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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?"
cars suitable for average daily use by more than half the people with that kind of fuel efficiency have been available for decades.
Start importing cars made for the european market. We have loads of those cars here.
A) Instead of building lots of new tollbooths (you know they will), replace each of 'em with a Taco Bell drive-through.
B) Build a methane-capture device into every driver's seat...
Yeah, and if people stopped eating meat we'd need a lot less grain. And if people started keeping their thermostats at 55F, we'd need a lot less gas/electric/oil. If people would top watching TV, that would also save a lot of energy.
But people like to eat meat, they like to stay warm, they like to watch TV... and wait for it... they like fast cars.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I'm a Brit. I understand the tradition, and history of US cars, and that this holds a place for many American people. But your business and political angles don't work well for you here. Most of the US car makers already make fuel efficient engines and models for other parts of the world. I don't know if its parts of the US car industry and some political levels that are messing around - but they should stop.
At some stage the US will face a fuel hit. It would be much better to have the things lined up than be caught out. Your citizens should not face that having mistakenly bought high fuel consumption models after being decieved or lied to by car makers or political fools. The car is central to life in the US. The fuel munching car has no real future in this.
We`re all equal
There will be no next Obama administration. Didn't you see that last presidential debate?
Obama is too stupid and lazy to be president.
Mitt knows that it isn't possible to "heal the planet", (insert Romney smirk here), or begin to slow the rise of the oceans.
So when Mittens is elected all of these silly MPG ratings will be rolled back once we achieve North American energy independence.
The answer to better mpg, traffic shaping, less accidents is - as much as I hate to say it - is autonomous cars.
They can drive at the best measured MPG zone, they don't get distracted, they have faster response times than human drivers. They don't hit the gas pedal stopping you from merging onto the highway or changing lanes, they don't pass illegally or drive recklessly. Numerous studies have shown that traffic jams are simply caused by people following too closely.
I don't know for sure, but I really think the next evolution of vehicle transport will be autonomous.
Your 1985 Civic would probably fail today's crash tests and emissions checks (in the areas that require them), and likely lacked features most consumers prefer these days.
-Higher crash standards demand more structure and additional equipment like airbags
-Higher emissions standards dictate more additional equipment (catalytic converters, etc.) and different combustion profiles
-Consumer expectations for performance (acceleration/handling), size, and comfort (features, sound insulation, etc) have gone up
All of the above add weight to the vehicle (making for inefficiency) Oh, and the mandated use of ethanol reduces mileage even further.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
The 2000 Honda Insight came out 12 years ago and drivers regularly beat this standard. Geo Metros, Suzuki Swifts, Honda CRX HFs, VW Diesel Rabits, VW TDIs.... the list goes on and on.
The issue isn't making a fuel efficient car, it's making a Ford F150 get 54.5MPG
No, he got it in a Jaaaaag.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
You speak with a certain amount of sarcasm, but the laws actually have an interesting effect, and do affect the gas mileage.
The way it works is this. Each company must keeps its CAFE above the legal limit. To do this, they may not (by law) sell cars that are below the CAFE if their corporate average is currently below the CAFE. So, that means that Ford cant sell trucks because they are below the limit, but can sell Fusions and Focus'. Then when they sell enough of the little jobs, and their average comes up a little, then they can sell a few SUVs. The end result is that law of supply and demand will drive the cost of those SUVs through he roof, but the little econ o-box will get cheaper and cheaper. In fact, car companies may be willing to take a small loss on the econ o-box just so it can sell one high margin SUV. For the average citizen, it will make the gas-guzzlers financially out of reach, which is the way it should be.
I know a guy who bought a pickup truck (16 MPG), and drives it 40 miles a day commute because he can only afford the one vehicle. He got the truck because twice a year he uses it to haul yard materials home from the garden store... I suggested he could just rent a u haul, but he said he didn't want to spend the $100 bucks for a u haul... Just goes to show that most Americans have the financial savvy of a 10 year old.
-=Geoskd
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
What a crock. I live in london , I'm over 6 foot and 210lbs and I've never had any trouble fitting in any car. Unless you're the height of a basket ball player or you're a 400 lb ball of sweaty lard because you can't leave off the donuts then there's no reason you can't either.
Have you seen my wife?
Only the top of her head. Why?
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The real question is going to be what that does to the electric grid. No way we are ready for even 10% of the cars to be EV today - we simply do not have the generation capacity. Oh, and such cars are going to charge at home at night, so any solar PV system is useless. I do not see suburbs putting up wind turbines between houses, so we are going to have a real electric supply problem.
Electric vehicles do not use as much power off the grid as people think. To put it in perspective, a 20 mile per day commute uses the same electricity monthly as leaving four CRT monitors on all the time. They use only 25% of the consumption of a 4-TON AC unit during June, July and August (typical household AC) They use the same power monthly as a single 8000 BTU window air conditioner... Converting all of the private commuter vehicles to EVs today would only increase electricity consumption by 20%. While this would require some increase in infrastructure, it is not the end-of-the-world scenario that everyone keeps claiming. It is well within what we could achieve within the scope of normal market supply and demand. The introduction of the television had a much more profound impact on our electricity consumption...
-=Geoskd
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
You don't need a V6 to merge quickly. Hell, even a whimpy 80s econobox can merge quickly if you have a good driver and manual transmission.
This is rubbish, the average commute is rather short and comparable on both sides of the pond, and I regularly drive straight through France and Germany. We too drive a lot.
The real reason why large cars don't sell and small cars do sell in Europe is because of the insane gas prices. When you pay $10/gallon you will change your driving habits or your type of car.
I just got myself a new car which is quite large for European standards, it goes 40mpg which is decent. But more and more commuters are going for efficient smaller cars (50-60mpg) because of increasing fuel costs, the difference means that the car pays for itself within a few years.
If fuel costs were the same I'd bet every family here would want an SUV too.
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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
I am sorry - but this is not true. Why is it that if I want to purchase a diesel from VW, Mercedes, or BMW, and do the European pickup (where you pay $3k, they fly you to the factory, you drive the car for a week, and then they ship it to the US for you), you have to SPECIFICALLY get the US emissions, which is $3-5k more than the European standards? You have to have all the specifics in documentation. I know the NO2 is like one tenth the US level which requires the Urea and regenerative particulate filters (thus eating about 3-5 US MPG). Many of the European car companies are implementing these on their Euro models now so that they are "greener" and that they can lower costs to not have to build two lines.
Try to Buy a European Diesel engine. So for example, I want to buy a VW engine so I can put that in a Jeep Wrangler. Great, I have to buy the US model, and all the extras for it just to make it US EPA compliant, while already by default Euro compliant.
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.
Blimey. Just had a look at the Ford F-150. To provide an overview for my fellow Britons:
That thing (F-150) is five and a half metres long, two metres wide and one point nine metres tall. Even if you're really, really tall, you still wouldn't be able to see over the roof, you'd still be able to lie down in it sideways, and it would take six paces to walk from the front bumper to the rear. It won't fit into a standard European parking space through the two horizontal dimensions, and won't fit vertically through most multi-storey car park "Max Headroom" barriers either. It weighs over two tonnes even before you put anyone or anything inside it.
For comparison, a massive gas-guzzling British car such as the Vauxhall Zafira 7-seater has a maximum engine size of 1.9 litres, produces only 148hp and weighs 1.5 tonnes.
The F-150's smallest engine is 3.5 litres and produces 350hp. That is roughly the same as a high-end BMW 5-series. Yup, their smallest engine is the same as a top-end BMW engine. That 3.5 litre, 350hp engine is branded the "eco" version.
I could understand this if Americans drove everywhere. But from my repeated and frequent trips to the USA, my experience is - they don't. They drive hardly anywhere - they generally just drive to the shops or to work, plus a few outings to nearby towns and parks within a couple of hundred miles. Sure, Americans make a lot of journies, but they don't tend to be very long ones. Anywhere much further, they FLY and get a hire car. They don't generally, for example, take their cars on long-distance holidays like Europeans do. They don't ever get in their car in, say, New York and drive all the way to Charleston; they fly. Whereas lots of Europeans would think nothing of getting in our cars in, say, Manchester, and driving all the way to Bordeaux, or starting a journey in Rome and driving to Zurich.
So I'm mystified by what Americans use an F-150 for.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com