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White House Issues New Gas Mileage Standards
Hugh Pickens writes "NPR reports that the Obama administration has signed off on the nation's first rules on greenhouse gas emissions and set new fuel standards to meet a fleet-wide average of 35.5 mpg that will raise current standards by nearly 10 mpg by the 2016 model year. Although the new requirements would add an estimated $434 per vehicle in the 2012 model year and $926 per vehicle by 2016, drivers could save as much as $3,000 over the life of a vehicle through better gas mileage, according to a government statement. 'We will be helping American motorists save money at the pump, while putting less pollution in the air,' says Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. Dave McCurdy, leader of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a trade group representing 11 automakers, says the industry supports a single national standard for future vehicles. 'Today, the federal government has laid out a course of action through 2016, and now we need to work on 2017 and beyond.' As the auto industry seeks to emerge from ashes, many manufacturers already are trying for the right mix of approaches, experts say. Some will try to sell more hybrids. Others are introducing not-so-gas-guzzling SUVs. They may also push slightly downsized and small cars, such as the Ford Fiesta."
For survivability you don't want "sturdyness", you want the car to be crumply. The crumpling absorbs the crash energy so the occupants don't. Lighter cars also means lower crash energies. Lighter cars are less likely to crash in the first place owing to better handling and manuverablilty.
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Ultra-Lightweight cars were attempted before.
You crash, you die.
No, not at all. Indy cars, for example, are vastly lighter than any standard American cars, and they crash at extremely high speeds with very few fatalities, and often without even injuries to the driver. Lightweight cars can be made quite safe. If I were designing cars from a safety point of view alone, I'd go with styrofoam as the main structural element. You crash it-- well, go and spend the ten bucks and buy a new shell to replace the one you broke.
The problem is that vastly overweight cars are dangerous to other cars on the road. To the extent that fuel economy makes all the cars on the road lighter, it doesn't hurt safety, and likely improves it.
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Now we come to the heart of the matter.
America is about consumption. Whether it's oil, food, bling or large-screen TVs, we are taught from childhood to buy, to use, to waste. Everything has to be supersized and extra sauce on the side and there is no such thing as "enough". In fact, continuous and endless consumption is institutionalized here to the point where our very economic existence depends on it. When people stop buying for a few months, things start to fall apart and our economy is like a cancer patient, sucking smoke through their tracheotomy hole. It's just not in our social vocabulary to economical or for that matter, rational.
It wasn't always so. Ben Franklin and Henry David Thoreau very eloquently expressed a thriftiness that was uniquely American. It went hand in hand with self-reliance. When I see the over-fed, demanding, soft, food-stamp using Americans of 2010 who are claiming to champion a return to "every man for himself", I wonder how long they would last if any one of them were to actually be expected to pull their own not inconsiderable weight.
No. Americans aren't going to like the new fuel-efficiency standards, because they believe the world owes them whatever amount of fuel it will take to power their personal locomotives down the federally-funded highway, so they can waddle into the all-you-can-eat buffet. Like one of the porcine princesses we see on television, telling Maury Povich how she's going to "do what I want!" we're not going to even consider being more efficient with fuel until we suffer a shock to the system. They're not going to slow down slurping down the Colonel's Special Gravy until they get that massive cardiac arrest and they need a pair of high-voltage paddles to the chest.
And maybe not even then.
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