In the auto industry, there’s one thing you can always count on: if a new environmental or safety rule is proposed, executives will prophesy disaster.

From the New Yorker:

A few years later, when Congress was thinking about requiring fuel-economy standards, auto executives warned that instituting such standards would create ‘“massive financial and unemployment problems.’ And now, with Congress debating a bill to raise fuel-economy standards, for the first time in almost twenty years, the Chicken Littles are squawking again, forecasting doom for Detroit and asserting that making higher-mileage vehicles is technologically unfeasible and economically suicidal.”