Why gas mileage has barely budged since 1980 - Brad Plumer via The Washington Post
Are the car manufacturers stuck in a time warp? Doesn’t it seem like we should have 100 mile/gallon cars by now? It turns out that there has been great advances in car technology, but they have been cancelled out by making the cards heavier:
Brad Plumer via The Washington Post
[MIT economist Christopher] Knittel notes that automakers have made a slew of striking advances on the internal combustion engine over the past few decades — from variable-speed transmissions to front-wheel drive — that have drastically increased efficiency. But automakers mainly took advantage of those breakthroughs to build larger cars and light trucks with more powerful engines. Between 1980 and 2006, the average curb weight of vehicles increased 26 percent, while horsepower rose 10 percent. Average gas mileage, by contrast, improved just 15 percent.
The charts below, for instance, show how the Honda Accord has evolved over time. The car’s weight, horsepower and torque have all climbed dramatically since 1980. By contrast, the car’s gas mileage (shown in the lower right corner), spiked briefly in the early 1980s before plummeting and then largely stagnating for a decade:
Here’s another way of making the point: If Americans were still driving the same-sized cars that they were back in 1980, Knittel calculates, the average gas mileage of vehicles would be about 37 miles per gallon today, rather than the 23 miles per gallon we’re currently getting. But oil prices fell during the 1980s and 1990s, and fuel-economy standards stagnated. Automakers had few incentives to improve gas mileage. So they didn’t.
And if they had worked at making the cars small and of lighter materials, they’d probably be over 50 miles/gallon.
Source: Flickr / cloughridge
The Benefits Of State Capitalism? Maybe We Should Switch.
China’s central coordination of economics and policy is unsettling when they manipulate their currency to maintain a strong export market for low-cost Chinese goods, but there is something attractive about China’s ability to control growth by simply telling cities and manaufacturers what to do:
Keith Bradsher, China Carmakers Told to Seek Fuel Efficiency, Not Sales
J.D. Power & Associates, the global consults, estimated last month that China would have a manufacturing capacity of 31 million vehicles by 2013. Yet the domestic market has decelerated sharply this year, with sales of family vehicles up just 5 percent in the first seven months, compared with the period a year earlier. By contrast, sales had soared 33 percent in 2010, compared with 2009.
Much slower sales growth this year has prompted strong lobbying by the auto industry for a renewal of government incentives. But if anything, policy makers seem to be leaning toward more limits to address China’s steeply rising dependence on imported oil and its traffic jams, air pollution and shortages of land in many areas for more road construction.
Officials in Beijing have urged the auto industry to improve technology for years. But they clearly shifted their tone at the conference this weekend in calling for curbs on the industry’s overall growth in sales and production.
Many Chinese automakers are partly or entirely owned by municipal or provincial governments, however, and these lower tiers of government have pushed their manufacturers to expand as fast as possible to maximize jobs and economic output.
But limits on car sales in big cities may pressure Chinese automakers to slow down. The municipal government of Beijing, China’s largest single market with 4 percent of sales last year, stunned the industry last December by imposing stringent limits on the number of new-car registrations each month, effectively imposing a decline in sales of close to 70 percent.
Industry executives argued that this was purely a response to severe traffic jams in Beijing and lobbied for the central government not to let other cities take the same course.
Shanghai is unusual in having limited car registrations since 1994 because its historic city center has many narrow old streets. But with the exception this summer of Guiyang in southern China, most Chinese cities have been awaiting signals from Beijing on whether to follow suit.
Mr. Jiang said during a brief interview Sunday on the sidelines of the conference in Tianjin that he expected other cities to do so. “Beijing is a very typical city from which other cities may learn,” he said.
In China, the collusion between government and industry isn’t concealed by shadowy lobbying groups and political donations, the government is a shareholder in the industries, and government officials are amassing wealth through their involvement. But at least when they decide that something is amiss — like too many cars in urban areas, the leaders can decide to take action, and do so.
Contrast this with the fooforaw when Mayor Bloomberg tried to limit the number of cars in downtown Manhattan through his congestion pricing proposal, based on similar programs in London, Singapore, and Stockholm, and which never even was brought to a vote in the NY State Assembly. Note that New York would have been eligible for $350 million in US Department of Transportation funding to expand various aspects of public transport.
So, I for one cannot wait for the day that our corporate overlords simply acquire the government, giving up the pretense of a democratic system. At least then they won’t have to continue with the GOP versus the Democrats charade, and they will be able to pursue policies that are beneficial to the state — like limiting traffic in growing urban areas — without a Punch and Judy show about global warming or the freedoms of the individual car owner. Our leaders — albeit not popularly elected — would simply pass decrees, which might be better than political stalemate.
Source: The New York Times
Reclaiming Our Cities: Just Say No To Cars
I was riding my bicycle down Main Street the other day in Beacon NY, my newly adopted home, just 60 miles north of New York City. A wide SUV passed me, and a fat woman yelled out the window, “Get on the sidewalk!”
Of course, she might not know that it is illegal to drive a bicycle on the sidewalks, but she has to know that it isn’t safe. But she could have cared less: all she wants is the road, for her. For cars.
Luckily, Beacon has a very narrow Main Street, so even without bicyclists like me slowing things down, people parking, opening car doors, and so on, makes traffic crawl. Thank goodness.
Beacon has had zero pedestrian fatalities in recent years in part because of the nature of downtown: too slow to be dangerous.
But people like the woman in the SUV push to make downtown more car friendly: there is a constant argument going on at the Beacon Citizen website about the supposed need for more parking downtown.
Europe has been taking the opposite tack: to make cities less car-friendly as a way to make cities more people-centric.
Elisabeth Rosenthal, Europe Stifles Drivers in Favor of Alternatives
While American cities are synchronizing green lights to improve traffic flow and offering apps to help drivers find parking, many European cities are doing the opposite: creating environments openly hostile to cars. The methods vary, but the mission is clear — to make car use expensive and just plain miserable enough to tilt drivers toward more environmentally friendly modes of transportation.
Cities including Vienna to Munich and Copenhagen have closed vast swaths of streets to car traffic. Barcelona and Paris have had car lanes eroded by popular bike-sharing programs. Drivers in London and Stockholm pay hefty congestion charges just for entering the heart of the city. And over the past two years, dozens of German cities have joined a national network of “environmental zones” where only cars with low carbon dioxide emissions may enter.
Likeminded cities welcome new shopping malls and apartment buildings but severely restrict the allowable number of parking spaces. On-street parking is vanishing. In recent years, even former car capitals like Munich have evolved into “walkers’ paradises,” said Lee Schipper, a senior research engineer at Stanford University who specializes in sustainable transportation.
“In the United States, there has been much more of a tendency to adapt cities to accommodate driving,” said Peder Jensen, head of the Energy and Transport Group at the European Environment Agency. “Here there has been more movement to make cities more livable for people, to get cities relatively free of cars.”
To that end, the municipal Traffic Planning Department here in Zurich has been working overtime in recent years to torment drivers. Closely spaced red lights have been added on roads into town, causing delays and angst for commuters. Pedestrian underpasses that once allowed traffic to flow freely across major intersections have been removed. Operators in the city’s ever expanding tram system can turn traffic lights in their favor as they approach, forcing cars to halt.
Around Löwenplatz, one of Zurich’s busiest squares, cars are now banned on many blocks. Where permitted, their speed is limited to a snail’s pace so that crosswalks and crossing signs can be removed entirely, giving people on foot the right to cross anywhere they like at any time.
As he stood watching a few cars inch through a mass of bicycles and pedestrians, the city’s chief traffic planner, Andy Fellmann, smiled. “Driving is a stop-and-go experience,” he said. “That’s what we like! Our goal is to reconquer public space for pedestrians, not to make it easy for drivers.”
While some American cities — notably San Francisco, which has “pedestrianized” parts of Market Street — have made similar efforts, they are still the exception in the United States, where it has been difficult to get people to imagine a life where cars are not entrenched, Dr. Schipper said.
Europe’s cities generally have stronger incentives to act. Built for the most part before the advent of cars, their narrow roads are poor at handling heavy traffic. Public transportation is generally better in Europe than in the United States, and gas often costs over $8 a gallon, contributing to driving costs that are two to three times greater per mile than in the United States, Dr. Schipper said.
What is more, European Union countries probably cannot meet a commitment under the Kyoto Protocol to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions unless they curb driving. The United States never ratified that pact.
Rosenthal, perhaps unintentionally, frames this trend as curtailing the perogatives of drivers instead of the benefits that everyone else gets by having less cars in cities. And I am sure that most Americans would frame this discussion like her, as an abridgment of personal liberty.
Rosenthal never gets around to discussing the benefits of car-less cities, aside from a decreased carbon footprint. Shouldn’t she dedicate a paragraph or two to the decrease in noise, accidents, and grime? (Read this great piece on getting rid of traffic lights and lanes: Taking Our Streets Back.) At least a few words on the pleasures of walking on a boulevard, or dining in a sidewalk cafe without shouting over the traffic din?
At some point, the streets were implicitly there for cars and trucks, and we were pushed onto the sidewalks. It’s worth the push to get people back into the streets, and make it expensive and inconvenient for cars to be there.
Source: The New York Times
- Steven M. Johnson, Self-Shortening Car, Searching for Value in Ludicrous Ideas
World’s First Biodegradable Car: Kenneth Cobonpue’s Phoenix Roadster
From Laura K. Cowan, Inhabitat:
You are looking at the world’s first bamboo and rattan roadster, a biodegradable car called the Phoenix. The Phoenix was created by product designers Kenneth Cobonpue and Albrecht Birkner and was built in just 10 days of bamboo, rattan, steel, and nylon. At 153 inches long, it is a small and elegant solution to a big and ugly problem: the waste created by old cars that outlive their purpose. “This project attempts to unveil the future of green vehicles using woven skins from organic fibers mated to composite materials and powered by green technology,” says Mr. Cobonpue.
Source: abcsoupdot
Corbin Sparrow Introduced: 1999 Designer: Michael Corbin The electric, three-wheeled Sparrow was designed for a single occupant, so naturally it’s tiny. The curvaceous body, bent windshield, and concave hood, though, make the car look like a rolling big toe. (via Fifty Ugliest Cars of the Past 50 Years: Corbin Sparrow - BusinessWeek
)
Source: images.businessweek.com
Economic View - Why Free Parking Comes at a Price - NYTimes.com
from the piece:
The subsidies are largely invisible to drivers who park their cars — and thus free or cheap parking spaces feel like natural outcomes of the market, or perhaps even an entitlement. Yet the law is allocating this land rather than letting market prices adjudicate whether we need more parking, and whether that parking should be free. We end up overusing land for cars — and overusing cars too. You don’t have to hate sprawl, or automobiles, to want to stop subsidizing that way of life. As Professor Shoup wrote, “Minimum parking requirements act like a fertility drug for cars.”
A great case for how we can start choking off the cars that dominate our cities and towns.
Professor Shoup estimates that many American parking spaces have a higher economic value than the cars sitting in them.
[…]
As Professor Shoup puts it: “Who pays for free parking? Everyone but the motorist.”
If I had the kind of life in which safety, gas mileage, acceleration 0-60 in under a quarter minute and highway driving were non-issues, I might find myself searching one of these out. Introduced to the mass market in 1973, Volkswagen’s “Thing”, otherwise known as the “trekker”, the “safari” or plainly, type 181, was slightly more than an 46hp flat four engine, 4 seats and a speedometer. Doors could be removed, the windshield folded forward, the interior hosed out and heat was provided by an optional gas-powered heater that connected directly to the fuel tank. VW sold it as less expensive peer to the then popular 4WD Toyota FJ40 Land Cruiser. (Uh, no.) Perhaps wisely, importation of these beasts was halted after 1974.
My friends eccentric father proudly owned one when we were kids and I can distinctly recall the overwhelming (i.e. suffocating) smell of petrol and the fear of the floor boards opening up like an upside down sardine can when riding in it on the way to school.
(via SECRET FORTS: Impracticality and Safety Aside…)
Source: secretforts.blogspot.com
Fuel-Efficient Cars Are Not The Answer
Alex Dubro attack the central flaw in Obama’s transportation plans: fuel-efficient cars.
Alex Dubro, The Myth of the Efficient Car
Let’s get something straight about green industry: in its basic form it means we all have to buy new stuff … lots of it. As an industrial policy that will create jobs and increase spending, it’s pretty sound. As an environmental policy, it’s largely a fraud.
Nowhere is it more disingenuous than the pursuit of the fuel-efficient car. In their effort to stave off collapse of their industry, auto executives have continually cited their efforts are building the high-efficiency cars of the future. The problem is, there are no cars of the future, and the looming catastrophe of global pollution, including climate change, will never be solved by building more cars – efficient or otherwise.
We’d desperately like to believe that there is a way to preserve our car-centered civilization, while simultaneously placating the gods of atmospheric warming. Even the president-elect believes it, and Obama made fuel-efficient cars a central part of his energy policy. He promised a $7,000 tax credit to hybrid car buyers, aiming for a million plug-in hybrids, getting 150 mpg, by 2015. He wants to put an additional million completely plug-in vehicles by the same year. And he’s willing to federal funds up for research, or at least he was before we lost all our money.
Even on its face, this seems like a tepid response to climate change. At the moment there are upward of 250,000,000 registered vehicles in the United States – more than there are licensed drivers. Converting one percent or so of them to greater fuel efficiency is not likely to do very much in the time needed to act. Nevertheless, the hope is that introduction of a new generation of electric and semi-electric will eventually lead to a replacement of our entire fleet of gas-guzzlers. Maybe. But the bigger problem is that increasing fuel efficiency has never led to an overall reduction in pollutants. In fact, efficiency has always led to more production and consumption.
Dubro goes on to explore the history of increased efficiency in engineering: it doesn’t lead to less energy used, but an increase, which is called the Jevons Paradox:
via Wikipedia
In economics, the Jevons paradox (sometimes called the Jevons effect) is the proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used, tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource. It is historically called the Jevons Paradox as it ran counter to common intuition. However, the situation is well understood in modern economics. In addition to reducing the amount needed for a given use, improved efficiency lowers the relative cost of using a resource – which increases demand and speeds economic growth, further expanding resource use. Overall resource use increases or decreases depending on which effect predominates.
The Jevons Paradox has been used to argue that energy conservation is futile, as increased efficiency may actually increase fuel use. Nevertheless, increased efficiency can improve material living standards. Environmental economists have also pointed out that fuel use will unambiguously decline if increased efficiency is paired with a green tax that keeps cost of use the same.[1] As the Jevons Paradox applies only to technological improvements that increase fuel efficiency, policies that impose conservation standards and increase costs do not display the Jevons Paradox.
[…]
Khazzoom-Brookes postulate
Main article: Khazzoom-Brookes postulate
In the 1980s, the economists Daniel Khazzoom and Leonard Brookes revisited the Jevons paradox for the case of a society’s energy use. Brookes, then chief economist at the UK Atomic Energy Authority, argued that attempts to reduce energy consumption by increasing energy efficiency would simply raise demand for energy in the economy as a whole. Khazzoom focused on the narrower point that the potential for rebound was ignored in mandatory performance standards for domestic appliances being set by the California Energy Commission.
In 1992, the economist Harry Saunders dubbed the hypothesis – that improvements in energy efficiency work to increase, rather than decrease, energy consumption – the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate, and showed that it was consistent with neo-classical growth theory under a wide range of assumptions.[4]
According to Saunders, increased energy efficiency tends to increase energy consumption by two means. First, increased energy efficiency makes the use of energy relatively cheaper, thus encouraging increased use (the direct rebound effect). Second, increased energy efficiency leads to increased economic growth, which pulls up energy use for the whole economy. At the microeconomic level (looking at an individual market), even with the rebound effect, improvements in energy efficiency usually result in reduced energy consumption.[5] That is, the rebound effect is usually less than 100%. However, at the macroeconomic level, more efficient (and hence comparatively cheaper) energy leads to faster economic growth, which in turn increases energy use throughout the economy. Saunders concludes that, taking into account both the microeconomic and the macroeconomic effects, technological progress that improves energy efficiency will tend to increase overall energy use.
Therefore, if Obama’s policy is intended to decrease energy use, we should have steep taxes on gasoline and highway use (and use that additional revenue to build orders-of-magnitude more energy efficient mass transit). If his goal is to increase energy use, he should push for more efficient cars.
This is one of those paradoxes that never surfaces in the public discourse, because people find it counter-intuitive, and as a result is deemed illegitimate.
Source: progressive.org
Erratic inquiries of Stowe Boyd, who means well, despite everything.
