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Hybrids Beware? EPA Revises Mileage Standards
Shivetya writes "The federal Environmental Protection Agency announced a new system for determining the fuel economy of many cars and trucks. Hardest hit will be hybrids as all-electric driving is not considered. At the same time, many medium-duty vehicles will get rated, but not have to be published until 2011 This move to more realistic ratings will severely reduce the high numbers some cars have posted."
From the EPA site itself http://www.epa.gov/fueleconomy/420f06009.htm#fuele stimates
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A site to enter your own observed information http://www.fueleconomy.gov/mpg/MPG.do?action=addG
or lookup what others have recorded http://www.fueleconomy.gov/mpg/MPG.do?action=addG
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The big deal is that I get a "real world" 40 mpg out of my 96 Honda Civic, and I don't have a trunk full of toxic batteries. Sure all EPA gas mileage ratings are currently very optimistic, but they are especially optimistic for hybrids, and that's a problem.
The Prius is a great car, but you could almost certainly have gotten a non-hybrid car that was more efficient in real world driving at a much lower price. You wouldn't have to worry about batteries either. As a concrete example my 96 Civic gets much better gas real world mileage than my mother's 2005 Civic hybrid.
51.4% of a barrel of oil goes towards gasoline according to the state of California.
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I drive a diesel (VW Jetta) and it is awesome. No cold weather starting problems, either, even when I lived in central new york, where the temperature was regularly in the single digits. Most fuel sellers put additives in their diesel in the winter to prevent the fuel from gelling, and engines have very good glow plugs these days. The motors are even quiet and soot-free these days (unless you really floor the gas pedal)...every time I've told a passenger in my car that it's diesel, they've been surprised and/or didn't believe me.
It's also zippy as heck. The motor produces a ton of torque at really low RPMs so it feels a lot faster than it really is, but the feeling makes it a ton of fun to drive.
The biggest reason that more diesels aren't sold in the states is that California banned the sale of new ones. Several other states adopted California's emissions laws (New York and most of the northeastern states). Consequently not many car companies are interested in investing the time, effort (replace previous two words with 'money') to bring diesels to the US -- it's illegal to sell them in many states so it would be a lot of money spent for not much return in sales revenue.
You can buy used diesel passenger vehicles in any of those states, but it's hard to find them (since they were never sold as new there in the first place) and they fetch a premium. Case in point: I bought mine *used* for $19,500 in New Jersey (where new diesels are actually legal to sell), and it had 42k miles on it at the time. New, the car's sticker price was about $22,000. Now it has 60k miles on it and my car will fetch $21,000 without too much trouble (I live in California these days). It's kind of a shame they aren't more common, as the mileage is good (36 city/50 highway is my real-world driving).
Before people call me a diesel zealot, I'll definitely mention the bad things: they are bad in that they create more particulate in their exhaust, which has been shown in studies to be a carcinogen. Old-skool diesel fuel sold in the US also contained lots of sulfur, which created sulfur dioxide in the exhaust, which in turn created acid rain. The sulfur also prevented good catalytic converters from being used, so diesels create way more NOx. Now that we have low-sulfur diesel in the US, I think diesel cars will become quite a bit better...but the reputation they garnered as smoking, smelly, sooty, bad-for-the-environment cars through the 70s and 80s will probably hurt their chance at widespread adoption in the US.
Diesel is also interestingly becoming more expensive than gasoline where I live. I find it funny, because diesel fuel is a lot easier to produce than gasoline, or so my fuel engineer friend tells me. Still, mile for mile diesel fuel is cheaper, since I get about the double the mileage that I would in a similar gasoline vehicle...
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The old Honda Civic VX (straight gasoline) could get 50+ MPG and it was considerably better on the highway. My mom got 55-60 MPG with her VX on the highway, but it dropped to 45-50 in city driving.
All current hybrids use NiMH batteries, which have no cadmium toxicity issues (unlike NiCd). They're soon going to switch to Li-ion because the specific power (kW/kg) and energy (Wh/kg) are better with some of the new chemistries.
Li-ion batteries have few toxicity issues either, and the new chemistries like iron phosphate and titanium spinel have even less.
Of course, it still makes sense to recycle batteries instead of landfilling them. Lead-acid car batteries are already the most-recycled items in the USA, and the more valuable the materials in the battery (nickel, lithium, cobalt in the old Li-ions) the more attractive it will be to recycle them.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
The only way to put to charge the Prius's battery is by putting gasoline into it's tank. It has no external charging solution from the factory and adding your own invalidates the warranty. All-electric mode just means there is enough residual charge to propel the car, that charge got there by running it's gasoline engine.
Yep I love diesel as much as the next diesel freak, however, VW, the one and only major manufacturer selling diesel cars in the US, is sending only one diesel vehicle to the US for '07: the V10 Touareg TDI, priced at ~$60k... Ostensibly, the reason for this would seem to be that they don't want to deal with our revised emissions standards.
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In my limited experience Diesels have lots more engine compression braking. I used to drive a Nissan PU with a SD25 diesel. Gear down, let of the clutch and get pulled over by the cops to check your brake lights.
With a 22.5 to 1 compression ratio (close to 500 lbs engine compression) it had lots of engine braking.
I think the difference is that this engine had a butterfly valve in the intake hooked up to the throttle and a vacuum line to the fuel pump for throttle operation and others have the throttle connected straight to the fuel pump with no valve in the manifold to create vacuum.
Another nice thing about that engine that given a hill to jump start it you didn't need electric power for it to run.
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I know this is probably flamebait anyway, but I'll bite. First off, saying American people like to drive "big SUV which have lazy fat motors" is like saying Europeans drive cars that make them look stuck up. There are plenty of people who don't like big SUVs. Why do you think Toyotas, Hondas, and Hyundais sell so well in America? Fuel stingy Toyota has already surpassed Ford and its lazy fat (discontinued) Excursion in market share, so what does that tell you? I'm not defending many Americans' decision to drive fuel inefficient vehicles, but I won't go so far as to take that choice away from them. I do wish that Europeans' tastes' for diesels would reach our shores. I think they are a great alternative to anemic small displacement gas engines and hybrids. As for American cars' "several decades old" motors, that may have been true even 8 years ago, but today is the exception rather than the rule. Look at Ford's Duratec, GM's Ecotec and LSx engines. Even the small block Chevy, now in its 53rd year, bears little resemblence to the original, or event o its predecessor from 3-4 years ago.
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Going up grade the car performs great. Last week I drove up to Flagstaff and had no problems maintaining 65 for the 5-10 mile stretches of 5-7% grade with 4 people in the car. The electric engine augments the ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) and that helps the performance.
On the A/C front, the Prius has a multistage compressor so the hit on the car is minimal under moderate heat. I see plenty of hot conditions out here and the milage doesn't seem to be effected much at all even at maximum cooling. If anything, the mileage is a bit lower in cold conditions due to the engine running longer to bring the engine up to temp for emisions management. It also is an ELECTRIC motor compressor so the power used is not directly from the gas engine. That should help with the new EPA tests.
Do I drive like a type "A" personality? No, that never did appeal to me to race up to a stop light to get one car ahead. I do drive to take advantage of the car I have. YMMV.
The big deal is that I get a "real world" 40 mpg out of my 96 Honda Civic,
What nobody is posting is the fuel ratings for many diffrent styles of driving. Highway and city are fine, but what about all the mail delivery and newspaper routes. During the big storm in Louisana, many people simply ran out of gas on the freeway because they were getting less than 5 MPG in the creep and stop driving. I hope the EPA includes local delivery estimates to the mix.
I do have a Prius. I have stuck a kilowatt inverter in it. It doubles as an emergency generator. I have run for days at a time off it. It would start, run at a fast idle for about 5 minutes and shut down again and repeat in about 20 minutes. A regular car would be out of gas in under 24 hour sitting at idle. I use about 1/8 of a tank a day running this way while running a couple CF lights, the fireplace blower, the small TV, the fridg, and a small chest freezer. I ran that way for an ice storm that knocked out the power for 2 days. When I ran low on gas, I filled it and still got 32 MPG on that tank. (my all time low) Not bad for 2 days of running getting 0 MPG and a week of commuting.
I would have never been able to do that with a conventional car.
The choice of a car sometimes comes down to more than just a replacement for public transportation.
I would like to see the real world numbers for letter carriers and city buses.
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