Nonsense. The vast majority of people routinely replace their vehicle every 5 years or less with either a new vehicle or a late-model used one. If the government dictated that all new cars be fueled with coagulated soymilk, within about 3 or 4 years the majority of cars on the road would be tofu burners. Within 10 years, it’d be an overwhelming majority, something over 90%. This kind of thing happened just 20-odd years ago when they mandated new cars use only lead-free gasoline.
I want to see some stats backing those statements up, pal. I personally am driving a 1990 vintage automobile (recently purchased). Most of the folks I know are all driving cars that are mid-1990s or earlier. I know of a handful of folks who still drive (on a daily basis) cars built to run on leaded gasoline.
Swapping over to hydrogen or curdled soymilk is not the same as switching from leaded to unleaded gas. Cars designed to run on leaded fuel can operate just fine on unleaded gas (there might be some problems with the valves, but not necessarily). Comparing the swap over to unleaded fuel to the switch to an alternative fuel is meaningless.
Old cars do not automatically get scrapped, they simply move down the economic food chain. Indeed, I can well imagine that if there was a switch to an alternative fuel you’d still see lots of gas powered cars on the road a decade or more after the switchover. Why? Because those cars would plummet in price as used cars, so more and more economically disadvantaged folks would buy cars who do not currently own them.
In the early 1990s in the US there was an experimental program to reduce pollution by getting the dirtiest cars from the road. We’ve all followed somebody in a clunker spewing oil smoke and thought “Heck, that one guy is single-handedly undoing the good effects of the 5000 very low-pollution cars around him.”
This program sought to solve that problem. It recognized that the most cost-effective way to reduce the total pollution of that 5001 car fleet was to park the clunker, not incrementally reduce the emissions of the other 5000.
The program took the market-based approach that the government would simply offer to buy any clunker for, I think, $1000. Just bring it in and collect the cash. Totally voluntary for the clunker-owner; if they’d rather keep driving it, fine. The government allocated enough budget to essentially corner the market on clunkers.
At first this seemed like a Great Idea. The Lefties liked it because it was green and activist and the Righties liked it because it was market-based and voluntary.
It lasted 6 months. The critical problem was that it put a floor price under all clunkers. It became impossible for a poor person to buy another $300 clunker when theirs gave out. In efect the governement was pricing these folks out of the transportation market. If they lowered the price to where it was politically palatable to the poor folks, that was low enough that it lost its incentive effect and the number of sales to the government fell dramatically.
The Leftie’s solution ws a second subsidy to permit really poor folks to still buy a clunker for $300, with the government making up the $700 difference to the floor price. The Righties solution was to cancel the program. The Righties won that fight.
A similar problem will arise if/when we begin to introduce vehicles whose fuel is completely incompatible with current vehicles. As Tuckerfan pointed out, the leaded / unleaded changeover was minor by comparison.
Critically, the US government delayed the real-world in-use changeover from leaded to unleaded for many years by lax tax policy. At first, unleaded gas was about $0.10 more expensive than leaded. So there was a huge aftermarket is ways to avoid putting unleaded gas into unleaded cars.
Eventually the price difference dropped to almost zero as unleaded production technology caught up and the relative production volumes of leaded & unleaded shrank and grew respectively. At the end, just before leaded gas was withdrawn from the market, it cost maybe a penny less than unleaded.
Had they simply put a tax on leaded, or decreed that unleaded had to be sold for 1 penny less than leaded, the public would have embraced unleaded rather than schemeing to avoid it for an extra 5 years.
As I commented in my first post, the public at large (including me) is blind-selfish. People will do whatever is short-term cheapest. So any introduction of new technology must be arranged so the economic path of least resistance leads to the future, not the past.
If my current PC cost as much more than my old XT as its performance would imply, I’d still be using the old XT and so would all the rest of us.
LSLGuy, another problem with those clunker programs is that quite often the cars which were being brought to the crushers hadn’t been driven in years! They were simply cars that had been sitting on someone’s property that they never got around to taking to the junk yard. Also, there were problems with clollectable automobiles (admittedly in need of restoration) being bought up by those programs, and the classic car community fought the programs fiercely because in the past, highly valuable cars had been bought and crushed in similar programs. (During WW II scrap drives, one woman donated her Huispanola to be cut up. The general at the base where the car was donated to, knew what the car was and tried to save it, but the owner got wind of it, and made sure that the car was carved up. Today, the value of the car would be over $500,000!)
Actually, that should be “erg-for-erg” or “joule-for-joule”, not “pound-for-pound”. Energy is not measured in pounds, even in the strangest variants of the old British system. Oh, but I do love to quibble.
That much I agree with. I had a fun conversation with an ethanol advocate at Indianapolis’s last “Earth Day” celebration. There is some hope for improving on fuel cell technology, however–but it’s still not close to production model use.
OK, I’ll admit that I pulled the numbers out of the air, but I was basing them on how quickly the majority of cars became no-lead only after those were mandated. In something like 4 to 5 years, the majority were no-lead only.
However, the average age of cars on the road has been steadily increasing since then, a fact I was unaware of. Googling found various web pages that indicate the average age of cars on the road is now about 9 years. So the numbers I gave are wrong.
And back then you could buy a new car for something like $3K. Don’t forget that this was also around the time of the oil crisis, so folks had an incentive to unload that gas guzzling hog (along with the fact that Detroit was turning out some of the least reliable models in it’s history at this point).
I seem to recall hearing somewhere that processing Cane Sugar into ethanol actually yields more energy than it takes to process the stuff into a useable form. Better than Corn-into-Ethanol, at least.
Of course, I don’t know if you could even grow enough Cane Sugar in the U.S. to provide enough ethanol for our auto needs. We might just end up turning Jamaica into the next Saudi Arabia, or something. ;D
I guess we could always go back to Uranium…