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Trump Administration Plans To Freeze Obama-Era Fuel Standards (theverge.com)
The Trump administration plans to freeze Obama-era fuel-efficiency standards starting in 2021, according to a report from The Washington Post. The report says the Trump administration "would go even further by restricting a state's ability to set its own fuel standards, which would be a strike against California and its strict state-specific emissions rules," reports The Verge. From the report: The proposal has been reportedly drafted by the Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration, and the plan right now is to freeze standards for cars and light trucks at levels set for the year 2021 and keep them their for five years. The Obama administration's rules, which involved a partnership with California and car makers, set standards at 50 miles per gallon for cars and light trucks by 2025. Obama also, through the Clean Air Act, granted California a waiver to set its own, higher standards. That way, if automobile manufacturers wanted to maintain a presence in the lucrative California market, they'd have to abide by the new rules. The Trump administration now says a separate law overrules that arrangement, The Washington Post reports.
Ford just mostly pulled out of the North American car market, leaving the US/Canada with a bunch of tippy little trucklets and bigger trucks. I hope gas does a 2008 and shoots up to $5/gal soon -- if it won't push people to buy more reasonable cars, maybe it will at least help sales of electric cars out of their current niche.
Also, thank God for the Japanese makers who still sell reasonably-sized, nice-to-drive actual cars in the US market.
When you govern by issuing waivers to the law instead of actually using compromise and diplomacy to pass laws, then at some point you have to expect a new Presidential Administration might be elected and revoke those waivers and reverse previous executive actions.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
More like a strike against Chevron(*), which controls he reformulation of gasoline in California to prevent importation of gasoline refined in other states, and artificially raise the price.
State specific environmental regulations should be held to he same bar as state specific laws... subject to the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution: Federal regulations override state.
(*) From those wonderful folks who brought you MTBE
The drinking age is tied to 10% of highway funding, though enforcement varies vastly regionally. No one seems to give a shit about underage drinking in NYC, whereas the law is strictly enforced in PA (to the point that college kids with alcohol poisoning are often arrested in hospital). It will be interesting to know how they'd stop CA from setting their own economy laws -- tie it to road funding? CA already has its own emissions standards for hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, NOx, and other pollutants.
Good thing is that the lithium, once mined, is recyclable. And most people drive under 50 miles a day. Which means that, with more charging stations coming online, newer electric "commuter" cars could have smaller batteries. Enough for a range of ~100 miles, not 300-400.
Also, dead is dead. How many kids have died in horrible ways in US-funded and often US-lead wars over oil? US still uses napalm. Which really does stick to kids and burn like hell.
This is classic whataboutism.
> Ford just mostly pulled out of the North American car market, leaving the US/Canada with a bunch of tippy little trucklets and bigger trucks.
You know why? Cars have stricter fuel-efficiency standards than light trucks. That makes sense. However it creates the perverse incentive that in order to meet fuel efficiency standards, manufacturers need to make bigger, heavier, less-efficient vehicles - trucks.
And there I was thinking that the Republican party were all about giving states more freedom and independence.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
1. Lithium is not a "rare earth".
2. Lithium is not a conflict mineral.
3. Lithium is extracted from salt flats or brine. Neither process uses either children or slaves.
Only where such freedom and rights benefit DOW 30 corporations or certain churches where the lunatics run the asylum.
Or slap a 100% sales tax on all cars. Discounted by 90% if the manufacturer meets California average fuel-economy standards, of course.
That's what the major car companies kept trying to shovel down consumers' throats, and nobody bought them. It has nothing to do with charging station availability. With such a short range, you don't really have much choice but to charge your car every night when you get home, because nobody wants to spend 30+ minutes every day charging. (Remember, you won't be able to charge as fast if you're filling the battery all the way to the top, and the shorter the total range, the more likely you'll be to have to fully fill the battery every day, so AFAIK, charging should take disproportionately longer per mile than with longer-range cars, assuming all else is equal.)
The thing is, Tesla's charge times (except when the supercharger is full and you have to wait behind four or five cars just to start charging, like you do in most of the Bay Area) are actually pretty much in the sweet spot, at 50-70 minutes. That's long enough to get out of the car, walk to a restaurant, eat, and come back. At 30 minutes, that isn't possible unless the charger is literally in the parking lot of the restaurant. It's too long to treat as just another minor part of your commute like a gas station fill-up would be, but it isn't long enough to comfortably get food while you wait. So IMO, no matter how ubiquitous charging stations become, unless charge times drop to almost nothing, there will never be a serious market for cars with only a 100-mile range except perhaps in California (and even then, only for the carpool lane stickers).
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Neither process uses either children or slaves.
So you're saying there are 'untapped inefficiencies' that could be addressed?
Not with that attitude!
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
So charge at home overnight. You can charge at about 12kWh per hour off a 240V/50A circuit. 2.5 hr gives you enough charge (30kWh) to go 100 miles, whole day's driving and more for most people. If there are chargers at work, you can also charge there. Viola! Another 100 miles' range, 200mi per day.
Cyanide and carbon monoxide are also made of carbon. Try sniffing some and telling me it's not a pollutant ... oh wait.
50mpg is not a realistic number for fuel consumption on anything you'd be willing to buy.
The Chevy Volt and the Toyota Prius both do better than 50mpg, and plenty of people are willing to buy them. They are both based on years-old technology, so there's no reason (outside of laziness and a race-to-the-bottom mentality) that carmakers can't do even better going forward.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I always learned that states rights was an outdated racist concept that we killed off in the Civil War.
Having 50 standards was wrong when having one standard made much more sense.
The state level bureaucrats got substandard educations from State U instead of the elite Ivy League and as such were unqualified to govern effectively. Now suddenly states rights is progressive and having 50 different standards designed by morons is a good thing? Am I the only one experiencing cognitive dissonance here?
Confusion is natural for those who neglect to form arguments for or against a course of action based on actual articulable merit and instead hide behind voodoo magic, worthless ideology and dogma.
The majority of Americans don't live in the rural US. Infernal combustion cars aren't going anywhere for the 10% of truly rural population.
"Lithium is extracted from salt flats or brine. Neither process uses either children or slaves"
Lithium is also extracted from lepidolite, which is in fact extracted in many countries with slave labor (which is incidentally children looking for lithium-borate gems within those lepidolite bodies.)
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Plus there is a stack of awesome V8s all over the used market. 75% of the motors in useless mall utility vehicles, so the good cars will be going for the foreseeable future. Lots of cheap parts for miles and miles.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Those are also mostly carbon.
Hence the "sweet spot" for non-city commuter cars is about 500 miles.
? I've lived in very rural areas most of my life and never had a ICE car that could do more than 325 miles on a tank while living there. I never noticed a problem.
My last truck, an F150, could do 500 if I let it suck fumes. But that was because it had a 26 gallon tank. When gas broke $4 a gallon, filling that damn thing hurt bad. I did break $100 a couple of times.
I'm in a suburban environment now, but would have loved having a 200 mile or better BEV when I lived in the country. My electric was via a natural gas generator fed by free wellhead gas. I'd have been driving for free.
Have you ever stopped to think about the *quality* of the jobs he pledged to "bring back"? If any jobs are "brought back", it'll be bottom-of-the-barrel, meaningless, back-breaking work that won't serve America's long-term future or viability at all.
Let me know when his Congress can pass a balancing or surplus budget and minimum wage is livable again. You guys like the 1950s, right? You could buy a home, have children, and own a home on minimum wage in the '50s through till the 80s, when double-income became a thing and everyone's prices rose to match it. Ever since then, the poor have paid for the affluence of the middle- and upper- class.
Funny, that era was the time that the baby boomers enjoyed the most of their fortune, only to do everything they can to keep all future generations from enjoying the same fortune that the "greatest generation" from the 1910s made possible through their sacrifice and tireless work.
"Common sense" dictates that if you put a bunch of toxic gas into the atmosphere, nature will pay for it somewhere. Unless you know of some magical anti-pollution machine high up in the sky that filters all this shit and puts it somewhere... your pretty little truck contributes to the problem; being an obnoxious twat and "rolling coal" only harms humanity's future. Do you want your great-great- grandkids to be cleaning up the mess your generation created? Gen X and millennials are already paying for your generation's economic and political fuck-ups, with the next generation likely to be caught in it, too. Why add to the mess?
Blind selfishness will be the end of us.
Exactly. Coal (other than burning it in power plants or large factories) went away because using it was a cast-iron b!tch. All romance and nostalgia aside, it's a hell of a lot nicer to drive an electric or diesel train than a steam engine. Imagine being the poor guy who's shoveling coal into a locomotive boiler in 90-degree heat, where the temperature in the cab is likely closer to 130-140 degrees. And unlike natural gas boilers or diesel engines, coal boilers need to be cleaned of ash and caked on coal soot regularly. Care to volunteer for that job?
If electric cars were popular, your condo's board would likely have charging stations installed. Maybe even with a subsidy from the power company, who'd love to sell more power.
Infernal combustion cars
I assume that was an autocorrect mistake, but I absolutely love it. Some kind of mix between a crotchety old-timer who doesn't want to give up his horse buggy and a mindless hipster twitter jokey who thinks all fossil fuels are pure evil.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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when Clinton (Bill) shifted the Democratic party right to win the presidency. The Republicans then moved right to protect their own identity (after all, why vote Republican when the Dems are damn near the same) and then the Dems decided to move to the new "center" and here we are with both parties far, far to the right of Eisenhower. Bernie's trying to get things moving back in the direction of FDR and the like.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
No, you can't. Not safely, anyway. By law, you have to de-rate circuits by 20% for continuous use like EV charging. So your 50A circuit provides 40A, which is only 9.6 kWh per hour.
The problem with your approach is that it doesn't scale. At 9.6 kWh per hour, in theory, you would need about four hours of charge per vehicle for that hundred-mile range. Unfortunately, that's actually a best-case estimate, because it assumes that your battery has at least a 200 mile range and is starting out empty.
In practice, lithium battery charging slows down as the battery gets closer to being full, which means that if putting 100 miles into an empty 300-mile battery would take four hours, putting 100 miles into an empty 100-mile battery would likely take closer to 6 hours. So unless your employer does some sort of staggered work hours, this effectively means that if every employee actually needed 100 miles of range each day, you would literally need one charger for each employee who owns an electric car. Providing five or ten 50A circuits per building is relatively easy. Providing 200 EV circuits per building is not.
The other big problem with your theory is the assumption that an EPA-rated 100-mile range is enough for a 50-mile round trip. That doesn't factor in things like heat in the winter, climbing hills, or the fact that smaller EV batteries lose on the order of 10% of their capacity every year. In five years, you'd better be ready to buy a new car, or else you'll find yourself not making it home.
You see, the other major advantage of a larger battery is that the larger capacity lets you leave a lot of charge in the bottom and never fully charge the cells all the way to the top. Deep discharging and full charging are hard on batteries, and avoiding both of those scenarios makes a big difference in their life expectancy.
Also, the larger capacity means that the batteries run down over 3x as many miles, which means they get a third as many cycles per mile. Those differences mean losing 5% of your charge after five years instead of 50%.
The bottom line is that 100-mile EVs are really quite impractical, and it isn't just because people are worried about needing to make longer trips. No improvements to the charging network can solve those fundamental problems, because you'll still be absolutely torturing their batteries. Anyone who buys a car that can't make at least three or four round trips per charge is likely to regret that decision. And if folks lease the cars instead, then the poor suckers who buy them used after three years are likely to regret their decisions even more. Building cars with such limited range just doesn't make sense.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Here is the full rule (1500 pages) for 2012-2016 if you'd like to read it, but I'll summarize a bit for you.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/staticfi...
> fleet-wide averages, without as much exception for "trucks."
There are two (or more) completely separate fleets. Cars, light trucks, medium trucks (and busses), heavy trucks, motorcycles. There is no "exception", the two groups are computed entirely separately, based on entirely different MPG standards and different average lifetime miles.
For CAFE purposes, each company is essentially split into two companies - a truck company and a car company. (Also motorcycles and large trucks are computed entirely separate, as if they were different companies). You can read the full details in the EPA rules above.
So first the company does its cars. The first step on calculating the car standard is to find the average size (footprint) of the company's cars. I'll directly quote the EPA rule on this rather than trying to explain it in my own words:
--
EPAâ(TM)s final standards, like the standards NHTSA
promulgated in March 2009 for MY 2011, are expressed as mathematical functions depending on vehicle footprint. Footprint is one measure of vehicle size, and is
determined by multiplying the vehicleâ(TM)s wheelbase by the vehicleâ(TM)s average track width.
--
After finding the footprint, you look at the table (section 3, I think) that gives the formula for your range. Inputting the average footprint, the formula tells what the average fuel economy needs to be, in GALLONS PER MILE.
It's gallons per mile because a vehicle that gets 1MPG burns twice as much gas as one that gets 2MPG, but a vehicle that gets 99MPG is almost the same as one that gets 100MPG.
Subtract your company's ACTUAL average GPM for cars from the standard to get the amount of credit or debit. If the company is more efficient than required, it can either save those credits for next year, or sell the credits to another car company. Similarly, if this year's sales aren't efficient enough, the company can either use credits it earned in an earlier year, or buy credits from a more efficient company. (Credit brokers are allowed, but cannot actually own the credits, only bank them).
Once your done with the cars, you go through the same procedure, separately, for your motorcycles, then again completely separately for light trucks, etc.
I mentioned that a company that doesn't meet its target can buy credits from a company that the target. What Mack beats their heavy truck target, while BMW needs to buy credits for their cars? Mack has truck credits to sell, BMW wants to buy car credits. The public doesn't care whether a gallon of gas is burned in a motorcycle or a bus, they only care how much as is burned, so before trading companies can apply a formula to convert light truck credits to car credits, or car credits to medium truck credits or whatever. (It's not one-for-one, different kinds of credits are "worth" different amounts). Note that it may be Volvo's truck credits offsetting Ferrari's car debit. The Corporate in CAFE doesn't matter once you start trading different kinds of credits.
Just as GMC can convert truck credits to (fewer) car credits in order to sell them to Ferrari, GMC can also convert truck credits to car credits for Buick. GMC and Buick happen to be the same company, but GMC could just as easily trade those credits to a different company, maybe Ford or Volkswagen.
Again, the full details are in the actual rule linked above, but the summary is that car, light truck, medium truck, and heavy truck are computed completely separate, like separate companies. There is no averaging between cars and trucks.
Lithium can be extracted from lepidolite, but not much actually is.
Over 40% of the world's lithium supply comes from Australia, primarily spodumene mines like these. Chile and Argentina produce another 45% from brine evaporation, as is most of China's output which supplies around 7%. The rest comes from the USA, Canada, Brazil, Portugal, and 2% from petalite and spodumene mines in Zimbabwe.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
No, you can't. Not safely, anyway. By law, you have to de-rate circuits by 20% for continuous use like EV charging. So your 50A circuit provides 40A, which is only 9.6 kWh per hour.
Incorrect, Electrician by trade. On a dedicated circuit(120v or 220v) I can use every amp available continuous, only on appliances with high starting inrush do you provide a higher breaker size and you also have to raise the wire gauge to match breaker size. On a circuit without a dedicated load, do you have to de-rate what you install, and that is because high draw appliances(vacuums) can be plugged in while other stuff is also plugged in. also for expansion at a later point.
A device like a Tesla is considered a Dedicated Load, even if you unplug it or only plug it in periodically.