I find myself reminiscing about Growing up in the 1970s & 1980s when things seemed much simpler, when things made much more sense, like stuff costing what it should.

We were not as manipulated to purchase and taken advantage of by pseudo pricing structures. Try to use your powers of recall, can you remember any sort of item which was marketed back then with the “craftiness” that Sony uses for the PS3 or Apple & AT&T use for the iPhone, or what Google will undoubtedly do with their mobile phone when it is eventually released sometime in the next 30 years…

It was a time when the free market decided what things should cost, not what some PR firm imagined the cost should be – case in point, diesel fuel – it is easier to refine and actually costs less at every point along the supply chain.

Back in the 1980s, it was your cheapest option for fuel – but today… well, today, is another story. Some ‘Brianiac’ somewhere has decided that smaller diesel fuel vehicles like the Loremo (to be released in Europe sometime in 2009 and in the U.S. probably in 2010) get such good mileage that we consumers should be manipulated into paying more per gallon for diesel than the unleaded fuels which cost much more to produce and even pollute worse than the cleaner burning diesel.

When will the insanity stop?

This Loremo (Low Resistance Mobile) vehicle is a really neat idea – I was reading about it on MSN today. This new car is estimated to get between 130 and 150 miles per gallon (mpg). The way the design engineers have come up with this amazing mileage performance in a 4 seat sporty looking coupe was to go “old school” – they improved engine efficiency, lowered the weight of the vehicle dramatically and worked to reduce as much drag as possible.

What I dig the most about this vehicle is that it is planned to enter the European market at about $15,000 Euros, which translates to about US$22,000 – a much less expensive alternative to the $80,000 Fisker Automotive plug-in hybrid or even the $8,900 premium above what a normal SUV would cost for a vehicle featuring a AFS Trinity Extreme Hybrid SUV.

These are exciting times to live in, even with the massive amounts of manipulation we find ourselves being forced to swallow every day. I am encouraged that with these sorts of vehicles on the horizon, maybe they provide a glimpse of one way to get out of the marketing manipulation we find ourselves in by creating technologies which will provide the ability to normal folks like us to depend less on the things we are being forced to purchase in order to exist in our modern world.