They are where the rubber of production meets the road of consumption, whether in a showroom or a studio or on the phone or calling you at home.
With video, however, it's been a rocky road from consumption to creation.
For example, in "Road transport" consumption by tourists induced production activity in the petroleum industry that recycled 1655 t of waste oil and 3140 t of waste plastics.
Today the U.S. has wandered blindly down a road where consumption is what matters and the fate of worker-producers is relegated to the tender mercies of quasi-divinized "market forces" that are never seriously challenged by those in the political class.
Petrol consumption used to serve as a reasonable proxy for road use, satisfying the "user pays" principle for road funding.
But according to the HonestJohn motoring website, where 68,000 drivers of all makes and models have posted their on-the-road fuel consumption figures, this particular model of the Golf has only managed 58.6 mpg on the road, just 66% of the figure claimed by VW.
Volkswagen has just done likewise, as it and others did long ago in Europe, for its diesel-engined cars, a rare species in America, but now spreading.American output of biodiesel is still trivial: last year 30m gallons, in a total on-road diesel consumption of 36 billion.
The first approach applies distance-dependent fuel efficiency and on-road electricity consumption rates based on naturalistic or real world, driving information to determine gasoline and electricity consumption.
The New European Driving Cycle (NEDC) is shown to underestimate on-road fuel consumption in Spark (SI) and Compression Ignition (CI) vehicles by an average of 16%and13%3%, respectively.
Using projected inputs for engine size, vehicle mass, and compression ratio, the likely average 2020 on-road fuel consumption was estimated to be 7.6 L/100 km for SI and 6.4 L/100 km for CI vehicles.
