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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."
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*
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??
/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.
/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.
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
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
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
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.
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.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
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?
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
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.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
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.
Have gnu, will travel.