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White House Finalizes 54.5 MPG Fuel Efficiency Standard
The Obama Administration announced today it has finalized new fuel efficiency standards that will require new cars and light-duty trucks to have an average efficiency of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. This adds to the requirement that 2016's new cars must average 35.5 miles per gallon. "The final standards were developed by DOT’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and EPA following extensive engagement with automakers, the United Auto Workers, consumer groups, environmental and energy experts, states, and the public. Last year, 13 major automakers, which together account for more than 90 percent of all vehicles sold in the United States, announced their support for the new standards." According to the administration, the standards will reduce dependence on foreign oil, save money at the pump, protect the environment, and everything else that sounds good in an election year.
At some point you just have to account for the laws of physics.
Pushing a vehicle at 80MPH down the highway is going to be hard to do and get 54.5 MPG. No matter how "hybrid" the car is, no matter how good your regenerative breaking.. once you're at highway speeds, air resistance becomes insurmountable.
This adds to the requirement that 2016's new cars must average 35.5 miles per gallon.
I hope they mean AT LEAST 35.5 miles per gallon, or my 60 miles per gallon super-car is doomed..
US traffic injuries and fatalities will increase sharply in 2016, and again in 2025.
Not in 2025.. The oil would have run out by then.
Hypothetically because smaller cars are less safe. Not that I subscribe to that theory.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Force all new cars to use some alternatve fuel, one that doesnt just move the pollution and I will be happier.
To be fair, they might as well say 'all cars will run on magic moonbeams by 2025', because it's about as likely to happen.
Cite or GTFO.
My mother, in her little blue Ford escort, was crushed to death under an oncoming SUV that was gigantic relative to the size of its passenger, and barely controllable on an icy Buffalo-area road in winter. I am, understandably, dubious about this constant "CAFE kills" blurp that occurs in every last conversation of fuel economy. I'm willing to bet that if most people used the same size vehicles, rather than vehicle size being related to income level, everyone would drive more carefully and charitably.
We should just stop subsidizing the oil and car industries. Stop subsidizing refineries. Stop giving tax brakes to oil companies. Stop subsidizing road development out of regular taxes. Gas will hit $10/gal and the problem will take care of itself.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
If the truck you're hit by is an 18-wheeler transport truck it won't matter if you're driving a Fiat or an F150. If you only have a standard driver's license then you're nowhere near the biggest thing on the road, and should probably learn how to drive defensively rather than depending on the size of your vehicle to save you in a crash.
soccer mom texting in her gas guzzling behemoth, when wrecking with a subcompact, tends to survive better than the poor guy in the subcompact
so the real solution is to just get rid of the gas guzzling behemoths
but i guess some people want status conscious assholes driving our energy policy
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
He's got the wrong target. The most efficient vehicles are the ones that aren't on the road at all. Further proof that "if you can measure it, you can mismanage it".
The most efficient "car" I ever drove was a condo in the city. I even went without a car for a while. Driving was OPTIONAL there.
I have a car now, but still live close to commuter rail and within walking distance of many shops.
Policy makers should focus on making development more walkable. It wouldn't be bad for the economy either. You would get construction stimulus from building residences in commercial areas, and commercial buildings in areas such as the vast residential tract that I grew up in. With these spaces encouraging people to walk, ride bicycles, and drive less there would be knock-on benefits in health.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I got rid of my car about 1 year ago, and have never looked back.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
Suppose there are two cars that irreparably die at exactly 100,000 miles, and that gas stays at its artificially and temporarily low $4 a gallon. If Car A gets 28MPG, and Car B gets 35.5MPG but costs $3000 more, then you'll end up paying the same ($purchase_price + $fuel_price) for each.
If you exactly that to a perfectly reasonable 150,000 miles, then Car A would have to get at least 30.2MPG to make it a better deal. If gas goes to $10 a gallon like it is in UK, then Car A would have to get 33.1MPG to make it cheaper than Car B.
Basically, your math only holds for cars that aren't driven. If you actually use the multi-thousand-dollar vehicle you purchase, better gas mileage directly converts to cheaper per mile to operate.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
by 2025. Hybrids are a hot commodity now, and gas extended electrics are just beginning. Soon there will be a point where a gas engine will cost a lot more to build then electric... (In an engineering standpoint, the drivetrain of a petrol car is way more complex then electric. We're just waiting for battery packaging/recharge/swap technology to catch up, and once that's done they'll be no turning back to petrol except for edge cases.
Sorry, I use my dodge ram (with Duallies, thats what we call them) to go grocery shopping, to pull my boat, to pull a horse trailer, to help friends move. But saying that I'm unsafe because I drive a pickup is pretty narrow minded. I'd imagine that I'm less dangerous than 20somethings with sportbikes or a sports cars. Oh or the soccer-moms texting&driving with a minivan full of kids. Jackass.
Just got back from a trip to GenCon on my motorcycle (Hayabusa). According to the bike (likely off by a little due to the stupid bike things), I averaged at least 50mpg for the entire 2,500 mile trip. Since the mpg indicator doesn't go higher than 50mpg, it could be even higher.
My wife had a smaller 250cc bike (Ninja) and was getting upwards of 100mpg and 75ish on her 650cc bike (Ninja).
I'd love to see more folks on bikes. Have motorcycle only lanes just like there are bike only lanes; split a current full sized lane into two dedicated motorcycle lanes :)
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Some families are larger than others and need a vehicle that can hold several people. Busses exists. Tractor-trailers exists. Some people need larger vehicles to haul boats and toys, haul work equipment, haul [insert large object here]. You will always have large and small vehicles on the road. It's a fact that most of the increase in fuel economy over the last few yeas is attributed to smaller and lighter cars, thinner sheet metal, plastic parts, etc. Hybrids, electricity, the air-powered cars in India, and other mileage-increasing technologies typically just move the carbon-generating from the vehicle itself to somewhere miles away.
Yea, I would much rather be driving a Fiat 500 than an F150. The Fiat can get out of the way or stop much faster than an F150. Just being able to avoid an accident beats size way more often.
The fact that people have given up avoiding accidents is a sad description of the state of driver education in the US.
Your stupid, stop driving
Stop posting. Same reason.
This is just an effort to get the greenies to reelect the big O. It's also an unconstitutional mandate of private individuals in what they can purchase, and businesses in what they can produce.
We're nothing but peasants and serfs, here to serve the government, who apparently can take care of us better than we can ourselves.
It's not a matter of physics. Such cars can be made right now, and 2025 is still 13 years away.
Not intended just for you, but for anyone who says "bigger cars are safer".
Here's what 50 years of automotive engineering has done. The driver of the '59 would have been dead. The '09 driver would have injured their knee.
A few hundred pounds lighter, almost triple the MPG (13 mpg vs 29 mpg), and is way safer.
To keep saying "bigger cars are safer, thus don't work on smaller cars" is not really thinking this through.
....when the only tool you have is a sledgehammer....
Besides that, the fact is that some folks legitimately need vehicles that can carry multiple passengers or cargo. These will be less efficient per mile, so the Nanos of the future will need to not only sell well, but have GREATER than 55 MPG to balance out the 25-40 MPG haulers. Plus, we have the ethanol mandate working against us. Ethanol has lower energy density... frankly, the government could torpedo this themselves with their stupid corn lobby mandate.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Why?
Because the easiest way to improve gas mileage is to reduce the weight of the vehicle, meaning less steel protecting you in an accident.
You know, this is something that amazes me about auto manufacturers and, to an extent, the government -
We all know that race car drivers enjoy a fairly low fatality rate due to 2 key safety devices: The roll cage, and the multi-point restraint system. With modern alloys, building a rollcage into the frame of every car off the line should be a trivial matter, right? So why, then, are cars filled with all manner of airbags and other expensive (especially in terms of power:weight ratios) "safety" features, when the 2 methods proven to keep a person alive even after launching into the air and flipping multiple times are completely ignored by the commercial auto business.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
You're completely unable to comprehend what you read.
The GP wrote that small cars are unsafe when most other drivers are driving trucks. He is correct. It's not the truck driver he's worried about.
Too bad the vehicles will cost $16,000 more (unadjusted for inflation).
Do you have a source for this?
2012 Prius C (53/46mpg) - $19,000
2012 Toyota Matrix (21/29mpg) - $19,000
2012 Camry Hybrid (43/39mpg) - $26550
2012 Camry conventional (25/35mpg) - $22155
Toyota is already selling hybrids today that are close to meeting the new standard for a few thousand dollars more than (or the same price as ) a conventional car.
status conscious assholes should not drive our energy policy
You've used that term twice now, I assume because you need to demonize the people whose vehicle choices you disapprove of. Invective isn't much of a convincer.
That's not necessarily true... we COULD build cars out of lighter yet stronger materials if we wanted to spend a lot more on our cars... unfortunately, since we seem to build most consumer vehicles out of the same materials, they keep getting heavier as we add more reinforcement and equipment for safety. Still, weight alone is not a measure of safety. There is a video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g) showing an old car hitting a new one. The new one wins even though it's probably close to a ton lighter. Just because you have inertia on your side, doesn't mean you can take the hit you will be handing out better. So, in conclusion, we need to find ways to lesson production costs on lighter, stronger materials and not just reduce the size of vehicles.
27% of pickup owners have *never* hauled anything in the bed. 78% do so once a month or less. [1] Face it, the average pickup truck driver is some suburban cowboy poser who is commuting to his office park. If we're serious about oil consumption, we're going have to move about 50% of pickup buyers back to cars.
[1]Polk Pickup Truck Usage Study (sorry no url)
Sure, if you take a big car with no safety features and compare it to a smaller car with safety features, the smaller car is going to be safer. That goes without saying. That said, a modern big car with equivalent safety features would be safer than a modern small car. You have to compare apples to apples.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
*I had a Toyota Corolla, a very small car then, now have a Prius. It consistenly gets 45 mpg or better and is a mid size car.
Coincidentally, is a mid size vagina as well.
Actually, if a heavier car hits an immovable object, that car is going to be subjected to more destructive force, while a lighter car will have less inertia and thus, there will be less force exerted back into the car. As long as we can lighten cars by using new, lighter materials that are just as strong, we should still be able to build larger vehicles that simply weigh less.
Anecdotally, I have found that the worst drivers tend to use their huge vehicles as a safety blanket. They don't pay attention to traffic and anticipate upcoming maneuvers, they don't know how to react to unexpected actions by other drivers, and most importantly they *can't* react because their vehicle is too unwieldly. When something comes up, the best they can do is slam on the brakes and hope that their momentum doesn't carry them into an accident. It's a form of learned helplessness. People who know how to drive have no fear of piloting a normal-sized vehicle.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Face it, the average pickup truck driver is some suburban cowboy poser who is commuting to his office park.
Ironically, a lot of pickup/SUV owners aren't necessarily "cowboy posers", but just people who think that if they ever do get in an accident, they'd rather be driving the bigger car when it happens. So smaller cars are more dangerous because there are so many big trucks on the road because so many people are afraid of getting hit by big trucks, thus perpetuating the problem.
just admit that you want energy companies deciding US policy rather than the actual american people
stop with the bullshit nods to the miraculous marketplace, which has no meaning in this conversation. we are just talking about a choice between two different monopolistic modes: energy companies, or the US government. i don't understand people who see so much menace in their own democratic government, and less menace in oligopolistic multinational energy corporations (that corrupt your democratic government). personally, as a resident of a democracy, i'll go with the organization that is entrusted with our willpower, however flawed, than the organization entrusted with making profit by any means necessary
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And here's a youtube of a Range Rover t-boning a Civic.
:wq
Strange post given the quote in your signature. So the past 13 years, average fuel economy increased by 5mpg without any mandate from the gov (CAFE has been 27.5 from 1985 to 2010). Meanwhile the weight and size of cars also increased significantly (compare a 1998 camry to a 2012 corolla). I'm thinking cars can't get much bigger or powerful (a 2012 camry is only .5s slower to 60mph than a 1990 Ferrari 348...not to mention >250 HP is unusable in a fwd car) but they can get lighter and more efficient. Especially if thats what manufacturers are now focused on.
Fitting a roll cage without the occupants wearing helmets would be counterproductive. That's pretty well known in the off-roading world. Too easy to bash your head in on a rollbar.
:wq
now some other dude is putting his kids in a larger behemoth to survive a wreck with you, at your expense. the larger and more ridiculous gas guzzlers only affordable to those richer than you. which is the whole point of this nonsense: it is not about survival of the fittest, but about survival of the richest
at some point the american people will give up this ridiculous social darwinist religion and understand that you need to curtail the excess abuses of a social system where those with money win more money and everyone else scrapes by with less and less every year
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Don't know who makes Outback, but Audi and Subaru both have the best AWD of all time. Subaru is actually kicking ass. I drive a Mazda, I tend to light rail, I bicycle less now because I'm lazy but I envy a Trek 2.3 Apex.
Sorry, I should have been more specific -- it's a Subaru Outback. I've been quite happy with both the AWD and reliability of the car.
You are completely ignoring important other factors such as crash avoidance. Small cars are much easier to control, especially in emergencies. The safest car is a car that never gets in an accident. Granted that's one impossible extreme. :)
Care to show evidence that vehicle prices are increasing due to regulatory compliance? And if they are, then I see it as a way of "internalizing the externalities"--that is, making car owners pay for the costs of reducing their effects on everyone else.
We have one compact car in the family, I bike when I can. I think gas should be double the current cost like it is in Europe. Carbon-base fuels are currently way too cheap, there's no incentive to conserve.
Anecdotally I've found that the worst drivers are those driving those smaller sportier cars who tend to think they can just zip through traffic without warning or signals using their speed and small size as a safety blanket, They don't flow with traffic but try to force their way through it but often fail to anticipate upcoming traffic or turns. They don't worry about reacting to unexpected actions by other drivers because they are the ones making the unexpected actions. Most importantly they think they can react faster than they actually can, but do usually manage to escape the accidents they cause by cutting off other vehicles, forcing the other drivers to slam on their brakes and thus causing accidents. People who know how to drive know to they need to fear the idiots in small cars who can't obey the rules of the road. --Dirk
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
this is a thread on slashdot, not a political plank. i will leave the carefully chosen words that actually have more venom than mine to the professional politicians. who apparently you will follow, because you seem to be the type who prefers serene lies over ugly truths
the problem according to you is word choice, not rationale. this is why we have the kind of snake tongued leaders we have in the world
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Exactly. I can't tell you the number of times I've wondered what the heck I would do if we didn't have a Honda Pilot or something of a similar/larger size. We routinely use all the seats and/or storage capacity, tow stuff, etc. I prefer driving smaller cars, but you can't beat the utility of something like an SUV or pickup.
Actually, this is a good time for a question. For those of you who only have compacts or subcompacts, what do you do in situations where you need to haul stuff? Or is my family just an outlier in that we actually use our SUV for its intended purpose?
If you can't convince them, convict them.
As long as we're gonna be legislating technical advances into existence, I'd like to request that congress passes legislation requiring a warp drive is developed by 2020.
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
Across the street from my house, a lady pulled out of her driveway in her little Audi, passed out behind the wheel, and after driving about 150 yards, slammed into a little birch tree about 5 inches in diameter. The tree was mostly unhurt; the engine compartment was wrapped around the trunk like a pair of pliers around a wire. Tree 1, car 0. The idiot driver broke an ankle
What really needs to be done is to cut the tax breaks and subsidies for energy production in this country. The government gives massive handouts to the oil industry making the gas at the pump unrealistically cheap. What you pay is incredibly low because the companies are getting government handouts (in form of subsidies and tax breaks). If we paid the true price of gas at the pump, driving a giant SUV would show its true impact on our wallets. With the government handouts, the true price of fuel is shared among all Americans, so even if you're driving a Chevy volt and you're not spending any money at the pump, you are paying through the nose for the gas that your neighbor puts into his Chevy Suburban. The subsidies and tax breaks are in the billions, and we're all sharing in that burden. If people want to drive giant cars, let them drive giant cars, just don't make me pay for their damn fuel.
So they'll just re-introduce the 55 MPH speed limit, which was done to save energy.
It depends entirely on the design of the car and engine. I get 4 additional miles per gallon (mpg) when cruising at 65 rather than 55. I was surprised and repeated the measurements several times. Verified the onboard computer's reported mpg against the odometer and actually gas consumed (top off at same fuel pump before and after).
Perhaps 55 was some sort of average efficiency point for vehicles of the 1970s but I expect a higher efficiency point with today's designs.
True, and that ticks me off. I live on a farm and my less than 2-year-old pickup is beat to hell in the bed and covered with scratches because I USE it.
Seeing lots of pristine, clean pickup trucks driving around is a joke.
And you probably overbought on your computer purchase. What's your point?
Overbuying on a computer purchase doesn't have anywhere near the negative externalities that unnecessarily buying a giant pickup or SUV does.
You are roughly 1/2 as likely to die in an accident if you are in a SUV compared to a compact car. The rollover problems that were prevalent in early model SUVs (see 1990s) were mostly alleviated with traction control systems that were implemented industry wide through the 2000s. http://money.cnn.com/2011/06/09/autos/suv_rollover/index.htm
I did some trawling of the Wayback Machine and this seems to be the study that the GP is referring to: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/83383916/4873_PickupSurveyReport.pdf
Found at http://web.archive.org/web/20070713221433/http://www.edf.org/documents/4873_PickupSurveyReport.pdf
The stats are what he claims, and I don't have a spin on them. Decide for yourself.
For starters, you talk about making grille openings smaller? On many vehicles, the grille openings are functional. The radiator (or even the air intake piping) may be placed behind it, so it needs to have good airflow. I'm not sure your idea provides a net benefit in many situations, and that's why you aren't seeing it done.
As for weight savings, I agree to a point. Some of this is the result of "old school" thinking and preferences of a generation who believed a big, heavy car had a better feel on the road and was safer. But you're seeing a shift away from those ideas, even with companies like Cadillac with their new ATS sport sedan. It's far lighter weight than the CTS sedan that came before it. But suggestions like using carbon fiber in place of sheet metal for more weight savings are probably largely ignored by the auto industry because it lacks durability. Anyone who "mods" their sports car with aftermarket parts for looks/styling can tell you, carbon fiber side-skirts or "ground f/x" tend to break off in pieces and develop nasty stress cracks with time. The material works a bit better for a component like a hood, where it won't take as much abuse from flying pebbles/rocks while driving, or accidentally scraping it on a curb. But still, saying carbon fiber is "stronger" than aluminum doesn't tell the whole story. Metal body parts absorb impacts by denting or creasing. That can be popped back out (such as you see with paintless dent removal places) pretty inexpensively. Carbon fiber just chips, cracks or snaps. A sheet of glass has a lot of strength too. (Try pulling it apart to "tear' it in two.) Doesn't mean it's not liable to shatter when stressed in a different way.
As for the auto transmission torque converters, what alternatives are you suggesting? I used to drive a Jeep Patriot with a continuously variable transmission (CVT). Pretty slick in concept, but not at all durable in reality. Most Patriot owners I knew had a CVT die of an internal bearing failure after 70K miles or so on the road. Plus, it was WAY more expensive to have fixed than a standard automatic transmission. Even the fluid it took was a special, very costly type since it had to have certain friction properties that changed with temperature.
A 1987 Honda CRX HF meets the standard. It was originally rated at 52/57 under the old test, which is a combined average fuel economy of 54.5MPG, which is the new standard.
I routinely got 60+ MPG in that car just driving along at 60MPH back in the day.
Actually, Mr. Fusion doesn't get his doctorate until 2030. You may want to check the calibration on your flux capacitor.
Knowledge Brings Fear
If the people were serious about being safe when driving they would insist on the driving test being more difficult to pass, ie, actually test a person's driving ability, and take away the license of people who have proven that they are bad driver much sooner than is done now.
Anarchists never rule
Nooo..it's because like everything else they do heavy ham handed force by the government causes unforeseen consequences!
Ever wonder where the SUV came from, or why small trucks were replaced by monster V8s? Well wonder no more, it came from CAFE standards! You see in the 70s we had these things called "station wagons" as well as light trucks based on cars. These wagons were perfect for your soccer mom types and the car-trucks were perfect for those that just needed to be able to haul a little furniture or lumber on the weekends. Then along came CAFE that made it practically impossible to build those vehicles anymore but guess what? Work trucks had an exemption! See where this is going?
You can't force people to drive what they don't want at the barrel of a gun or the barrel of a pen, its as simple as that. gas goes up? More people that can buy smaller cars, less buy bigger cars, and the market changes to give them what they want. I wish I could find the link to the money matters video where one of the guys from Kelley's Blue Book spent all damned day trying to get something so obvious through the heads of congress critters. he brought charts and graphs and sale figures showing that the American public saw those itty bitty cracker boxes as a DO NOT WANT and were buying vehicles MUCH larger than they needed, simply because the regulations were making sure there was nothing in between. the critters answer? "Well how do we make them take it?" arrgh!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
As an aerospace engineer I will say that from a physics standpoint, momentum conservation means that all the safety standards you see for a vehicle colliding onto a wall either directly or at an angle, merely represents what would happen if that vehicle were to collide with its mirror image. Replace that wall with a vehicle twice its size moving at the same speed and all of a sudden your 'five star' rating doesn't mean too much in the real world.
I say this as a matter of fact, but realistically people are faced with a prisoner's dilemma, purchase a large car for safety because someone you might collide with could choose a larger car, or pick a compact vehicle. Everyone would be better off if we all chose compact vehicles as the nature of our collisions would contain less energy & momentum.
and I haven't read the article linked, but I have read the NHTSA press release.
First of all, the 2025 MPG is augural -- the NHTSA is statutorily prohibited from setting standards more than five model years in the future. Secondly, the numbers of 49mpg is based on their estimate of the maximum achievable fleet-wide technology. The 2025 number is a *projection* of the requirement the NHTSA estimates that they will propose sometime around 2020.
A better link is:
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2012/08/nhtsaepa-20120828.html
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Let me show you why that statement doesn't make sense:
"Ironically, a lot of 'gun owners' owners aren't necessarily "cowboy posers", but just people who think that if they ever do get in a 'hostile situation', they'd rather be 'carrying a gun' when it happens. So 'gunless people' are more dangerous because there are so many 'criminals with guns' because so many people are afraid of getting 'shot', thus perpetuating the problem"
How is that statement not true, it works perfectly for me. If you reduce the number of guns around (which is probably pretty hard once they are all out there) you reduce the number of current and future criminals with guns.
Don't believe me? Just compare gun ownership and gun related deaths.
So if you feel an SUV is more are dangerous in accidents don't buy an SUV, instead of making the problem worse buy buying one and risking you kill somebody with it. At least when it comes to pedestrian safety SUVs are pretty bad compared to other cars, making SUVs illegal in urban areas will do more to protect your kids then buying one.