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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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Why do you worry?
If you do a little controlling for available horsepower, vehicles have improved a huge amount since 1980, but people have spent a lot of the improvement on having more power available.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Ford makes class leading cars in the UK. Not just "average cars" - they make genuinely desirable, high quality, class-leading cars in several size/usage classes with some of the best handling and best engines available.
There is no reason for them to be selling shit in the US, which is essentially what they are doing with all but their trucks. They make some amazing vehicles, and do so profitably in Europe.
The engines they sell *right now* in the UK are way, way above what these CAFE proposals are mandating. They don;t even need to do any reseach so there;s no "bankrupting" going on - they just need to bolt those engines into the US models, or just tweak the UK models slightly so that US licence plates fit onto the back (ours are thinner but wider) and Bob's your uncle.
Maybe also tweak the screen slightly - I remember a story somewhere about the US safety requirement for airbags is to assume the occupant is not wearing a seatbelt, so the screen has to be more upright to account for this in some models. Just lobby to have that common sense thing changed and we're done.
The big automakers in the US like to hide behind that "oh woe is us, it will cost too much and we don;t have the time to do the R&D, and the margins are too low" wailing, but they are really just dragging their feet. Ford is *very* competitive in the European market, and has innovated and picked its game up to get itself there, in the commercial and the consumer market. Hell, the light commercial it sells is the word for van in the uk: Transit Van, and you can't turn left without seeing a Focus, Fiesta, Mondeo, Ka and occasionally the odd Galaxy (I'm afraid the French have pretty much sewn up the soccer mom van market - it's the only segment Ford doesn't have a class leader in).
With some minor tweaks here and there (nowhere ear enough to bankrupt them), Ford could sell its Euro models in the US and be right on top of those regulations. Even if they skipped out all of their diesels (which are outstanding) and only sold the petrol ones, the lowest mpg petrol Focus they sell is 35.3mpg - for the automatic one. The worst diesel automatic does 48.6mpg (best does 74mpg, but you need the manual gearbox).
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
It's become obvious to me lately that advertising is a big culprit here. For the last sixty years, Madison Avenue and friends have been refining ways to convince us to do things that aren't in our best interests: buy more than we can afford, buy things that we don't need, buy, buy, BUY!
Advertising is corrosive. It sells an idea of a world where everything has a simple solution. Buy our product, and life will be BETTER! Even if you're smart and assume that advertising is always lying to you, being exposed to lies for years on end will start to make you believe them, or at least believe the normative view they come from.
My friends' kids, and my older son's friends are frequently obsessed with this cartoon character or that. Ours aren't. Why? We don't have TV. We haven't for about three years now, and so our son isn't getting exposed to constant advertising that exhorts him to eat shitty fake food at shitty fast-food chains, or to harass us to buy character-branded toys. All the video we watch, we watch on our computers after he's in bed. (And it's all ad-free; I don't really want to see ads any more than I want him to. In fact, I'd happily pay $2-3 per episode for the few shows we watch, if it meant no ads.)
A huge problem with "free" TV (that is, ad-supported TV) is that there's a cost associated with watching ads. As I said, it promotes a false worldview; even if the ad is relatively accurate, its sole purpose is to get you to spend money on something that you may not actually have any real need for. And the advertisers don't care if you spend money you don't have, or spend money on a product you don't need instead of saving for retirement, or your kids' education.
Okay, okay, I could go on for hours. Rant over.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Frictional force exerted at the road is given by weight * coefficient of friction [u]. Since weight = mg that all boils down to mgu.
Lateral acceleration at a velocity v on a curve of radius r = v^2 / r. Since F = ma, The
lateral force = mv^2 / r.
As long as the first force is greater, the car is gripping. When it ceases to be, you skid. The limiting case is where mgu = mv^2 / r. The m cancels out, and you, sir, fail @ science.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."