White House Finalizes 54.5 MPG Fuel Efficiency Standard 1184
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.
Re:Got this wrong.. (Score:3, Informative)
Physics isn't going to change for the amount of energy in a gallon of gasoline.
My 400 pound motorcycle gets about 50mpg. It could get more if it wasn't so much fun, but I don't see much hope of a 3,000 pound car getting much more than that without changing fuel sources.
Re:Overcomplicated solution. (Score:5, Informative)
$10/gal for gas has really forced European manufacturers to produce 80 MPG cars and reduce the amount they drive. Oh wait....
Re:Got this wrong.. (Score:5, Informative)
My insight's only 2000 pounds and gets very close to 90mpg (89.something). The 3000 pound Civic I testdrove using the same techniques scored over 60 mpg. That was the CVT version; the stick shift is probably better yet.
(Actual EPA ratings are 65 and 47 respectively.)
Re:CAFE Kills (Score:5, Informative)
Not intended just for you, but for anyone who says "bigger cars are safer".
Here's [youtube.com] 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.
Re:"Savings" (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:CAFE Kills (Score:3, Informative)
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)
Re:Got this wrong.. (Score:2, Informative)
Weight is irrelevant. Compared to a car, your motorcycle has horrible aerodynamics, and *that* is the real killer for highway mpg. Hybrids like the Prius and Insight, and diesels like the VW BlueMotion, are already getting well over 50 mpg, with room for four people. Small gasoline-powered cars can also do this, and that's not sci-fi, that's something European and Japanese manufacturers have been building for decades. (Americans may not be aware of that because those small-engine compact cars are generally not offered for sale in the U.S. because everyone there believes that anything with less than 200 HP is "underpowered", but elsewhere in the world, people get by just fine driving cars like that.)
Re:Air resistance. (Score:5, Informative)
There's not a single car sold in America that gets 50+ mpg, which does not mean that such cars don't exist or are impossible
12 years ago I zipped all around Japan for a couple weeks in a Honda Today, got something like 60ish MPG, cruised right along at freeway speeds, power windows, AC -- it was a great car.
Here's an example of new minicar:
http://www.honda.co.jp/LIFE/webcatalog/spec/ [honda.co.jp]
The base model gets 22km/l (51.7mpg). The turbo 4wd model gets 18km/l (42.3 mpg).
This looks like an interesting microvan:
http://www.honda.co.jp/Nboxplus/ [honda.co.jp]
Efficiency range is 18.8 km/l (bigger engine 4wd) to 21.8 km/l (smaller engine FWD).
http://www.honda.co.jp/Nboxplus/webcatalog/spec/ [honda.co.jp]
Anyway, the reason we don't have cars with 55 mpg is merely because they aren't sold here. Not because of physics.
Re:it's an arms race (Score:5, Informative)
In the town of Dimock, Pennsylvania, 13 water wells were contaminated with methane (one of them blew up). Arsenic, barium, DEHP, glycol compounds, manganese, phenol, and sodium were also found in unacceptable levels in the wells.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_hydraulic_fracturing_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]
When I can't drink my own water because it combusts out of the tap next to a flame, I don't really give a fuck how fracking drives down natural gas prices.
Re:Air resistance. (Score:5, Informative)
In fact the tests are done on a dynomometer so wind resistance isn't accounted for. I think it should be but the mileage standard the President is implementing will be based on the EPA test cycle, not you hauling ass down the freeway.
Re:Air resistance. (Score:5, Informative)
There's not a single car for sale that gets 54mpg on the highway.
Here is a link listing 15 from 2009. http://www.autoblog.com/2009/10/02/report-all-of-europes-15-most-fuel-efficient-cars-get-better-t/ [autoblog.com] All sold in Europe. So there may be some market impediment to good mileage in cars in the US, but it ain't physics.
55 mph is not inherently more efficient ... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Air resistance. (Score:4, Informative)
I was with you until you go to the transmission. Lock up torque convertors are nearly universal in automatic transmissions.
Since you don't know that simple detail I'm forced to wonder how much of the rest of your post is also ignorant.
Also the 90's Metro much touted for its high mileage was a HUGE, and stripped to the bone, pile of junk, something that its praise singers always forget.
Re:Air resistance. (Score:5, Informative)
The full size Volvo V70 estate does ....wait for it... 54 miles per gallon.
Its mind blowing to sit here and watch a discussion where people question whether it is "Physically possible" to build such cars, or whether they will be around in 2025. You can buy (and many do) a full size family station wagon that does 54mpg! You don't have to get a "subcompact" or even a "compact"! http://www.autocar.co.uk/car-review/volvo/v70/first-drives/volvo-v70-1.6d-drive-se [autocar.co.uk]
Re:CAFE Kills (Score:4, Informative)
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 [dropbox.com]
Found at http://web.archive.org/web/20070713221433/http://www.edf.org/documents/4873_PickupSurveyReport.pdf [archive.org]
The stats are what he claims, and I don't have a spin on them. Decide for yourself.
Re:Air resistance. (Score:4, Informative)
Add difficulty to tire changes and chaining up in the winter.
Make cooling less effective, which reduces engine efficiency.
And harder to repair. Steel can be fixed with a welding torch and a grinder. Aluminum requires special welding techniques. Patching carbon fiber is a pain, and is nowhere near as strong as the original part.
Everyone uses locking torque converters these days, and designs have improved to take less than a 5% hit to efficiency compared to manual. Once the reliability problems are solved, they'll be switching to CVTs, which beat manuals by always hitting exactly the right gear ratio for conditions, where a discrete gearbox can only manage a series of near-misses.
Please, if you're going to complain about car designs, look at what the manufacturers are actually doing, not at what you think they're doing.
Re:Air resistance. (Score:3, Informative)
That's 54 miles per imperial gallon, presumably, which comes to 45 miles per US gallon.
Don't get me wrong, that's still impressive, just... apples to apples and all that.