Obama just announced the final mpg rule. Sometime in the future (after 2016) new cars will have to obtain 54.5 miles per gallon fuel economy.
Does anything think this is real? Motor cycles might get to 55 mpg, but no kind of car anyone would like to drive will ever get that sort of fuel mileage. And attempts to get there are expensive. Like hybrids. A hybrid costs $10,000 more than the same car with just a plain old gasoline engine. And hybrids don't get 54.5 mpg either.
I see two possibilities here. Either they soften up the rules to permit continued manufacture of usable cars, OR they load the cars up with so much expensive stuff that people cannot afford them. In which case, the car business becomes the used car business. Sorta like Castro's Cuba where they keep a fleet of 1950's Detroit iron running.
Technological progress isn't gonna give us a breakthru on the gas mileage front. The miles per gallon is set by laws of thermodynamics which won't change just cause we want them to. We know these laws, and there is no way around them.
2 comments:
That's like legislating the value of PI to be 3.00. It looks good on paper but you'll always get the wrong answer because you cannot legislate either natural physical laws or mathematics (though goodness knows Congress has been doing that with the budget for decades).
They might invent a magic way to fudge the mpg tests so some politically favored cars (Volt!) pass and less favored cars fail. For instance right now, any car that is "flex fuel" (runs on alcohol AND gasoline) gets a big boost in mpg ratings. I forget how much, but it's enough that was I running a car company I would make all my vehicles "flex fuel". It isn't hard to do, just use alcohol resistant gaskets and hoses in the fuel system.
Post a Comment