Auto Makers Oppose latest MPG proposal

Well I knew this was coming.. Time for the Tea Baggers to stand up for the rights of free roaming cattle everywhere... I mean Proud American Citizens Of the Greatest Country in the World!
It is hard for the auto manufacturer to get over the lazy days of the past, when a "totally new design" was a new grill and rear bumper!

 

I am pretty certain that every single CAFE/mpg change has been opposed by the auto makers so not surprising they play the same old tune again. The better part of 15 years to get there - come on these companies are lazy and need to lead and inspire rather than oppose and block.

 

yes i also think 62 is not good
2025 by then it MUST be 100mpg

 

Yes 62 mpg is crazy high for 2025. It is brought to you by the same people that
brought you the ev mandate, then changed it, then made it hard to produce phev's and wanted hydrogen cars. How about a reasonable number? Would that be asking a lot. I believe CARB should be stripped of its power to regulate anything but LA air pollution. As it continually is among the highest in the country CARB is trying to regulate the CO2 of the nation after years of failure on most of its mandates. A ridiculously high number will cut the number of efficient new cars sold, and thus keep the us fleet at a higher consumption figure than a reasonable number would. This is ugly California politics. Let's get rid of oil subsidies and have reasonable cafe standards. 35.5 by 2016 is reasonable and the auto industry agreed with it as per the article.

What commitment? The industry did not commit to a suicide pact. They agreed with the obama administrations time table. One thing they got was an agreement that California would not set its own crazy standard. Well here we go, bankrupt california is saying the nation needs higer unemployment, higher government spending, and higher gas use since fewer new efficient cars would be bought under its plan. Perfect!

They agreeed with the rollback for trucks, and if you read the article they agreed to the 2016 timetable. What they did not agree to was to triple fuel economy in 3 cycles.

 

Hi macmaster,

The mileage quoted in these requirements is not the new-car-sticker EPA mileage. Its the raw test mileage. The 2010 Prius is at 70.9 CAFE mpg right now. So, one can think of this limit as a 40 mpg combined sticker EPA mileage.

In essence, this would force all car makers to make only Prius concept cars, or EVs. SUV's and large cars would be very expensive.

One way this might fly, is if the rule would allow car manufacturers to subdivide the penalty fees to the individual vehicles that exceed the limit. So, then the penalty would just be passed onto the customers of the inefficient, or large cars only.

 

IMHO, "62 mpg" (these are unadjusted) for a fleetwide average is pretty challenging unless most vehicles become smaller, hybridized and many more diesels are available. Also large SUVs and trucks would pretty much have to cease to exist.

The 3rd gen Prius already gets "70.894 mpg" towards CAFE purposes. I posted about this doublespeak at http://priuschat.com/forums/other-cars/88602-gm-ceo-says-future-gas-mileage-rules-ambitious.html.

The most current report on how each carmakers has done against CAFE standards is at http://www.nhtsa.gov/staticfiles/rulemaking/pdf/cafe/Oct2010_Summary_Report.pdf. (Again, the numbers are based upon unadjusted EPA dyno numbers.) Lots more on CAFE at Fuel Economy | National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

We do have a gas guzzler tax (amounts at Frequently Asked Questions), but unfortunately, all "light trucks" are exempt from this , meaning all SUVs, trucks, minivans, vans, etc. Then there are the vehicles that are so heavy (GVWR >8500 lbs.) that they're exempt from fuel economy testing (e.g. the now dead Hummer H2 and Ford Excursion), so by extension, they're exempt from the gas guzzler tax too.

 

This is the difference between well intended (but poor) legislation and well crafted legislation. Specifying limited technology metrics rather than incentivizing the intended final sustainability goal is the problem.

Mpg targets revolve around gallons of gas. We actually want to mpg to be 0. If a sustainable approach to using a liquid fuel were to be generated but has much poorer energy content in a gallon, then the legislation is going down the wrong path right out of the gate. It's not a whole lot different than federal financial support for Hydrogen Cars over Electric Cars.....more politics than engineering sense.

Those comments are not supporting the auto industry. (They complain about anything that might impact their quarterly bonuses....good or bad.) The question is what is a better path to sustainability. Establishing metrics that will fizzile out at some point is not going to get us there.

 

it's a good thing we have the asian manufacturers to at least give us optons and provide competition.

 

Hi Cwerda,

Edited my post before seeing yours....

 

Car manufacturers:
"It can't be none ... the price won't be affordable! !"


Manufacturers cried about every one of these ... and more. So when manufacturers cry about NOT being able to do it, the question then becomes WHAT IS IT that they can not do?
catalytic converters?
crumple zones?
multiple air bag locations?
padded dash?
Non-solid steering columb?
warranties above 12 months?
smog devices that reduce pollution?
Higher mileage?

NOPE . . . none of these. BUT ... ask the auto industry to build all of us a million dollar hydrogen car . . . that uses fuel that's either more costly than any type of fuel, or more polluting than any other fuel vis a vis hydrogen extraction/manufacturing.

.

 

Is it?

EPA testing already adjusts for the energy content of gasoline, and is referred back to a standardized fuel that most of us can no longer obtain. I'd be quite surprised if the underlying CAFE definitions didn't do the same.

 

Is it a good idea? I don't know. The best of all possible ideas? Highly unlikely. The most practical one to reduce our consumption of (and dependence on) oil? Quite possibly so.

The experience of most of the rest of the (non-OPEC) world, and the experience of the US during 2008, suggests that the best way to incentivize consumers to reduce fuel consumption is to make fuel more expensive. Much of the world does that via levying taxes on fuel, with some of the resulting revenue then going in to funding other modes of transit. Realistically, the politics of this country ensures that any legislator proposing such a thing is committing political suicide. It is also undeniable that the US is geographically very different from densely populated parts of Europe and Asia, and the automobile is really more of a necessity in, say, New Mexico than in France. So, we are left with CAFE, which has its imperfections.

One thing I will say with absolute confidence: When faced with new regulations, the automakers would serve themselves, and their customers, far better by putting more of their money into engineering and development and less into lawyering and lobbying (as if the US Congress can legislate that a finite resource become infinite, or otherwise repeal the laws of physics). You'd think Detroit would have learned that lesson, having its nice person kicked by Japan in the '70s and '80s and beyond for exactly that reason, but I guess not. (I'm not in any way saying that the 'Big 2-1/2' are the only ones doing that, or that they don't also pursue technological advances, but they do seem to reflexively go that route first and fastest...).
~T

 

Once again, this is so sad. Made even more depressing for the fact that Toyota continues to be an active member of this "Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers", an entity of "NO" that always seems to reject a challenge for much needed (if not urgent) improvement.

If other non-member manufacturers can consistently say "YES" to these challenges then why would Toyota see any benefit in continuing as a member of this body?

Obviously, only Toyota can fully explain this but every time I see this push-back and I see US Toyota officials in the midst of that infamous cabal, it saddens me to no end that neither myself nor my Prii can justify this complicity and attrition.

Cheers;

MSantos

 

The auto makers will always oppose anything that that might make sense. Look at the track record. Brought to the brink of Bankruptcy by buying politicians, rather than engineers who could design what is needed.

 

My comment was about the overall stategy of reducing oil dependence, not about tactics of setting CAFE standards. It is a trival exercise to adjust energy density ratios for different fuels. It is a very, very difficult task to come up with a viable approach for eliminating oil use while maintaining economic balance.

For example, I thought California's (prematurely killed) requirement for XX% of automaker's vehicles to be non-polluting was much better. Not perfect, but progressing in the right direction. This did not put technical limits on automakers, but definitely forced them to use their smarts to come up with a end solution....which they did.

 

The problem is how to internalize the costs of pollution and global warming associated with petroleum burning. The problem is that the only way to do this is through cap and trade--create a market for preventing pollution (and even then, the "cap" is arbitrarily set, so the market isn't "pure"). This has pretty much been rejected as a solution for the US for the near to mid term political future.
So the next solution is a carbon/other pollution tax--that's effectively the government setting the price of pollution. That does not seem feasible now.

CAFE is a third best solution. But if it's what can be done, it should be done.
And Donee points out that the proposal is not actually as hard to achieve as it might seem.

 

I'm of a different opinion on the above approaches being the only options. Anytime a solution resorts to specific technology tailoring, it's a sign that the symptom is being attacked, not the problem. I'm not going to solve the problem in one post, but here are the lessons of history that standout to me.

1) Montreal Protocol(Ozone Layer recovery)-The problem is really not internalizing the costs of pollution, it's establishing an approach for eliminating the pollution outright. There the approach was steady elimination (and still is). That needs to be the integrated national policy.

2) CARB Non-polluting vehicle requirements(EV incentive)-Make it possible for the states to tax polluting vehicles but unable to tax non-polluting vehicles. (Sort of like the never ending increasing taxes for smoking.) To me it's always been amazing how much money and effort people will expend not to pay taxes. Take advantage of it.

3) Sulfur in Coal Emissions(Acid Rain Elimination)-Take the same approach at the industrial level. At this level, I would not bother with ELABORATE cap and trade, just more pollution=more taxes. Keep it dirt simple. Coal plants pay a sulfur tax and a CO2 tax and a waste ash disposal tax. Nuke plants pay a waste tax (actually they pay some already). Renewable plants don't pay any pollution tax.

Again, this is a grand oversimplification to the problem solution, but it attacks it at the source rather than by a bunch of indirect mechanisms that can be loopholed around. Make no mistake, I'm not against CAFE standards because I support the auto industry, I'm for using what history has shown works better. Our pollution sources are far larger than just ground vehicles.