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When the US Government Built Ultra-Safe Cars
Jalopnik has a piece on a mostly forgotten piece of automotive history: the US government built a fleet of ultra-safe cars in the 1970s. The "RSV" cars were designed to keep four passengers safe in a front or side collision at 50 mph (80 kph) — without seat belts — and they got 32 miles to the gallon. They had front and side airbags, anti-lock brakes, and gull-wing doors. Lorne Greene was hired to flack for the program. All this was quickly dismantled in the Reagan years, and in 1990 the mothballed cars were all destroyed, though two prototypes survived in private hands. "Then-NHTSA chief Jerry Curry [in 1990] contended the vehicles were obsolete, and that anyone who could have learned something from them had done so by then. Claybrook, the NHTSA chief who'd overseen the RSV cars through 1980, told Congress the destruction compared to the Nazis burning books. ... 'I thought they were intentionally destroying the evidence that you could do much better,' said [the manager of one of the vehicles' manufacturers]."
Just look at the near fanatical destruction of the blueprints and prototypes of the canadian supersonic Avro Arrow combat jet back in the 50's. This car design getting buried is clearly another case of someone not wanting anyone to manufacture a competing model that could shake the current makers out of their lowest common denominator complacency.
I think you might be surprised if you look into what the economy commuter cars from the 70s and 80s actually got.
They were lighter, and had smaller/less powerful engines.
"30mpg!" has been about the average for good mileage for a long time now. Every time we hit a new development in engine technology that'll give us a more effecient engine, we either use it to make more horsepower with the same given displacement, or the government mandates some other safety/emissions technology that pulls us right back down again.
I'm not saying that we (well, the auto industry) can't do better. Of course they can. Europe has turbodeisel deathboxes that get 70+ mpg. I'm saying that we, as americans, don't WANT better gas mileage. We want the huge rwd musclecar with the 7liter V8, or the tricked out awd import pushing 21psi through what might otherwise be an effecient 4banger.
Note, My father did own one of those "8mpg" 70s cars. It was a 71 challenger with a built 440 with a radical cam and solid lifters in it. it had about 500hp BEFORE the 300hp nitrous shot, and it had 4.90 gears in back. If you know anything about cars, you know that the above is about as bad a reciepe you can have for gas mileage short of towing a boat behind it (which he also did. my dad was a crazy guy), and it took all that to get down to 8mpg.
When you elect people that axiomatically believe that government can't do anything right, you get people that intentionally do government badly. Whether it's automobile safety, maintaining an a healthy and stable economy, or maintaining worker and environmental safety standards.
You wouldn't hire a janitor that said he was morally opposed to cleanliness and didn't believe that brooms worked. Why would you be shocked when everything goes to hell when you hire someone that says they don't believe government?
Really, if you want all this stuff, you can go buy a Passat, or an Accord with a bit lower mileage. That rig from the 70's wouldn't pass emissions tests today, so it would have to get heavier and the mileage would go down. A 70's Honda engine isn't exactly what people are looking for when they need to get on an Interstate, so you couldn't sell them easily either. Giant bumpers are nice until you need to parallel park in Chinatown.
I totally want a Delorean, emotionally, but I'm not actually going to buy one for daily driving - I was in a roll-over accident once; side-opening doors are nice.
Really, though, somebody should FOIA the plans and build a factory and see what happens, any patents have expired. Prove that Reagan's goons were wrong...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If what was developed gets distroyed, or hidden for no apparent reason, other than lobby or corporate pressure than that is TREASON.
The Reagan campaign committed treason with Iran in order to get him elected. You can hardly expect a baseline of good government after that.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Those who have watched the movie "Who killed the Electric Car" know that industry and politics will conspire to do what's profitable, not what's good policy. It is disheartening to hear that, once again, politicians supported by industry killed an effort to do what's good for the public interest.
Best regards.
Many of those improvements have been spent on dragging around safety systems, rather than discarded for better fuel economy.
This is true, and both the rate of vehicle deaths and number of deaths per year has been declining for 20 years.
So how do you translate "unimpressive performance" into "less safe"?
Because if everyone drove a small and light car with a smaller, more fuel efficient engine, we would have less fatalities and much less fuel consumption nationwide. We could also save an immense amount of money on replacing infrastructure, since hauling around 4,000 lb SUVs to get a single person from one place to another has more externalities than just the waste of metal and oil resources. Not to mention the increased danger to other, smaller vehicles.
This is why libertarian movements may be the nail in the coffin of the United States. The more a society refuses to pool easily shared resources, the more costs go up for individuals subjected to each other's externalities, and the more efficiency goes down for the society as a whole. If China can turn one gallon of fuel into a few hundred miles of transport per person, and we can only turn one gallon of fuel into twenty miles per person, guess who wins.
I've heard of threads getting Godwin'd..... but this one had it in the summary.
Doesn't that, by itself, mean that no further replies are necessary?
by the continuing use and misuse of something a lawyer said in a Usenet post, what, 20 years ago?
A single invocation of a Nazi comparison, in the original post/article no less, is NOT running afoul of the Magic Pixie Dust of the Godwin Line. And it isn't even a comparison to Nazism in general, just an analogy to one particular thing that they did; rewriting history by obfuscating the truth. Some bad things that people do today *gasp* realy can be as bad as some bad things done by Hitler's government; not every comparison is an automatic beeline to the Holocaust.
Get over yourselves and these witty "OMG GODWIN!" bon mots.
Let's assume a collision:
VW lupo
-vs-
the lady in the ford expedition that she bought so she could feel "safe" on the road
=
healthy dent on the expedition and horrible crushed doom to the lupo.
Have you seen american highways lately? people who can't drive their way out of a paper bag are routinely crusing around in 3 ton tanks, and you have to be in another 3 ton tank to survive the impact with them.
Ah, the 'SUVs are safer' myth.
Did you know that since SUVs are so much more likely to roll over, you actually lose all the safety benefit and are actually in more danger? It takes two cars to collide, it only takes one SUV to roll over.
Also, they have pretty stringent crash safety standards in Europe where gas is so expensive ($7/gallon last time I checked) that nobody but wealthy egotists can afford to drive gas-guzzling oversized vehicles that are too big for European city streets anyway. (Does Ford even sell the Expedition in Europe?) Get into a collision in Europe and it's more likely to be with another small car.
So the description of European cars as 'deathboxes' is a load of nonsense.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
A pure EV using even (relatively) cheap batteries today can suffice for your day to day commuter, recharging at night at home. For long trips trips, there is this concept, the range extending generator trailer.
If you need to do that sort of hundreds a mile a day driving, no, EVs are not for you. Under one hundred miles a day, which hits like 90% of most folk's driving, the tech is here now and a number of places have after market kits to convert cars and light trucks. Run you around 20 grand or so plus the donor vehicle you get used, then you decide what flavor of batteries you want to invest in first. Kits for like a ford ranger or chevy s-10 or some sedan, all sorts have been made so far. And you can put together your own generator trailer for that trip to see the relatives, etc., just stop and fillerup like normal at any gas station.
Waiting for the three hundred mile range on batteries and five minute recharge option, that I see people saying all the time, means they really aren't interested in them unless they are a millionaire or close to it and can get like a tesla or something with their toy budget, and you still won't get a five minute recharge.
But, 50 -100 mile range and falling into the normal joe sixpack range of cost for a new midrange normal vehicle, you can do it now. You can't do it brand new from some dealer, it will be years and years before they get that cheap, but you *can* do it with the kits.
http://www.google.com/search?electric+conversion+kits
No, I'm assuming that will be enormously expensive when all pieces of equipment used to transport and construct new infrastructure use oil as their primary fuel source, and that for every calorie of food consumed in the US, 3500 calories of petroleum are expended to produce, harvest, transport, and process it. In 1970 the ratio was 1 to 1.
That, and the fact that the average American lives tens of miles away from their workplace, and has no way to get there without using a highway. Just project in your head what Sean Hannity would say if, to pull through such a shortage, we needed to legalize bicycles on interstates and put quotas on oil usage to preserve them to build rail stations and non-motorized vehicle lanes. He'd try to get everyone in line to invade Venezuela, which of course will only put off the inevitable and entrench our dependence on foreign resources.