How We'll Get To 54.5 Mpg By 2025

concealment writes "At the end of August this year, the US Department of Transport's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced new standards to significantly improve the fuel economy of cars and light trucks by 2025. Last week, we took a look at a range of recent engine technologies that car companies have been deploying in aid of better fuel efficiency today. But what about the cars of tomorrow, or next week? What do Detroit, or Stuttgart, or Tokyo have waiting in the wings that will get to the Obama administration's target of 54.5 miles per gallon (mpg) by 2025?"

Comments

nothing new at all needed

[iggymanz]

cars suitable for average daily use by more than half the people with that kind of fuel efficiency have been available for decades.

Re:nothing new at all needed

[SydShamino]

I live in Austin, and my family has a wimpy car (16-year-old Miata with a manual transmission) and newer cars (BMWs with both manual and automatic transmission).

Getting the Miata up to highway speeds can be a challenge. I have to merge onto Mopac north and south every day, including taking the north-bound Mopac on-ramp from 2222, where the on ramp is a tight loop. I can wind out the transmission but if people don't get over I'm not going to merge successfully. The 645 can merge wherever because I can meet and beat highway speeds to find a safe gap.

Honestly though, I think the problem with wimpy engine cars is the poor quality of turbochargers. My wife used to have a few Jettas and the turbo lag was atrocious. I recently saw though that there was new turbocharger technology that can "pre-charge" them or somesuch, effectively eliminating the lag. If those become standard, then turbochargers are great and smaller engines will be significantly more successful. (Also, as I see someone else mention, hybrids can solve this easily as well, as electric motors can provide the merge boost too.)

the easiest way

[Picardo85]

Start importing cars made for the european market. We have loads of those cars here.

Re:the easiest way

[Anonymous Coward]

Those are in English gallons, not U.S. gallons.

When your gallons are 20% larger it's easier to get high MPG numbers.

The car would get 61 MPG in US gallons. Still great, but not as great as 73 sounds.

Re:Ford makes the engin allready.

[jo_ham]

As far as I know, there aren't ant european diesels than can pass our current emission standards, regardless of the milage.

This is not true any more. Euro diesels since about 05 and above have exceeded the US emissions standards. The only thing holding it back now is misinformation and the stigma of diesel as something only for big rigs and tractors.

Re:2000 Honda Insight, Metros/Swifts, Honda CRX HF

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that the F150 will not have to get 54.5MPG by 2025. It will only need to hit 30MPG by then due to the cluster fuck of regulations that CAFE is. That 30MPG only translates to about 23MPG in real world driving. Part of the problem is that a lot of the CAFE standards are based around the footprint of the vehicle. This provides the car manufacturers with no incentive to give the US small cars since they have to meet much tougher efficiency standards. Go read the link for more information.
http://jalopnik.com/5948172/how-the-government-killed-fuel-efficient-cars-and-trucks

Re:Not anti American

[Sez Zero]

The car is central to life in the US. The fuel munching car has no real future in this.

Not the car. The truck.

The Ford F-150 has been the best selling vehicle (car or truck) in the US for the past 35 years. In 2011 here are the ranks (from this source):

1. Ford F-150 (584,917 sold)
2. Chevrolet Silverado (415,130)
3. Toyota Camry (308,510)
4. Nissan Altima (268,981)
5. Ford Escape (254,293)
6. Ford Fusion (248,067)
7. Ram Pickups (244,763)
8. Toyota Corolla (240,259)
9. Honda Accord (235,625)
10. Chevrolet Cruze (231,732)

For all the people complaining about Suburbans, Escalades and Expeditions, it is trucks, not SUVs that sell in the US.

Of the top 10: 1,533,174 cars (51%); 1,244,810 trucks (41%); 254,293 SUVs (8%)

How many trucks sold in Europe?

Re:Ford makes the engin allready.

[Solandri]

Diesel cars are not a panacea.

1) European (UK) gallons are 20% bigger than US gallons.

2) European fuel mileage is determined using a different test than U.S. EPA mileage. There's less stop-and-go in the EU tests.

Consequently it's not unusual for models which hit 50+ MPG in the EU to not even break 40 MPG in the EPA tests. CAFE uses a different test than EPA though. I'm not sure how CAFE mileage stacks up to EU mileage.

3) Diesel contains about 12%-15% more mass and energy per gallon. Consequently it also puts out about 12%-15% more pollutants per gallon. So unless you're comparing on price or range on same sized fuel tank, you need to tweak diesel's MPG down to draw a fair comparison with gasoline MPG.

4) When you distil a barrel of oil, some of it will naturally distil into diesel, some into gasoline. It's relatively easy to convert heavy fuels like diesel into gasoline. It's very difficult and expensive to convert light fuels like gasoline and kerosene into diesel. Consequently the most energy-efficient approach is to just take the fractions of diesel and gasoline which comes out naturally from the distillation process. The next-most energy-efficient approach is to favor gasoline.

So for consumption you want to err on the side which favors gasoline consumption. Diesel is only a cost-effective fuel competitor to gasoline because there are lots of gas-consuming cars. If you lower gasoline consumption below the production from natural distillation, diesel starts to become much more expensive. Whereas if gasoline consumption rises above natural production fractions, you can simply cook diesel a bit to break it down and make more gasoline.