat’s harms are well-documented. Heavier vehicles can pulverize modest-sized ones, and tall front ends obscure a driver’s vision, putting pedestrians and cyclists at particular risk. Deaths among both groups recently hit 40-year highs in the US. The threat of hulking vehicles could even deter people from riding a bike or taking a stroll, a loss of public space akin to avoiding places shrouded in tobacco smoke.
Despite ample research demonstrating car bloat’s harms, American policymakers have done virtually nothing to counteract them. The political headwinds are powerful: Encouraged by carmaker ads depicting SUVs traversing rugged terrain, millions of Americans use oversized vehicles daily simply to get to an office, store, or school.”
“For decades, New York City has been trying to enact an ambitious experiment to reduce traffic and pollution on some of the most congested roads in the world by charging cars a fee to drive in parts of Manhattan and using the revenue to better fund public transportation.
It’s known as congestion pricing, and after many hard-fought political and legal battles, lawmakers and transit officials had finally agreed on a plan that was set to launch later this month. Mere weeks before the new fees would go into effect, however, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul postponed the implementation of the plan indefinitely, citing economic concerns.
Supporters of the long-planned, much-discussed effort are fuming. The plan’s ultimate goals were to get cars off the road, reduce carbon emissions, and improve public transit, including the New York subway and regional rail. Congestion pricing would have, in other words, made the city safer, cleaner, and easier to get around for the people who live there.
“Pedestrian deaths have increased 75 percent in the US since 2010, according to Smart Growth America’s latest report. The numbers started increasing dramatically in 2020, with pedestrian deaths reaching a 40-year high in 2022.
In the intervening years, I’ve learned a lot about the factors that make traffic fatality rates in the US 50 percent higher than they are in other comparable nations.
They include dangerous road design that makes it easy for drivers to speed, and a breakdown in traffic enforcement that allows some of the worst drivers to get away with it for so long that they eventually kill someone. I’ve also reported how drivers in the US spend more time using their phones while driving than people in other countries, and on survey data that seems to suggest that drivers in the United States have more lax attitudes toward road safety than their European counterparts.
But there’s one thing I still can’t understand.
Why has the government failed to address the fact that large, heavy vehicles are deadlier to pedestrians and cyclists than smaller cars? There is actually a way to make cars safer for everyone — and it includes changing how the government rates a “safe car.” In Europe, government regulators test new vehicles to see how dangerous they are for pedestrians and cyclists and include that information in their safety ratings. They’ve been doing it for years. The US does no such thing.
Those 5-star safety readings you see for cars? That rating is for people inside the car. So if you’ve read the news about the soaring numbers of vulnerable people being killed on roads, and thought about purchasing something that would be safer for them, you aren’t going to be able to find that information. The government currently isn’t testing for it.”
“”China spent roughly $173 billion in subsidies to support the new energy-vehicle sector, which encompasses electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles, between 2009 and 2022,” write Kubota and Leong. By 2019, there were 500 E.V. manufacturers in China. But that same year, the government started paring back those incentives, and by 2023, the number of automakers had shrunk by 80 percent.
Now, though, the country is ready to throw good money after bad: “Chinese leader Xi Jinping has called on local leaders to promote ‘new productive forces’—a buzzword in Chinese policy circles for the need to promote high-value manufacturing industries.” Local leaders responded by pumping money into struggling companies—in one case, giving the equivalent of $27.5 million to a company that had sold fewer than 2,000 cars in the first quarter of 2024.
“China currently has the capacity to produce some 40 million vehicles a year, though it sells only around 22 million cars domestically,” the Journal authors warn. As a result, the country’s largesse “is adding cars to a global market that risks becoming more oversupplied.”
Of course, E.V.s are not inherently a bad idea—especially in China, whose cities have a history of such severe pollution that it lowers the nation’s life expectancy.”
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“But as with anything, the advent of clean-energy technology should be driven by market forces. The Chinese government spent more than a decade subsidizing the production of electric vehicles, no matter whether consumers wanted to buy them. When the spigot of free money finally shut off, and manufacturers had to stand on their own, the country saw the rise of “E.V. graveyards,” in which entire fields were covered in unsold or abandoned vehicles.
America would do well to heed China’s example as a cautionary tale about industrial policy. China averaged 9.8 percent annual economic growth for 35 years starting in 1978; in 2013, officials pledged to keep growth at 7.5 percent—a two-decade low for the country, even if it would have been an enviable figure for any other nation.
But much of that expansion was driven by government spending, not market forces: For much of the 21st century, China embarked upon a construction binge, building residential and commercial developments as fast as possible with no regard for whether there were any tenants to fill them.
The result was China’s “ghost cities,” full of high-rise apartments and shopping centers in which nobody lived. Worried about rising debt, the Chinese government finally started drawing back its building spree in 2020. Since then, the country’s real estate market has cratered, and its debt load has only deepened.”