300 MPG Car Is Not Allowed In America Because It’s Too Efficient

[Mageth]

The answer to the fuel use efficiency problem will not be found in every individual on the planet driving everywhere they need to go in their own individual 300mpg vehicles, but in better mass transportation.

This ain't deep people.

Naive. If only it were that simple!

Overall higher fuel efficency for road vehicles would certainly contribute significantly to the answer. There's a need for both as solutions. Esp. since ramping up mass tran to the necessary level everywhere will take decades, if it's done at all, and will be enormously expensive, and thus politically and economically difficult.

Replacing less efficient vehicles with more efficient vehicles can be, and is being, done on a large scale (nation and planet wide), and with relative ease (political and otherwise) and at lower cost when compared to mass transit projects. Thus, the more feasible part of the answer that can give the greatest short term benefit, in addition to significant long term benefit, is higher fuel efficiency vehicles.


An anecdotal example is Austin, where I live. City's spent decades in political fights, had bond elections and what not, to improve the mass tran system, including adding some light rail. Spent hundreds of millions, yet a very limited system with only a few thousand riders. It'll take decades and billions to bring Austin's transit system up to speed, so to speak.

Meanwhile, as Austinites are replacing their cars, they're generally replacing them with more fuel efficient, hybrid, or electric cars.

Another example is NYC. I spent last weekend on Manhattan. Rode MTA. Great mass transit system. But I noticed there were still tens of thousands of vehicles on the streets. People still use road vehicles even where there is mass tran. Now - Imagine the benefit of increasing the fuel efficiency of NYC's taxi fleet by 25% or more.


So again, while better mass tran is needed, it's just part of the solution, specifically in the long term. Another part is fuel efficiency, which can contribute significantly to the answer in the short term.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[ZiprHead]

My Sprite's and Midget were pure joy to drive when I and wifey had the roads to ourselves.
I commuted 60 miles daily to my job at Oldsmobile, rain or shine, summer and winter, even through Michigan's snow and ice, and they never once let me down. Of course the tin worms soon consumed them (...except the one I installed a BOP 215 V-8 and Muncie 4 speed in )

May even buy another now that the kids are grown and gone. Not for use in urban traffic or on expressways though. Don't care at all for any of the newer 'civilized' sports cars.

I just saw a Sprite in somebody's driveway here in Saginaw. Looked to be in pretty good shape too.

 

[dockeen]

I have seen environmental groups complain about programs designed to synchronize traffic lights such that a driver going the speed limit would not be stopped.

Their reason. Making driving more efficient undermines mass transit.

 

[angelo]

In fact Ford owned 32% of Mazda, and many platforms are still shared even though they are no longer jointly owned.

 

[Bronzeage]

I have seen environmental groups complain about programs designed to synchronize traffic lights such that a driver going the speed limit would not be stopped.

Their reason. Making driving more efficient undermines mass transit.

I am always skeptical when I read about a group which wants to make problems worse in order to forward their agenda.

There is a point to the idea. Super efficient cars are still cars and the one man-four wheels transportation model has a practical limit, especially when population densities increase. The car has made millions of square miles of land accessible. The problem occurs when the car comes back, or all of them come back at the same time. For our OMFC model to work, there must be a place for the car to sit idle, all day long, another place for it to sit all night and a road in between. However nonrenewable fossil fuels maybe, or whatever new power sources may be developed, one thing is certain. The surface area of the Earth is finite and there is a limit to how many cars we can fit on it.

A 300 mpg car would be nice, but the cost of fuel is actually a small part of the problem and it is true, anything which extends OMFC transportation as the only viable form of transportation, hinders the development of the infrastructure which will end our dependence on it.

 

[angelo]

We had a couple of buses running on hydrogen some time ago as experimental public transport. It was great to see water vapour been emitted from the exhaust. The experiment must've been a faliur as they were taken off the road.

 

[Valjean]

Americans don't view cars as transportation appliances. Cars here are Rides, they're status indicators, they're moving entertainment centers. The technological improvements over the years have gone more into performance enhancements, cupholders and music systems than mileage.

I think the Industry has a point. Fuel efficiency isn't that high on Americans' lists of desirable features. Americans won't buy anaemic econoboxes.

It's not that high MPG cars aren't already available, either. Just look at an Asian or European dealership. The small cars there routinely get 50 MPG or more -- with no fancy hybrid-electric tech. They're just not sold here.

 

[Underseer]

I am always skeptical when I read about a group which wants to make problems worse in order to forward their agenda.

There is a point to the idea. Super efficient cars are still cars and the one man-four wheels transportation model has a practical limit, especially when population densities increase. The car has made millions of square miles of land accessible. The problem occurs when the car comes back, or all of them come back at the same time. For our OMFC model to work, there must be a place for the car to sit idle, all day long, another place for it to sit all night and a road in between. However nonrenewable fossil fuels maybe, or whatever new power sources may be developed, one thing is certain. The surface area of the Earth is finite and there is a limit to how many cars we can fit on it.

A 300 mpg car would be nice, but the cost of fuel is actually a small part of the problem and it is true, anything which extends OMFC transportation as the only viable form of transportation, hinders the development of the infrastructure which will end our dependence on it.

The whole business of synchronizing traffic lights to maximize throughput was abandoned long ago as impractical.

The problem is that if you whoosh everyone through as fast as you can, you end up with a bottleneck somewhere. If the traffic is heavy enough, that bottleneck turns into gridlock. So you have to slow traffic down from any intersection that might lead towards a bottleneck. Possibly even the intersections before that.

Some decades back, the average number of cars per household doubled, and the population increased all the while, so a change like this had to happen or there would be massive traffic snarls in every major cosmopolitan area.

 

[Clivedurdle]

BlaBlaCar is to car hire what AirBnB is to the hotel industry
The car-share service is cheaper than public transport and targets the built-in inefficiencies of motoring

The Guardian, Sunday 13 April 2014 08.59 BST

With only three days until Christmas in 2003, Frédéric Mazzella was under pressure to get to his family home in Fontenay-le-Comte, 300 miles outside Paris – but all the trains were full.

After eventually getting a lift from his sister, he noticed most of the cars on the road were empty but for the driver. This was a vast inefficiency in his eyes – but one that got him thinking.

"The idea was to organise all the available seats in cars just like we organise all the available seats in planes and trains, with a real search engine, and this did not exist. There was only demand and no offer and organised in a very weird way in that you would have neighbours who would share a ride but you did not know where they were going and when," he says.

Mazzella's observation that day was the seed for the car-sharing company BlaBlaCar, and it has grown to the point at which the president of SNCF, the French national railway, identified it as a competitor last year.

The Paris-based company has six million members in a dozen countries, linking drivers with passengers who can buy seats. According to the company, a million people use its website every month, keying in details of where they want to go and when, and getting a list of drivers heading to the same destination, with their journey history and a price – which can be a fraction of a ticket on public transport...

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/apr/13/blablacar-hire-airbnb-hotel-car-share-service

 

[dockeen]

The whole business of synchronizing traffic lights to maximize throughput was abandoned long ago as impractical.

The problem is that if you whoosh everyone through as fast as you can, you end up with a bottleneck somewhere. If the traffic is heavy enough, that bottleneck turns into gridlock. So you have to slow traffic down from any intersection that might lead towards a bottleneck. Possibly even the intersections before that.

Some decades back, the average number of cars per household doubled, and the population increased all the while, so a change like this had to happen or there would be massive traffic snarls in every major cosmopolitan area.

It might have been San Diego that I am recalling, but they had a really good system for feeding back traffic into the light sequencing that seemed to work. I will see if I can find the paper.

- - - Updated - - -

In fact Ford owned 32% of Mazda, and many platforms are still shared even though they are no longer jointly owned.

I owned a Mazda B3000 for a number of years. It was essentially a Ranger with some sheet metal differences. First "foreign" car I ever bought.

 

[angelo]

We here in Australia are about to lose auto manufacturing as the big three [Ford, Toyota and GM] have announced they are closing Australian manufacturing as it costs around $ 3.500 per vehicle more to build it here than overseas.
Mind you, all three only manufacture the Commodore, Cruze by GM, Camry by Toyota, and the Falcon and Ranger by Ford. All other models are imported. The Aussie market cannot sustain the numbers required to make any model viable here.
The market here is roughly around a million cars per year shared among all the marquees. It may have been a case of vehical manufacturing unions pricing themselves out of the market. Let's face it, when the tea lady grosses 100 grand per year AU we have reached the stage of absurd.

 

[arkirk]

What I keep thinking is: Is it really not allowed? Who makes that decision? If there is such a thing, we should all band together and demand it for ourselves. We have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Our friend from Australia complained that they only made a million new tailpipes in Australia last year. If we are serious about reducing greenhouse emissions, it would help if those tailpipes were each 10 to 12 times as efficient. So is it real or not. We can skip the falderal about how safe a light automobile is. Even if we had to build some separate roads to run these things on, they would help a lot. Unfortunately, I think it could be another false claim.

 

[angelo]

What I keep thinking is: Is it really not allowed? Who makes that decision? If there is such a thing, we should all band together and demand it for ourselves. We have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Our friend from Australia complained that they only made a million new tailpipes in Australia last year. If we are serious about reducing greenhouse emissions, it would help if those tailpipes were each 10 to 12 times as efficient. So is it real or not. We can skip the falderal about how safe a light automobile is. Even if we had to build some separate roads to run these things on, they would help a lot. Unfortunately, I think it could be another false claim.

No, the total car sales are a million. Total Aussie auto manufacturing is less than 200.000.

 

[Derec]

What I keep thinking is: Is it really not allowed? Who makes that decision?

Car companies make the decision what cars they sell in what markets. Generally, when you have the same model sold in US and Europe/Japan the lowest engine size options are not available in the US.
Take Ford Focus. Overall it is available with 1.0, 1.6 and two different 2.0L gasoline engines as well as 1.6 and 2.0L diesel, but the 2L gasoline is the only one available in the US. Is that some sort of dastardly conspiracy by the car manufacturers to deny US fuel efficient cars? No, they are merely catering to what the consumers here in the land of big block V8s want.

If there is such a thing, we should all band together and demand it for ourselves.

If enough people demand it the market will deliver. Of course the problem is that the demand for smaller engines is not high enough. One reason is the very low gas prices in the US compared to elsewhere (due to taxes). Good luck instituting some kind of carbon tax though!

We have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Our friend from Australia complained that they only made a million new tailpipes in Australia last year.

Well the population of Australia is less than 1/10 of the US.

If we are serious about reducing greenhouse emissions, it would help if those tailpipes were each 10 to 12 times as efficient.

Pretty much impossible to achieve that sort of efficiency increase.

So is it real or not. We can skip the falderal about how safe a light automobile is. Even if we had to build some separate roads to run these things on, they would help a lot. Unfortunately, I think it could be another false claim.

Is what real? VW XL1? Yes it is real. But it's a glorified concept car. Good for showcasing new technologies and approaches but not in itself practical as a mass-produced vehicle. Engineering is all about compromises. XL1 is too uncompromisingly designed for fuel economy. That is not a problem for XL1 because, again, it's never meant to be the next Golf but rather a showpiece to highlight fuel economy.

 

[Derec]

Americans don't view cars as transportation appliances. Cars here are Rides, they're status indicators, they're moving entertainment centers. The technological improvements over the years have gone more into performance enhancements, cupholders and music systems than mileage.

Other nations enjoy their cars too, especially the Germans. Yet they also manage to get good mileage with many of their cars and have a good public transit in the cities. We need to get away from this dichotomy of being either car-friendly or car-hostile.

I think the Industry has a point. Fuel efficiency isn't that high on Americans' lists of desirable features. Americans won't buy anaemic econoboxes.

And they shouldn't. Unfortunately the image of fuel efficient cars is still the anemic (and ugly) econoboxes of the 70s.

It's not that high MPG cars aren't already available, either. Just look at an Asian or European dealership. The small cars there routinely get 50 MPG or more -- with no fancy hybrid-electric tech. They're just not sold here.

Well many of these are diesel which makes comparison a bit unfair. Also be careful reading figures in UK publications as their gallon is bigger than ours (4.5L vs. 3.8L). And "anemic, ugly, unsafe econoboxes" apply to segments of Asian markets - your Tatas and your Protons for example. But European and most Asian manufacturers have lively smaller cars that get decent gas mileage. Unfortunately even when they are available in the US then only with the biggest engine.
But still, the US version of the Ford Fiesta gets 32 city/45 highway mpg which is not bad at all.

 

[Derec]

We had a couple of buses running on hydrogen some time ago as experimental public transport. It was great to see water vapour been emitted from the exhaust. The experiment must've been a faliur as they were taken off the road.

I do not know what caused the failure of this system but it likely was hydrogen infrastructure.

Another idea. Many cities use trolleybuses, electric buses powered by overhead wires like trolleys. They have been in use for decades. With improving battery technology, it should be easy to outfit them with batteries so they can run "off the grid" and serve outlying areas and then recharge when they are back "on the grid" in city centers without having to be out of service for recharge. That would also allow them to temporarily decouple for rerouting/traffic purposes as well.

 

[angelo]

Trolly buses were discontinued decades ago here. They were great and silent which caused other probs like pedestrians walking in front of them because they could be seen but not heard.

 

[Valjean]

Well many of these are diesel which makes comparison a bit unfair. Also be careful reading figures in UK publications as their gallon is bigger than ours (4.5L vs. 3.8L). And "anemic, ugly, unsafe econoboxes" apply to segments of Asian markets - your Tatas and your Protons for example. But European and most Asian manufacturers have lively smaller cars that get decent gas mileage. Unfortunately even when they are available in the US then only with the biggest engine.
But still, the US version of the Ford Fiesta gets 32 city/45 highway mpg which is not bad at all.

Yet the diesel version -- unavailable here -- gets over 60 MPG. When will the US wake up to diesel's better torque and mileage?

On the other hand, I've been looking at the Ford Transit Connects. Both available engines are petrol/gas, but the smaller, EcoBoost engine manages both better horsepower and torque -- and at a lower RPM -- than the larger engine, though it does need a higher octane fuel.

 

[Bronzeage]

...
Well many of these are diesel which makes comparison a bit unfair. Also be careful reading figures in UK publications as their gallon is bigger than ours (4.5L vs. 3.8L). And "anemic, ugly, unsafe econoboxes" apply to segments of Asian markets - your Tatas and your Protons for example. But European and most Asian manufacturers have lively smaller cars that get decent gas mileage. Unfortunately even when they are available in the US then only with the biggest engine.
But still, the US version of the Ford Fiesta gets 32 city/45 highway mpg which is not bad at all.

In a world where automobiles are seen as a phallic symbol, it nice to see a car named the Tatas.

 

[pegasus8]

I am old enough to have seen this coconut shell game go on since the 70's concerning the perception of mpg's!

This game has been going on for years. So I can add my two cents through experience and research.

First some folks will bend over backwards and touch their ankles to defend the energy interest here in America. It is kind of like "thank you can I have another" concerning why does the most technologically advanced country in the history of Mankind not have the ability to market a car that gets 100 mpg? And IMO it is an interesting answer. We have the technology, the means and even today the demand. So what gives?

In 1978 I thought that I was so F ing cool when I ordered a brand new 1978 Trans Am at 18. It was custom ordered with all the shit and got about 18 mpg with a 400, 6.6L. turbo 400 transmission. If you floored it on the freeway going to Las Vegas you could actually watch the gas gauge move. In 1979 will had the second gas crisis. You remember odd days even days to buy gas and the panicked ensued. In 1978 the Volkswagen Rabbit diesel had a waiting list to get/order as it got 40 mpg. It was a cool chick car and came in a convertible. Fast forward to today 35 odd years later and you be lucky to get 40 mpg in your car. What gives?

Is there some kind of energy/auto interest collusion going on for the last 40 years? I would say yes and no. Are they trying to keep this awesome concept car the XL1 out of the American markets? Well not in today's mpg conscious market. So why has it only been lately that little light weight wheel barrels of cars have taken to the mainstream if the gas shocker of the 70's happen so long ago? Why are the cars today barley getting a little over 40-50 mpg when the cars were almost getting this in the 70's? And the answer has been brought up here and there in this thread. It is all about marketing. The great America way is to make you want and buy shit you do not need and or drains your pocket book. It is the American way of waste and conspicuous consumption. Our vehicles are our statements and our status symbols in this rat race.

I bought that 1978 Trans Am because it made me look cool. It attracted chicks and tickets like a cold sore that would not go away. Some of my friends drove little Japanese cars as all of us "macho" Americans laughed at them. All the cool guys drove trucks, vans and V-8 sport cars; you know like Z-28's, Corvettes, Mopars, TransAms' etc. The "real " Americans would never be caught driving around in foreign wheel barrels. Little cars were for girls and nerds. Fast forward today and we still see the marketing of trucks, SUV's and sports cars as having this cool factor.

Look at the remake of the Mustang, the Camarro, the Challenger, etc in today's domestic market.They all pretty much suck at mpg. The Ford, Dodge, Chevy and GMC trucks are the mainstay in the auto industry. And how many people are usually in these trucks? Why usually one person! So the marketing aspect of driving cars, trucks and SUV's that get a MPG just south of 20 mpg is one of reflection. And we always hear the need and utility of big cars and trucks. You know my kids, my stuff and my need for the safety of my kinds and stuff. IMO all just marketing ploys.

We have the technology to get 100 mpg cars and trucks on the roadway today. Yet the people will not want to drive these kind of cars because the perception and the cool factor. I mean look how stupid the H2 was in the 90's and 2000's. It is obvious that the car manufactures make more money selling bigger cars that get lesser mpg. And marketing has done this quite well for years.

As a reaction to this we are seeing the recent phenomenon of the marketing of the hybird and other "eco, green" friendly cars. Today these cars are the new "cool" factor. I see this in Sonora with a segment that traditionally drives the Subaru line of cars. It can snow pretty good up here and the little Subaru's have 4 w drive along with decent mpg. Yet they pretty much all look kind of goofy. But heck what do I know some of us are still stuck in the 80's!

It is obvious that marketing cars with lower mpg's is a pleasant added plus for the energy interest. And since the first gas crisis cars today are barley getting better mpg then 40 years ago. So the question beckons why? GM had a whole line of electric cars in the 80's that were all recalled. Why did they have to kill the electric domestic car in the 80's? And of course you are going to hear that is was the, fill in the gap; the batteries, the safety issue, the parts cost too much and so on and so forth.

Tesla can do it against all the attacks and odds. So why can not the others do it? More and more Americans are following their European counterparts and understanding that a car is to get you from point A to B. But man or man I tell you. My brother's Pirus sure sucks. It is about a few inches above the ground and rides like a wheel barrel. But it looks cool though even with the lame ass interior and winky dink tires! I shall take my Ford Explorer any day of the week over those match boxes on wheels. At least it holds my dog and the ice chest with ease. Ah nothing like America.


Peace

Pegasus