In fairness, we’ve set up a system where people who don’t know how things work elect other people who don’t know how things work (mostly lawyers) to write laws dictating how things should and should not work. You need industry insiders to at least delineate between the impossible and the merely prohibitively expensive.
And once something “prohibitively expensive” becomes a legal requirement, industry is mostly okay with it. They can pass that expense on to consumers, knowing that all their competitors have to do the same and their competitive advantage hasn’t been undermined. They can make the trade-offs that consumers were never happy with, because now the consumer isn’t given a choice.
The last time automakers had to increase fuel efficiency is an example. They said it was impossible (read: prohibitively expensive) for years. Then the hammer came down and they found a way… the way that they had always known about, which is to make the cheaper cars lighter and road noise worse, while luxury cars now make you pay extra for quiet.
