US Dept of Energy Study: Fuel Usage Could Drop 80% by 2050 with 74 MPG Cars

^^^yes I keep trying to say gasoline is GHG and energy-efficient because you just take it out the ground and use it (with some complex dusting and cleaning) thanks to the dinosaurs. I am personally more concerned with stretching limited resources to as many generations are possible, and less with GHG. In either case we need to be more efficient.

 

BTW: My residential home has been upgraded to be more energy efficient than most new homes on the market and I also use less water than most homes too. Plus I buy my residential electricity from Clean Current - a wind farm electricity consolidator. About 3 years ago I did one of those internet GHG estimator apps to see how I green I was. IIRC my per capita my GHG was less than 50% of a normal USA citizen, Per household my GHG was about 30% of a regular USA household. So relative to my neighbors I'm pretty green. However, if you compared me to some family in rural Bhutan or Peru or Rwanda - then my energy usage looks pretty intense.

In 37 years, if any of my PriusChat (and other internet musings) posts are archived - it will probably be in some static magnetic bubble memory which doesn't use any energy at all unless its retrieved - it will also be highly likely that everything I've posted will be either obsolete or irrelevant in 30 years so nobody will even bother reading any of my stuff.. And if anyone does read my posts 37 years from now I'm sure the GHG assigned to my residual electronics will be a microscopic fraction of what a normal person would generate.

If I live so long to see it I would be very surprise if 40 years from now the Priuschat and the Prius brand still exist ... if that happens then the Prius will enter the history books along with the Corolla, the VW Beetle, the F-150, the Ford Explorer, and the Corvette as one of the more historically long-lived vehicle name-models...

In the 1999 - when I first started studying hybrid tech - I read that hybrid was only a transition technology that would likely last between 15 to 25 years ... at which point the conventional gas and diesel engines would be completely phased out. From what I can judge, it looks like hybrid tech is going to be economically viable around for at least another 15 to 30 years. I'm not sure what's going on... It appears that the manufacturing challenges of making a more powerful battery system, e.g. Air Lithium, are significant and it is not likely that BEVs will take off anytime soon - anyway there are certain political forces here in Washington DC Area that are hell bent on preventing alternative energy vehicle from becoming mainstream and these lobbyist have some really deep pockets.

 

While a lot of improvement is possible, I believe our biggest challenge is inertia. The status quo kicks and screams and buys our elected officials "gifts" and weasel out of far too much. {Please note I did not use the term "representatives" as I do not believe the people are being adequately represented.}

In the early part of Clinton's {I think} presidency, there was a program for the major automakers called the partnership for next generation automobiles to make an 80 mpg sedan. A vast sum was spent on it and our big three each made a demonstration vehicle that was capable of that figure, or at least close to it. Toyota tried to be part of it, but as they were not an American company, they were excluded. Fearing they would be left behind, with the Japanese governments help, they developed their hybrid technology. Since Honda brought out the Insight about the same time, they may have been involved in that program as well.

As soon as our "Big Three" cashed out, they went back to gas hogs and the Japanese continued to dominate the market as far as fuel economy is concerned. That proved fatal when the economy crashed and fuel prices soared.

As long as corporations effectively own our government officials, real change will only come on the heels of a disaster so large, the corporations sit quietly waiting for the fallout to subside.

 

Corps are smarter and more pernicious than you give credit.

They are not interested per se in the status quo, but in preserving their wealth and assets. So while they bombard the populace with GW FUD, they act rationally for the future. A very good example is the insurance industry: they are exiting the flood insurance game in coastal areas, leaving the govmint to pick up the tab.

Even the despised energy industry is slowly buying solar assets with it's wealth.

 

Every rational person should willing to pay the difference between the externalities for oil -the externalities for methanol. The former is around $10 per gallon, no idea about the latter.

 

If you consider the phev a hybrid, then according to the report hybrids will likely to grow to a much larger segment of vehicles in the next 30 years.

The report seemed to think that batteries would not get to be cheap enough or light enough to go in inexpenive 300 mile cars, or get charged in 6 minutes. That caps their potential to 33% of vehicles. I don't think lithium would change that. There is nothing preventing phevs from taking over, but the report said that would take tax incentives - either higher gas taxes, or continued subsidies. They didn't really analyse higher gas taxes much though.

Its even worse, the tom delay illegally gerimandered my district to make sure we wouldn't even vote for who we wanted.

That is mostly right. Instead of raising cafe requirements, the clinton administration launched partnership for next generation vehicle PNGV- super car, against the wishes of the big 3. This was supposed to make american car companies more competitive, so toyota was excluded by gore himself. The goals were too high and doomed it to failure. The japanese government was in the mean time giving their car companies loads of money to develop bevs. Toyota and honda took some of this bev research and developed hybrids using mainly american hybrid tech, japanese bev tech, and new electronics enabling it. Once the hybrids were developed and shipping the Japanese government supported them. If you want to see where PNGV was headed, look at the vw xl1. That is where we were going, only in a camry sized car instead of a 2 seater. Diesel hybrids with expensive light weight bodies that had no possiblities of selling, they couldn't even get close to meeting epa emissions with 1990s technology, that would wait until SCR was developed.

cafe loopholes encouraged american car companies to make SUVs - guzzlers during the program. The program had no chance of success, and was not really killed, just the diesel engine portion of it. It became the fuel cell freedom car under bush. In 2006 policies shifted towards plug-ins and higher cafe standards. That is responsible for some of the progress we see today.

I would say that it was clueless politicians that wanted the impossible high mpg car, instead of ford's suggestion of 50 mpg that mangled that. In return for trying they gave the car companies money and didn't regulate cafe encouraging guzzlers.

 

Even with ultra capacitors - I don't think a 60kwh Lithium air battery could recharge 70% in 6 minutes. It would not only require some unwieldly recharging power coupling but given that amount of power in such a short time something would probably end up overheating and exploding.

 

US car companies exploited loopholes meant to protect trucks.

PNGV was cancelled, 'FreedomCar' (aka hydrogen fool car, AKA detroit subsidy) instituted by Bush.

Thanks for the spin AG. You amuse once again.

 

I could very well be dead by then.

By the way, I don't think when I die, that God will ask me about my gas mileage.

 

No, but your children or grandchildren very well might.

 

True. True.

 

For profit corporations are not charities, and for profit monopolies and oliogarchical economic forces tend to behave in a predatory fashion.

Global warming - Climate Change trend is increasing the damage caused by coastal flooding -so coastal flood insurance policies are a bad bet/risk.

There are political and economic risks when any energy supply and other critical resources become under monopolistic or oligopoly control.

 

For grins here is a look back at pgnv, with a quote that goes to my pov -
Running on Fumes : The New Yorker

What started happening around the time that article was published though, Bush then obama strated to actually raise cafe and to subsidize plug-ins.

There are those that like to learn the wrong lessons from history. They think if only bush had kept the pngv program the way it was we would be driving 80 mpg cars today. what was the truth as they understood it in 2001?news: NRC issues 7th independent review of the PNGV program

california uber alles -
replace a couple of lines

Here come the air board secret police
coming for your diesel driving niece

The program was for very expensive diesel midsized hybrids that were not close to meeting any realistic polution or cost goals. These were to come out at a time we didn't even have ultra low sulfur diesel.

Is the fusion hybrid or the volt so much worse that the uber expensive diesels? Do you look at the fusion hybrid and say, hey if I can only make it cost $15K more and make it a lighter diesel.

VW has taken on the light hybrid diesel effort, we can see the fruits in the xl1. Its a cool car, but the tech won't sell high. The golf phev might though, and the tesla. we may start using more carbon fiber as prices drop, something mercedes worked a lot on as part as the program, but vw group with its lambo and porsche groups seems to be making the most progress.

 

In Michigan and Ohio where they make cars - people drive 75 mph on the super highway and sometime higher --so initially when car makers were given extra power and energy efficiency they put that power into a faster and quicker car NOT a more energy efficient car.

At 75 to 80 mph, the frontal aerodynamic surface and Cd coefficient make a greater impact than the power plant so that fuel efficiency between vehicles with the same frontal surfaces, similar Cd coefficient, and curb weight is scant. For example, at 75 mph - the Toyota Prius and the VW Jetta TDI, and the Honda Civic Hybrid are going to achieve about the same MPG results - despite radically different efficient power plant designs because their front surface and aerodynamics designs are similar. Give that each vehicle has a reasonably efficient power plant then at very high speeds it is the vehicle which has the smaller frontal surface and low aerodynamic drag that potentially can best the lot. Just cutting out a square foot of frontal surface area will make the vehicle more fuel efficient when the aerodynamic drag Cd and weight is about the same. The challenge with making an aerodynamic vehicle is making a still functionally useful and safe vehicle - and not just a one trick pony.

However when most non truck vehicle goes under 45 mph then rolling resistance becomes the more of a significant factor and then the difference in the efficiency of the power plant-transmission system comes into play. The divergence in energy efficiency at low speed due to a different power plant design can be significant - this is where the Prius engineering team has it spot on.

IMHO once the national speed limit of 55 mph was lifted and people started driving 65 to 80 mph - many people just are not going to see their vehicle get anywhere close to the EPA MPG rating - which is not design to reflect driving for a long time +70 mph.

 

Only because the EPA still doesn't take high speed motoring into account enough. My Honda Civic Hybrid got 45 mpg (EPA) at 70 MPH. The more aerodynamic cars will come closer to EPA than ones that are not.

What is frustrating is that aerodynamics don't cost that much and they never wear out. And the EPA doesn't reward it - adequately.

Look at the C-max pig with its horrible aerodynamics. The EPA testing didn't care

 

I believe it was part of a one-two punch. The PNGV would deliver enough, high mileage cars and pickups to show the technology works. Heck, the US Government could have ordered a reasonable number for life-study testing. Then raise CAFE based upon the evidence of the prototypes.

I've read the PNGV prototypes and one in particular, the hydraulic-hybrid pickup still makes a lot of thermodynamic sense. As for the Precept, today we call it the Volt.

What was especially bad was the wasted hydrogen-fool cell program. Doomed from the start by chemistry, physics, and economics, this was and remains a dead-end. Had PNGV gone through, raising CAFE would have taken away the remaining argument of Detroit.

As it was, it took a decade of Prius at 2-3% of market-share to puncture the high-mileage, counter claims. Heck, even VW has finally figured out they need to show they aren't brain-dead in this area.

Bob Wilson

 

They test on rollers. I have never understood how they expect aerodynamics to have any impact on the test. What am I missing?

 

IIRC the roller friction has calculated air friction added. Same deal to simulate a road. There is an underlying assumption of a non-windy day. I don't know if the calculation uses an average vehicle speed or an integral.

 

It seems fair to say that PNGV was a bedrock technical and motivational support that led to the Prius. Now why didn't Detroit follow a similar path ? My answer is that Detroit was only interested in PNGV for the subsidy. When the subsidy stopped, Detroit continued it's POS gas guzzler ways.

In effect PNGV was wildly successful, albeit not with the manufacturers that the US intended.

 

aerodynamics are done in calculations on the test. The problem is they are underweighted, which favors SUVs. The average speed on the test is 48mph. Hybrids have an advantage because they can go engine off, and the ford hybrids don't just have an advantage in the city test, but their higher speed engine off helps on the highway test. This is at least according to the epa's response YMMV. Your Sienna and Tundra also are aided by the tests low speeds. One of the 5 cycles - high speed - tests these things but it does not have much weight in computation of highway mpg.