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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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.