What the heck are we waiting for? If the U.S. automobile fleet got 125 miles per gallon, as now appears possible, instead of 25 miles per gallon, we'd cut our gasoline consumption from 9.3 million barrels per day to under 2 million barrels per day - a reduction of 7 million barrels per day. That would have enormous implications on so many levels I barely even no where to start.
So, of course the government is all over this, right? Oh yeah, I almost forgot for a second, the Bush Administration and their buddies at ExxonMobil don't really WANT to reduce our oil consumption, whether it's for national security or environmental reasons (or both). Fortunately, they'll be gone in 1 1/2 years, but meanwhile we're just wasting time while the planet burns. History will not look kindly on anyone who blocked action when it was still possible to avert catastrophic global warming (as well as money flowing to terrorist groups and unfriendly nations). Especially when the technology existed to get 125 miles per gallon in a pefectly nice vehicle.
*My understanding is that you have to plug it in to get the 125 mpg.
All in all, it's still a bit ambiguous, but it's not complete doom and gloom :)
Instead, we get hot air about ethanol and hydrogren fuel cells, technology that won't be viable for mass production for years -- plenty of time for oil company profits in the meantime.
Many states are shifting toward renewable energy, and should I have the honor of serving in the Virginia House of Delegates, I hope to creating a Renewable Portfolio Standard for Virginia to shift our fuel mix toward clean, non-polluting sources.
Whether wind or coal, the cost of electricity per gallon equivalent (wierd metric) is a little less than a dollar. I have it on good authority that Toyota will be shipping plug-in hybrids in the near future as soon as the battery technology is ready.
--morris meyer
Democratic Candidate
House of Delegates - 40th District
morris@morrismeyer.com
Last week Denmark began operating its first liquid hydrogen generating facility to deal with their "problem" of creating too much electricity from their windmills. They have so much electricity that they can't store it all so they are converting it (through the clean process of electrolysis) to liquid hydrogen that can be transported and used in vehicles.
It's amazing!
I know what you mean, and if there are 100 electric cars on the road instead of 100 gas cars then I suppose we're better off, but there still needs to be incentive for people to not drive at all, which means mixed use development, etc, etc. Making it cheaper to drive in my view means people won't put 2 and 2 together and try to work towards the paradigm shift I think we need.
This is all beside the point though, which is that technology has existed for a long time to raise fuel economy standards, it's just never been done.
For myself, I looked into the buses on my 10-mile route to work, and I'd need to take 3 buses. I've lobbied my representatives about the buses, hoping for a Europeon-style bus route where they run every few minutes, so if a rider misses a connection we don't have to be late for work waiting 30 minutes for the next one. No luck. The system is not willing to wait for the year or so it would take for people to learn about and then trust a more frequent bus line. If ridership isn't full in a month, they cancel the bus - and don't tell riders. I can't really bike all or part of the way because of dangerous roads along the way(and my skirt suits).
I've also lobbbied for a Purple line. Why are they even talking about an outer beltway or inter-county connector before they build an outer subway? That $3 Billion! County Connector road is a "road to nowhere." It doesn't go from one residential area to a job center. It goes to Konterra, an undeveloped plot of land -- owned by a campaign donor. So much for good planning.
Another way to address driving is hike up the tax on parking lots. Right now, driving in to a city can be faster AND cheaper then taking Metro. If it cost $30 instead of $10 or $15 to park, more people would metro. And Metro should drop its prices. It is the most expensive per mile in the country.
But then, we also need to fix metro. Right now, getting stuck on a metro train is like being stuck in an airplane on a tarmac. It can take a long time to get out, and communication stinks.
So we need to address all these things: we need to plan new communities better, and to provide reliable public transportation to existing communities. On those remote days when someone needs a car, a hybrid would be great.
When they found out how little they dealerships would make on repairs, they confiscated the leased cars from their drivers and said they would be donated to charity. Then they destroyed them in the desert. They only got caught by fly-over photographers.
Protecting the auto repair business is why the big auto makers want low CAFE (average fuel mileage) standards.
In Europe, with it's history of small neighborhood repair shops, they never structured the industry this way and should be able to survive low-maintenance and electric cars.
The Prius gets about 60 or so right?
So why isn't everyone driving a Prius???
My point is Americans have choice already from 10-60 MPG
Its up to US to choose.
I will say I think it would be a good idea to invest in technology that would enable 120 MPG faster but the bottom line the American public has to decide to purchase an 120 vehicle instead of one that gets 15 MPG
P.S. the market is working on this. Case in point toyota hybrids taking off while the big three continue to falter.
I had to wait two hours for them to find a white one with the options I had specified, but it was only two hours and I could have compromised and taken blue or silver/grey right away.
The Toyota dealers in NOVA are experts at pre-stocking right about what they know they'll sell.
Sometimes there is a wait of a few days, but that has not been very often.
The point is, "choice" is never in a vacuum - social, political, regulatory, economic, environmental, you name it.
Most cars today would be giving 50+ miles with conventional technology had the government pushed them to do so. My old geo prizm was giving me 40MPG in city drive.
Finally, we cannot choose better cars if the auto industry refuses to make them available. The automobile industry has a lot of power over what is available because not everyone can start a car factory.
The electric car documentary makes two interesting points: first, the cars took out of the market a vehicle that people wanted to have. Second, the hybrids from Japan were a response to the electric car, which in turn was developed to meet some kind of Californian regulation.
There are a couple of solutions I can see here.
1. Produce a powerful fast electric car. It can be done. Check out this nice piece of equipment. http://www.teslamoto...
This car goes 0-60 in about 4 seconds and costs about 2cents per mile to drive. It is prohibitively expensive and isolated to certain geographic locations right now. But the point is this is possible.
2. Develop more grain alcohol powered vehicles. This burns very clean and have you ever seen a funny car take off....DAMN those things are fast. We have crops like sugar cane and corn and switchgrass that would make great supplies for this production. A lot of cars existing today could be converted to use this fuel quite effectively.
There has been a proven market for a Prius and other hybrids. However I cannot buy one because it is not union made and not an American company. We should pressure more American companies to invest in these types of vehicles. I am sure that GM could use a few good cars and trucks to boost their market share.
A lot of this starts with the distribution system for alternative fuels. I could envision a few good companies buying older gas stations and converting them to alternative energy distribution centers.
All this talk about changing "our society" and the "way people live" is a bunch of hippie bullshit. The market cant fix everything but it can be used to great effect when we are able to direct its course to a certain extent. Imagine all these old hot rod fans sitting around talking about the new 0-60 in 3 seconds alcohol burning sports car that was just introduced. Think about tooling around in that totally sweet Tesla motors sportster.
And the electric car documentary seems to have made the point that the models that they had were fine to deal with normal driving. Maybe hotrodders wouldn't buy them, but I doubt that they were the market for electric cars in any case.
GM used to make Toyota and Japanese cars assembled in this country under the Geo or the Nova brand. I don't know if they still do. To me these cars were the best: Japanese technology, but built with American labor. :)
Most suburban moms don't need an SUV. They like the room and the POWER.
That is falling into the trap of trying to social engineer our way out of this mess. There will not be support for this method outside progressive circles. Think about how stubborn people are about this kind of stuff.
And the power you need has little to do with top speed. Power helps you get out of bad jams or out of the way of erring drivers or obstacles. I can't tell you how many times having the power to move out of the way has saved my ass.
Also the solutions I described should take far less time than the social engineering hippie bullshit would take. We need to keep our eye on the ball. The point is to save the planet from the growing ecological catastrophe that is of our making. Not to push people into living their lives the way we want them to.
If we want to succeed in this we need to use the powerful force of demand to fuel our efforts. If people want power and speed. Then lets give them ELECTRIC or ALCOHOL power and speed.
All what I am asking is that their efficiency should be higher under normal conditions, and this is a regulatory issue. I won't demand high efficiency when sudden bursts of power happen, but regular driving should give good gas mileage.
And unfortunately it seems that low mileage vehicles lower the bar for everyone else. Since we have SUV giving 10MPG, a 50MPG seems astronomically high. However, if the baseline were 30MPG, then
The low gas mileage from SUVs seem to have a lot more to do with regulations than with any engineering issue. Oh, and Detroit's unwillingness to spend money on research to create these vehicles.
The Who Killed the Electric Car docu was great in demonstrating how they are willing to give up on long term profit to gain big bucks now.
They can make a ton of money by developing a high performance high efficiency vehicle. It will just take longer to make the money as the buyers transition.
The tesla motors site has a great graph on the curve of performance versus efficiency.
I'm all for a free market place to a certain extent, but I see no reason not to say to the auto makers, sorry guys but you have to raise your fuel economy standards, tough break.
Does a nice job of tying all the discussion on the thread together
I am one of those few people who might have bought a honda accord hybrid someday as a clean performance vehicle.
PS. Rumor has it that Honda is going to introduce a clean diesel as a replacement in the next 1-2 years, that averages 50 miles per gallon.
However, this article proved that the demand for more powerful hybrids is not there yet
One of the sterotypes for the environmental movement in general is that we are a bunch of weanies who want to limit choice and freedom. Having 100-160 HP cars with great mileage is a good start but it only addresses a small subset of the population.
As the article states Chrysler is banking on big hybrid trucks, another market is hybrid performanec and hybrid luxury vehicles. I haven't seen any numbers on lexus hybrids but I don't think the demand is quite there yet just like for performance cars.
Its an evolving process
The Hybrid Camry mentioned in the article would possibly be a good choice for you if you wanted beter gas mileage :-)
1) regenerative braking - this feature makes the stop and go traffic of Northern Virginia vastly more acceptable.... I don't feel like I am wasting all the energy every time we stop for a light. I know I am still losing some, but no nearly as much in a traditional braking converts forward mementum into heat kind of car.
2) CVT (continuously variable transmission) - this feature makes for the smoothest shifting of gear ratios ever; vastly superior to both manual and automatic transmissions. There is no shifting gears clunk you get with mainstream automatics, and none of the "work" of manual shifting in heavy traffic. I demanded manual transmissions for years until I discovered the joys of CVT. I will not buy a non-CVT car again.
3) electric torque - the electric engine does not have a lot of raw horse power, but it has excellent torque, which means that off the line acceleration is very quick, and often without any gasoline at all (it takes some practice, but I routinely get my Prius up to 25 or 30 MPH without engaging the gasoline engine).
4) aux jack for your MP3 player or walkman, or whatever
5) bluetooth enabled hands-free connection to your own mobile phone (no high rates here)
6) 60/40 split folding rear seats so I can carry my recumbent bike without breaking it down!!! Prius has large cargo capacity if you have only the driver plus one passenger for the cargo trips, it continues to astonish me (as my Saab 9-5 Wagon did before the Prius). I routinely carry loads that could NOT be fit into a Ford Explorer or Toyota Highlander (hah, some utility in those gas-guzzling visual obstructions).
7) OK - so I confess, I do have a secret joy of getting 48-55 MPG as I silently cruise past people in their over-powered trucks... yeah, there is no lack of power in my car at all.