Auto Mileage Standards Raised to 35 mpg

Ponca City, We Love You writes "The Senate just passed a bill that will increase auto mileage standards for the first time in three decades. The auto industry's fleet of new cars, sport utility vehicles, pickup trucks and vans will have to average 35 mpg by 2020, a significant increase over the 2008 requirement of 27.5 mpg average. For consumers, the legislation will mean that over the next dozen years auto companies will likely build more diesel-powered SUVs and gas-electric hybrid cars as well as vehicles that can run on 85 percent ethanol. Automakers had vehemently opposed legislation in June that contained the same mileage requirements and Fortune magazine reported that American automakers were starting the miles-per-gallon race far behind Japan and that the new standards could doom US automakers. At the time, Chrysler officially put the cost of meeting the proposed rules at $6,700 per vehicle. The White House announced the President will sign the bill if it comes to his desk."

Comments

It's about damn time

[MadUndergrad]

I'm glad they're finally getting to this. As for Detroit, they'd have been better off if they hadn't had to be dragged kicking and screaming into this if the bill gets signed. Although given that the deadline is 2020 it seems like they have more than enough time to do this. Between nutating and gerotor engines it seems like the technology is just waiting to be taken seriously by an industry stuck in the 1960's.

Re:It's about damn time

[shmlco]

Unfortunately, in the last decade or so of the American idea of "innovation" has been to build ever-larger SUVs and trucks. And built by-and-large in the same factories, on the same lines, and using the same parts as their predecessors.

Radically changing engines or drive trains or anything else would mean expensive retooling and redesign and research, all things that tend to impact next quarter's profits. The Japanese, on the other hand, seem to actually have been paying attention to events outside of the NY Stock Exchange, and spent considerable time and effort on technologies like the hybrid and in making their existing models even more efficient.

The result? Once again the Japanese are making small fuel-efficient vehicles while the US was making big heavy gas guzzlers. And again they're eating Detroit's lunch.

And deservedly so.

by 2020...

[sethawoolley]

35 mpg average, not including all the except vehicles in their fleet, like the Hummer.

Seriously, why else do you think Bush is going to sign it -- it looks like a good thing when it isn't.

Legislation that's just good enough to keep pace with the status quo is exactly what the auto industry wanted. They know that if they completely succeeded in opposing the legislation, that they'd face consumer revolt. And as long as everybody else has to keep up with the status quo -- the most cost-effective manner for them -- then they don't have to worry too much about being undercut by companies in Korea and China that don't have emission controls. Instead, they only have to worry about Japanese and European cars, which they'll likely never be able to beat.

All in all, it's a good deal for the auto industry, and a bad deal for the customer, as we'll never get an incoming Democratic administration to support higher CAFE standards in the future. Last time they were raise significantly was during Reagan. His administration also introduced the catalytic converter as a requirement, too. *sigh*

Re:by 2020...

[DavidShor]

How exactly is it a *gain* to the consumer to mandate higher prices in cars? Sometimes, higher fixed costs, and resulting better mileage, are outweighed by lower operating(gasoline) costs. In fact, higher oil prices make this situation much more common.

Car makers, wishing to capitalize on this demand to increase sales, then proceed to produce fuel efficient models for this subgroup of consumers, while continuing sales of less efficient but cheaper cars to other consumers.

Where does the government come into this?

Re:by 2020...

[Knuckles]

Where does the government come into this?

It was invited to the party by yet another market failure.

Re:by 2020...

[squiggleslash]

How exactly is it a *gain* to the consumer to mandate higher prices in cars?

Two reasons: because the TCO of the average vehicle will be much lower than if the mandate hadn't happened, and in the long term the US auto industry will continue to exist and therefore there will be more competition than there would have been had the industry gone under, as it very nearly did in the 1970s when similar myopia meant a sudden increase in fuel prices almost caused the entire industry's collapse.

On the TCO point: remember too that we're not just talking about money saved by having the vehicles consume less gas, but also in lower gas prices (than would otherwise be) because demand is lower.

The automotive industry is one area where the unregulated free market consistently fails over and over and over again to work to the betterment of the consumer. If it wasn't for government intervention, we'd be paying much higher prices for lower quality vehicles exclusively imported from overseas.

Re:by 2020...

[Knuckles]

Yeah, "market failure" was probably the wrong word. As usual, the market as such was successful. But, also as usual, since it is a non-ideal (ie., real) market with arbitrary rules and constraints it efficiently optimized for the creation and perpetuation of a situation nobody particularly cares for and few profit from.

Very optimistic

[Average_Joe_Sixpack]

By 2020 the world may very much on the other side of the peak.

Why aren't they doing this /anyway/?

[Tastecicles]

The whole idea of engine design and track testing is to get the most out of your pint of gasoline. I's called cash economy. If a car maker isn't prepared to do their homework and give me an engine that will pull the maximum mileage out of my hydrocarbons then I'm not going to apologise for going elsewhere. I mean, /just what exactly is the point/ of building a car that does 150-200mph, when the only place you can open up to that kind of speed is on a racetrack??

Two things need to happen here for the automakers to get their fingers out of their arses or die like the dinosaurs of the 1970's.

1. Tell the automakers they have zero time to build a car that complies wit hthe /old/ standards, and /two years/ to build one that complies with the /new/ standards. Then cry open season on the local market for the foreign makers who are /already there/ with their ecobugs. That's right, drop the insane tariffs on foreign cars and give people real choice: SUV that pulls 8 to the gallon or the Honda that does 60.

2. Give the people incentive to choose the ecobug. Hike gas prices to come in line with eg the UK. We're paying the equivalent of /ten Dollars US/ per gallon of gasoline! So, DAMN RIGHT we're preferring economical cars. Not all of us can afford a £55 bill every time we fill up, particularly considering the forty five minutes each of us spend commuting to and from work /every single day/. Just waiting in the queues burns petrol, and most people I know if they get stuck in standing traffic will turn the engine off. Just to save money.

Re:Why aren't they doing this /anyway/?

[cpt kangarooski]

Urban density is a good thing. But if you really do want to lie in the wide-open countryside, you can do that too: just become a farmer, rather than some schmuck who wastes time and increasingly precious and so-far irreplaceable energy resources commuting a hundred miles a day.

Really, the idea that cities would not be dense, or that commutes would even be possible, is a quite recent aberration, and evidently not a sustainable one.

Re:Why aren't they doing this /anyway/?

[cpt kangarooski]

You really can't just say this and have us accept it without any justifying arguements.

It's always seemed pretty self-evident to me.

But for starters, transportation is inherently inefficient in terms of time and money. Ideally, your home, your place of work, all the people you want to meet, all the cultural activities you want to engage in, and all the goods and services you want to use, would be right at your fingertips, all the time. The next best thing is for them to be only a very short distance away, so that you can get to them (or have them come to you) quickly and cheaply. Since it is also more efficient for shareable resources to be shared (e.g. it's better to have one centrally located store for many customers than one store per customer at the customer's current location) you'll want densely populated areas to place these things.

For example, I live in a city; I don't need a car and so I don't own one, as it would merely be a waste of money to maintain, store, and keep registered and insured. Yet most of the things I need or enjoy (e.g. groceries, libraries, hospitals) are within only a few minutes' walk. Because I live along a transit line, I can swiftly, cheaply, and efficiently go from place to place in my city. I happen to live in a different part of the city than where I work. Of course, this isn't true of everyone. Still, I get to work a lot faster than if I drove, I don't have to look for parking (and most likely pay for it), and I can spend the short commuting time I do have in more interesting pursuits than crawling through traffic. I could take a cab, but that would be even more expensive.

Really, the only way that cities wouldn't be the ideal would be if we could teleport cheaply to anyplace (e.g. Larry Niven's Flash crowd or Dan Simmons' Hyperion).

OTOH, it sucks having everything far apart; it takes a long time, and more money in order to go anywhere to do anything. Further, you can't use mass transit, which is quite efficient, but have to move everyone individually. Providing resources is also costly; rural mail and electrification cost a lot due to the long distances involved. Sometimes it's unavoidable; as I said, I don't have any complaints about people who live in the middle of nowhere because they must (farmers, mainly, as well as some people who provide services for them, such as a small-town doctor). I do, however, have little good to say about people who don't need to live far out, and who, in fact, try to make country-to-city commutes frequently.

Read some Jefferson if you want some thoughtful exploration of the evils of large cities.

IIRC his biggest complaint, other than that they had different attitudes from Virginia gentry farmers, was that they were unhygenic. I'd say that that would be true of late 18th and early 19th century cities. In the early 21st century, we seem to have that problem pretty well taken care of.

High density cities are not the 'norm'

Traditionally, they are. Cities have generally been small in area and densely packed. It wasn't practical to have a spread-out city for several reasons and poor transportation infrastructure for food, fuel, and water, tended to keep most of the population in the country... often supplying resources to cities. Cities started to take off with the invention of the locomotive, and really took off with the use of steel structural members for buildings, which raised the density ceiling immensely. (Our main problem now is vertical transportation; it's tricky to balance the number of elevators you have with usable area per floor. I suspect that the answer will be in interconnecting buildings at height to remove the bottleneck of everyone having to go to the ground floor all the time)

We are not honeybees, who crowd into hives. Human culture can spread out.

The real question is whether it can sustainably do so. I'd prefer for human civilization to endure rather than to burn itself out. We certainly cannot keep living as we do, so something's going to have to give.

Re:Why aren't they doing this /anyway/?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. It's amazing what you can do with American autoworkers as long as you aren't saddled with UAW work rules.

Seriously. Look at what happened with Saturn's quality when they got too big for Spring Hill, and additional Saturn production had to be added at a plant where the UAW demanded the traditional union work rules be used. Did the Saturn engineers magically get dumber because a second plant was opened? Then don't tell me the problem is with American engineering. Flexibility and initiative are actively punished by the normal UAW work rules, while laziness and incompetence are shielded. The result is a crappy job done in the plant, resulting in crappy cars.

You want to make the Detroit automakers competitive? Bust the fucking union. Void the contracts, repeal the Wagner Act, directly outlaw the UAW itself, RICO anybody who tries to revive it outside the law.

Too little too late

[Doug Neal]

And by 2020 the rest of the world will be on 70mpg. And then there's electric cars. The Tesla Roadster has proven that the technology is viable - by 2020 there will surely be a wider and affordable range of electric vehicles.

The smart thing for the American manufacturers to do would be to start using Japanese or European engines and start achieving 30-40mpg now, while they develop their own technology.

Ethanol and diesel

[zakezuke]

I was looking for alternative fuel to my self back in the early 1990s. I commuted to work, and fuel at $1.00/gal was an expense, a legit expense but regardless. My first choice for a retrofit was Natural Gas as your typical carbonated vehicle, which was normal at the time requires very little modification. Just shut off the petrol supply and add an air air mixer, adjust the timing and poof. The ONLY reason I didn't shell out the couple of grand to do the conversion was the simple fact that there was NO place with in 30 miles I could fuel up.

Ethanol looks attractive, more so now that fuel is in excess of $3.00/gal. Brazil tried switching in the 1980s IIRC and last I checked continued to promote the use of the sugar beet surplus to make Ethanol.

Turbo diesel engines on the other hand look even more attractive. Diesel makes MORE sense for SUVs and trucks than petrol or Ethanol, and AFAIK is are much more flexable as far as the fuel medium due to the very high compression ratio and fuel injection at the top of the stroke cycle.

Methane, while not as practical to store as fuels which are liquid at standard pressures, is another form of fossil / renewable we should look into as well. We produce a ton of waste, some is converted to tegro, a form of fertilizer made from human waste.

But regardless of the path America decides to go as far as fuel, we NEED good public transportation.

Re:Fuel Efficiency and E85

[tm2b]

The thing is, the CO2 is not from carbon being pulled out of the ground but instead from carbon dioxide being scrubbed by crops from the atmosphere, so it's atmospheric CO2-neutral regardless of the efficiency.

Re:Only 35?

[Oscar_Wilde]

Different engines have drastically different amounts of CO2/Gallon emissions.
 
This would of course be because some engines use the CO2 to produce pixie dust rather than releasing it into the air, yes?
 
Burning a gallon of gas will produce the same amount of CO2 regardless of what type of engine you do it in. It's not like some engines have a magical device for transmuting the carbon in their fuel carbon another element.

Good for now, crappy for future

[Iloinen Lohikrme]

Actually 6,7 L/100KM is moderate for now, but in 2020 that should be considered more or less crap. In example new BMW 3-series with 3 liter diesel gets 6,1 L/100 KM and the 2 liter version gets 4,8 L/100KM. Even X3 with 2 liter diesel gets 6,5 L/100 KM. So in that sense that todays cars can get to that standard easily, it's really abysmal to set the standard for the future on the level what can be achieved in today.

In my opinion the standards should be set so that they make the car industry to invent and make innovations in order to stay in business. Actually in developed markets, I would say that it's actually a good way to protect own car industry by setting the standards higher as then the low cost low R&D manufacturers from developing countries can be easily closed from the markets. Thought as the US car industry really hasn't spend any money to R&D in the last 20 years, maybe in the point of view of US administration, that wouldn't be so good idea.

Some numbers

[Aaron Isotton]

Disclaimer: I'm a European and am not familiar with the US Auto Mileage Standards regulation, or the US in general. Still, as most Europeans, I find the American love for big cars a bit funny.

I somehow think that the $6700 extra per car is highly exaggerated. Your average European or Japanese car is already there, and they're not more expensive than the American cars (at least not in Europe, if you exclude the luxury cars). I mean, you can get an *entire new car* for about $9000 (not a very big one, though). On the other hand the current development of the Euro and the US Dollar will probably make European cars less and less attractive for US residents. I don't know about the Japanese ones, though.

Assuming that the average car does 100k miles in its lifetime, the new regulations imply that it'll use 100k/35 = 2857 gallons instead of 100k/27.5 = 3636 gallons. That's 779 gallons saved. At a price of $4 per gallon that's $3116 saved. Which is less than $6700.

Assuming that it does 200k miles that's $6232. Still less than $6700, but much closer.

At European gas prices (I'm taking $7/gallon) the saved costs would be $5453 and $10906.

Assuming that gas prices in the US go up another bit, that the $6700 are exaggerated and that your car will run 150k miles, I don't see the big deal. The costs are about the same, with the additional benefit of wasting less fuel. If you don't buy a bigger car than what you actually need, you might even save some money.

Re:LIES, and Numbers are all garbage

[The Master Control P]

Dear sir, please complete the following before posting on Slashdot again:

1. Finish your drug bender.
2. Look into grouping sentences which share a theme into seperate blocks (commonly called "paragraphs"), why this is a good idea, and how to do this on Slashdot.
3. Try to focus on one or a few topics when writing your post; Incoherently stumbling through a dozen or so makes for a poor reception.

Although without a basic understanding of geology, thermodynamics, and governance your post will still be devoid of meaningful content, at least it can be devoid in style. Okay? Cheers!

Re:destroy the US automakers ?

[savuporo]

Huh ? Each and every market, except for maybe in Burundi or Mongolia exists in a regulatory environment. Regulations are there to protect your ass.
Each and every company HAS to comply with the regulations of that market AND be able to compete. Is that news to you ?
Otherwise it would be OK for car companies to whine about passing safety tests and supplying airbags as well. Your comment is a non sequitur.

Americans should just stop with big engines!

[Xafier]

I don't mean to be offensive but it seems from my POV in the UK that Americans (and other countries like Australia?) need to stop putting such damn big engines in cars/pickups. I mean seriously, there is no need for everyone to own a vehicle with a 3.0 litre or bigger engine. A big engine in a normal car (non sport) in the UK is around 2.0 litre? Something like a Ford Mondeo? My car (Peugeot 107) has a 1.0 litre engine, it does upto 60MPG, although I usually get 50 - 55 out of it in the current cold weather, and it gets me to and from work fine and is plenty fast enough for motorway driving too. It has extremely low emissions, one of the lowest of any car you can buy at the moment. Unless you need to carry passengers regularly or your constantly transporting things in your car then there is no need for a big car with a big engine, its just pointless! Wasting your money, wasting oil and ruining the environment!

Re:I certainly hope "gallon" is well-defined

[Xafier]

I would hope by 2020 we have mostly moved away from petrol and diesel, as with the current consumption rates worldwide by 2020 were going to be struggling to keep up with demand for oil based fuels. Perhaps it would be better to write bills that clearly define a set of environmental impact limits, ie a maximum CO2 per mile limit or some other such way of determining the impact on the environment. And by definition does that mean that all electric cars will be illegal as they don't use any gallons of anything?

Gas is too cheap!

[Stoertebeker]

Regulating fuel consumption (and exempting the really big guzzlers) is just the wrong way to manage technology. All it does is tell the industry to get up to current standard (in 13 years) and not to innovate any more than needed.

The best way to improve efficiency is market forces. Once gas is expensive enough to be a real consideration when buying a vehicle, people might actually see past the marketing hype and realize they don't need that huge StupidUglyVehicle after all.

Yes, gas got expensive enough to get people to complain. But for most families it's still less than their cable bill. Clearly not something that would change habits.

Another major component in reducing fuel consumption or CO2 emissions is modifying our behavior: number of trips, distances traveled, and god help us car-pools and public transport. Raising the mileage standard does nothing on any of these fronts. Increasing gas prices gives a strong incentive to reduce consumption in any way possible.

Re:destroy the US automakers ?

[savuporo]

In case you havent noticed, bascially all large markets are regulated by governments. Oh yeah, i forgot about crackheads ..

If Microsoft would state that they cant unbundle IE or Media Player from their products because they would not "make it" would anyone feel sorry ? Or RIAA complaining that without DRM sanctions, they cant make it on the music markets ?
Who gives a rats ass, there are better technology solutions waiting take over.

Its not a US vs Japanese automakers thing either. Both sides are scrambling to get electric-dominant drivetrains in their vehicles, look at GM Volt, Saab and Volvo plugin plans, even Ford plugs their SUVs in now.
Mitsubishi, Subaru, Nissan and Renault have stated that they will have none of this hybrid nonsense, they all have full battery electrics in the pipeline.
So if some sorry ass german automakers cant make it, because they have sat on their arses for too long, who will cry ?

Re:1:14 isn't much

[kmac06]

CO2 is not a pollutant.

Re:Waiting for the oil to run out will hurt much m

[kmac06]

If you want an economical car, go ahead! I'm not trying to stop you. But don't tell me what car to drive when it's not hurting anyone. "No oil" will not happen, the price will just continue to increase until there is a natural (i.e. free market) transition to alternative energy sources. So the price of plastic will increase...big deal, it's super cheap anyway right now. I certainly won't be spending $6,500 more on plastics if the price of oil goes to $300/barrel.

Re:Only 35?

[squiggleslash]

Because US auto makers are stupid, and need it forced upon them?

According to TFA, the US auto industry has argued that it shouldn't product cars that are fuel efficient, even in the face of crippling fuel price rises, because the Japanese are so much better at it than they are.

Essentially, the US auto industry is saying "Please, please, please let us commit suicide while fucking up the environment as much as possible while we do it". Congress is, rightly, saying "Do you have any fucking idea what the destruction of the entire US auto industry will do to the economy and the environment?" They're being the poster child for how Lassez Faire is not always sane, rational, policy.

Re:Only 35?

[cheater512]

MPG is only weakly related to CO2 emissions?

Odd. I thought the combustion of petrol split up the hydrocarbons in to CO2, CO, H2O and a few other things.
One gallon of gasoline will pretty much always give out the same amount of CO2.

Now assuming the amount of miles you travel stays the same, if the MPG is higher doesnt that mean less gasoline is burnt?

In addition to lower CO2 emissions, it also has the benefits of reducing our dependency on oil and giving us more cash to spend.

Please do correct me if my logic is wrong but it seems valid to me.

Re:Only 35?

[Lumpy]

Thank you very much. I have this argument monthly with PRius and other hybrid owners that hate it when you pierce their cloud. I drive Suzuki cars. I have a Suzuki 4WD SUV that get's 32mpg, and a Suzuki(geo) car that regularly get's 44mpg both achieving "hybrid" mileage with far lower technology engine and drivetrain systems. My point in regular car milage debates is that we have had the tech to get high mileage for decades, it's that the car makers in the USA refuse to make them. My first car a VW TDI pickup truck (well a VW rabbit with a pickup rear-end) got over 45mpg all the time and it was made in 1982. The BMW Iseta got over 50mpg, and many cars in europe do this daily.

The favored argument is that the 40mpg their prius is getting is better for the air than my 44mpg I get with my Geo Metro.

As a side observation: why do they buy a hybrid and then continue to drive it like idiots destroying the MPG capabilities of the car? They still drive at 90mph, drag race to the next stop light, etc...

Re:Only 35?

[petermgreen]

And to preempt a flood of angry responses, I believe in Global Warming and Emissions control. But MPG and carbon tailpipe emissions are only weakly correlated. Instead of wasting large amounts of money on improving MPG, we could focus these resources on CO2 control.
The ammount of carbon in the fuel is pretty much fixed. And what goes into the engine must come out.

Some comes out as CO2, for the most part this is the preffered outcome, it causes global warming but thats about it. It also represents a complete burn (which means the maximum energy was extracted from the fuel.
Some comes out as CO, this is posious so we really want to keep it to a minimum.
It could come out as partiuclates or unburnt hydrocarbons, theese tend to also cause major problems and represent severe wastage of fuel.

So if we want to reduce CO2 emmisions (which are belived to be the main cause of global warming) we either need to reduce fuel consumption, increase emmisions of things that are even worse or somehow put the CO2 into permanent storage (which is not going to be practical for road vehircles).

Ethanol subsidies are bad policy

[sjbe]

Why exactly is Corn Ethanol a good thing? Haven't we caused enough food riots and inflation worldwide with this policy?

It's not. You are absolutely correct. The main useful effect of subsidizing corn/maize derived ethanol is to drive up food prices. Much/most of the food eaten here in the US has some corn/maize component in it. It does not in any substantial way reduce our oil dependency, it uses valuable arable land, and it is basically a handout to farmers who are already subsidized quite heavily. Like steel tariffs it benefits a few at the expense of the rest of society.

I have no beef with ethanol being a part of our energy supply, particularly from bio-waste. Diversity in energy sources is a good thing. But corn derived ethanol is just a terrible product to subsidize.

Re:Only 35?

[Temkin]

I have this argument monthly with PRius and other hybrid owners that hate it when you pierce their cloud. I drive Suzuki cars. I have a Suzuki 4WD SUV that get's 32mpg, and a Suzuki(geo) car that regularly get's 44mpg both achieving "hybrid" mileage with far lower technology engine and drivetrain systems. My point in regular car milage debates is that we have had the tech to get high mileage for decades, it's that the car makers in the USA refuse to make them.

The Prius and Civic hybrids are "look at me" cars. The TDI's are easily their equal with 10+ year old tech, and the VW Lupo (not available in the US...) is just in a different class altogether.

I have a '71 Super Beetle in my garage currently being restored. It has a 1940's technology air cooled 1.6l flat 4 in it that can be coerced to get around 35 mpg. The only difference I can see between the modern domestic compact cars and it are: 1. Safety, airbags & crumple zones. 2. Smog. The Bug will put out 100x more emissions than any modern car. (Which is why it might get converted to electric...)

Wolf!

[shmlco]

So true. Remember how they cried wolf when the Clean Air act passed and mandatory air efficiency guidelines were set into effect? That too was going to cost the consumer "thousands" of dollars and also be the end of the American auto industry. Didn't happen.

Unfortunately, while 35MPG sounds good the bill is little more than a whitewash, with a loophole large enough to drive an SUV through. Apparently once again the 35MPG is a "fleet" standard, so not every vehicle has to meet it as long as the fleet as a whole does.

Worse, vehicles get a 50% milage "credit" if they're ethanol-friendly. Add $50 or so worth of corrosion-resistant fittings and seals to that Chevy Subdivision so it can burn E85, and bingo: that 20MPG land bruiser now gets 30MPG in the eyes of the bill, raising fleet averages considerably.

And which in passing gives yet another sop to the corn/ethanol industry.

Did you honestly think they'd pass a bill that managed to do something positive?

Re:Wolf!

[Martin Blank]

Apparently once again the 35MPG is a "fleet" standard, so not every vehicle has to meet it as long as the fleet as a whole does.

It's very difficult to get some vehicles to that level. While the muscle cars are slowly moving up and will probably reach that mark (and probably well short of 2020), large trucks and SUVs have a lot of mass to move, and there's a legitimate market niche for them. If the company comes up with a couple of vehicles that exceed 50mpg, are you not willing to grant them any concession at all for a larger vehicle that comes up a bit short? (I do agree that any ethanol credit such as you say is in the bill is insane, as ethanol is a complete dead-end and should not get this kind of encouragement.)

Re:Wolf!

[DavidTC]

That too was going to cost the consumer "thousands" of dollars and also be the end of the American auto industry. Didn't happen.

In fact, if it hadn't passed, there's a good argument to be made that the US auto industry would be royally screwed right now.

Re:Wolf!

[shmlco]

A truck is one thing, but SUVs are not currently "niche" products, but mainstream ones. I think it's telling that many automakers are now extolling the virtues of smaller "cross-over" vehicles that should easily be able to hit the 35MPG mark. ( A RAV-4 already does 30, I think.) Reduce the size and mass and things get quite a bit easier, don't they?

I personally would have liked to have seen 50MPG by 2020 for cars, and 30MPG for trucks (and an SUV is NOT a truck).

Or are you saying that given 12 years of R&D those numbers are impossible to hit?

35MPG on a fleet-wide scale by 2020? That puts the bar too low to be a meaningful target.

Re:Wolf!

[General Wesc]

Unfortunately, while 35MPG sounds good the bill is little more than a whitewash, with a loophole large enough to drive an SUV through. Apparently once again the 35MPG is a "fleet" standard, so not every vehicle has to meet it as long as the fleet as a whole does.

That's not a loophole. That's an intelligent, effective solution. In order to meet the standards, car companies can either improve all cars to X MPG (very expensive) or subsidise high-MPG vehicles, thus allowing people to get large vehicles if they really want and making it easier for low-income people to get fuel-efficient vehicles. Both solutions have the same effect on emissions, yet the latter does so without taking away people's freedom to drive a ridiculously massive SUV and with the added bonus of rewarding people for buying fuel-efficient vehicles.

I do think the E85 part should be removed.

Re:Wolf!

[arivanov]

Yep, and that is why Bush is signing it. The bill has nothing to do with emissions, greenhouse gases, damage to the environment and so on. It all has to do with reducing USA dependency on Gulf Oil.

As far as the MPG, my Honda FRV (diesel) which is a big 6 seater (it still does 0-60 in 9s) does 50+ in summer and 40 winter. My wife's car which is a 2003 Daihatsu Siron once again hits 0-60 in sub-9s and does 52 MPG in the summer (if you do not drive in a binary manner). So frankly 35 MPG is a joke. Any self-respecting non-US car manufacturer is way past that already.

Re:Wolf!

[afidel]

The Ford Escape Hybrid already gets 34MPG city, with a little work all but the heaviest SUV's and trucks should be able to hit 35MPG.

Re:Only 35?

[DavidTC]

Bingo. Anyone thinks this bill is not a good idea was not alive or awake during the 70s.

People think that the car market has a long lag time, so the auto industry can respond fast enough to changes in the market as gas prices rise.

Wrong. The used car market has a long lag time, in that cars will stay on the road a very long time, but that doesn't help the automobile manufacturers. The new car market switches around near instantly, and we've already see gas-guzzlers sales start to drop.

And it takes a long time to develop new cars and technologies to make them more fuel efficient.

Unless we want a repeat of what happened to the US market in the 70s, except worse, we need to make auto makers get off their ass and actually learn how to competitively produce high mileage cars, as that is the only sort of car people are going to be buying in five years.

I helped my mother buy a new car recently, and her first and second consideration was 'What is the gas mileage?'. Do you think she bought American? Nope, her choice was eventually between Honda and Toyota, because she could actually buy a largeish four-door with 35 MPGs for a reasonable price.

Never underestimate large masses of stupid people

[caseih]

The answer is simple. And you will likely not believe it. The reason is that there simply is no demand for it. People, on the whole, are demanding that cars have lots of horsepower, lots of acceleration. They don't want little wimpy cars. All of the major US auto makers (Ford and GM at the moment; Chrysler is not a US automaker anymore) have made little gutless, high-mileage cars, and they can't sell enough of them to even pay for the R&D costs of developing them. So despite the outcry on slashdot, as a whole people just don't want what the government is seeing fit to mandate. In Europe and Asia, cars are smaller and much more efficient. The people there don't seem to want bigger, more powerful vehicles. So those companies are producing cars with higher mileage and doing just fine. Sadly here in the US we're the ones responsible for what GM and Ford are. And forcing through regulation rather than trying to change the attitudes of consumers, will just end up in the end killing Ford and GM and eliminating 10s of thousands of jobs from our own economy.

Oh and electric cars? No demand on the scale that would break even the costs. It wasn't GM that killed the electric car back in the 90s (whenever that was). It was a combination of very immature technology and total and utter consumer apathy. GM lost a lot of money on that little venture. They couldn't actually sell the cars because to do so would have been a huge loss for them, so they just leased them. And when the car was deemed "finished," GM brought them all back and destroyed them. Because the cost to GM of leaving them with the few people that wanted them would have been far too high in terms of GM's maintenance obligations.

Ironically, it's these large, gas guzzling SUVs that stand to benefit the most from hybrid technology. They are already large enough to easily replace the transmission with the hybrid module. Then in city driving an SUV should actually get close to 30 MPG, and have the perceived increase in acceleration (perceived power) that people think they want.

In short, it's all of us who keep the auto industry back. Computer-controlled, constantly variable transmissions for optimal engine efficiency? Nope, it feels too unnatural and the acceleration feels poor, even though it's actually better: put in artificial shift points so I can feel my body pushing back into the seat as I accelerate in spurts. Electrically-controlled breaks? No way! what happens when a wire is cut? Too dangerous! More efficient vehicles? Oh yeah, as long as I can accelerate off the light to 25 MPH in 1 second flat! Oh, and I might need to go 90 MPH on the freeway too. Oh, and I want to be able to drive 500 miles on on tank of gas. But it's so wrong that it costs me $130 to fill up my tank every day. Someone needs to do something.

Re:Now for those of us...

[Just Some Guy]

could you please put your numbers in SI?

I hate measuring consumption instead of mileage. Calculating range is easier when using distance per quantity: multiply the quantity left by the constant and there you go.

Also, mileage lends itself to handier values; as cars improve, the mileage numbers grow and occupy a higher range of values. With consumption, values asymptotically approach zero. Comparing 100mpg with 80mpg is easier for most people (and probably quicker for all people) than comparing 2.35L/100km with 2.94L/100km. If you start getting into very high efficiencies, it's the difference between comparing 500:600mpg and .470:.392L/100km. While both are mathematically similar, the former is more intuitive for most people.

Re:Finally.

[ynososiduts]

I live in a poor city (Newark NJ), so my opinions may be a little distorted. The most popular cars around here, are civcs. Japanese and American compacts reign supreme here, and people love them. So I would appreciate it if you would stop generalizing. The USA is a big place, filled with many different people.

For the record, my car has a 1.8L inline 4 that gets 30+ MPG.

Unintended Consequences

[PPH]

Unfortunately, there's a loophole. When applying fuel economy standards to fleets of vehicles, it is necessary to exempt trucks over a certain size. If this isn't done, your food bill (and everything else) will go through the roof when your local supermarket takes its deliveries from fleets of hybrid mini-SUVs. Typically, this exemption is granted to vehicles over a certain GVW.

As Congress has sought to target the increasingly large vehicles that Americans seek to buy, the auto makers response is to market larger and larger GVW vehicles to the consumer segment of the population. While many people will end up buying the more economical vehicles, there is a certain segment of the population that cannot deal with the tradeoffs* in performance and will switch to the next larger size. Currently, our local GMC dealer is beginning to carry pickup trucks based on the 4500 Series. They are selling like hot cakes. Larger vehicles are also possible, depending on how the MPG standards are written.

*One interesting tradeoff has nothing to do with fuel economy, but rather with the IRS's treatment of vehicle expenses allowed for 'cars' (and other light vehicles) vs those allowed for heavy trucks. People who use vehicles for business purposes, even if these do not involve the hauling of goods or equipment, realize such a tax savings by purchasing a vehicle that qualifies as a large truck, that fuel costs just vanish in the economic equation. Until the IRS removes the penalties for using smaller vehicles, I anticipate that this trend will only continue.

Re:I doubt it

[cdrguru]

E85 is made mostly of diesel fuel from the tractors and harvesters used to grow the corn. If we went back to by-hand weeding and harvesting there wouldn't be a problem for jobs and we wouldn't be using oil to make ethanol. Sure, it is about a 1.1 to 1 ratio so there is a benefit to ethanol, but most of this benefit is a gift to highly mechanized corn farming.

Re:Only 35?

[cayenne8]

"The Prius and Civic hybrids are "look at me" cars. The TDI's are easily their equal with 10+ year old tech, and the VW Lupo (not available in the US...) is just in a different class altogether."

You've GOT to be kidding me? A look at me car?

The Prius has got to be just about the most fugly car I've ever seen?!?!

\ Gimme the sleek lines of a 911, or Vette.....or if you must go alternative...the Tesla.

Why can't they make the hybrid cars look nice for God's sake....?