European combined cycle automatic Ford Focus 2.0L diesel, Ford Focus automatic 2.0L petrol, and Prius. MPG 48.6, 35.3, 74 respectively. CO2 emissions not as dramatic since diesel emits 15% more CO2 per gallon and has other greenhouse gases as well.
Once again, diesels are good, very good. But you do not serve your point well by overstating it. If you want to see a solid pro-diesel case without exaggeration see here (warning: pdf)
I agree with that conclusion. For CO2 reduction electric does better but not by all that much until the US mix moves more off dirty coal; for energy independence electric does much better. Diesel offers more utility for more drivers however. Match your vehicle to your needs and priorities.
Again, if your goal is to maximize a one-time, short-term decrease in CO2 emissions, you might do a little better subsidizing diesels. To change the game long-term, and actually get ourselves off CO2 emissions while keeping personal mobility, we have to look at electrics.
We should convert to a mileage based tax instead.(*) Problem solved.
(*) We should separately tax emissions as well, but those should be earmarked for climate-change prevention and mitigation programs, not highways.
what I’m talking about is that the 74.2 mpg UK Focus would get 60 mpg combined in the US with an automatic (adjusted from imperial gallons). It costs half as much as the Volt.
You also have to adjust for the difference between the EPA and European drive cycle. I’m not sure exactly what the Euro drive cycle entails, but here’s an easy way to figure it out. The VW Golf 2.0 TDI is rated at 34 MPG combined by the EPA. VW’s UK site claims the same car does the 58.9 miles per (imp) gallon in combined driving. This is about 50 miles per US gallon. So assuming EPA MPG=Euro MPG *.68, the diesel Focus would be rated at 40 MPG in this country. That’s better than anything sold here now (except the Honda Insight and Civic Hybrid), but nothing spectacular.
Car Reviews: New Car Prices and Used Cars Classifieds | AutoGuide.com There are lots of EVs coming down the line. It is the future. It is too bad you people are so old and stuck in ancient technology.
Buffet is investing in a Chinese electric with 200 mile range, zero to 60 in 9 seconds.
Imagine, hypothetically, that electric car technology improves to the point where it competes without subsidy. Sales of the liquid fuels plummet, and with them the taxes that pay for highway maintenance. But the need for highway maintenance continues unabated. Then what?
Put another way, the first purpose of the gas tax is to shift responsibility for maintaining highways onto those who use them most. If a future where something other than gas and diesel is providing any substantial portion of highway miles is possible, we need to consider other sources of revenue to replace the gas taxes lost. It would be nice if the alternative form of revenue managed to also have the effect of shifting payment to the heaviest users.
Do you have any suggestions for this possible future? Or do you want to argue it can’t possibly ever happen, and that liquid fuels will power nearly 100% of our mileage forever and ever?
Here’s where I see we are right now: on the one hand, electric cars give us the possibility of weaning our personal transportation sector off of needing net positive CO2 emissions. On the other hand, it is not optimal for reducing said emissions over a time horizon of a decade or two, and complicates the highway funding issue, for which you are unwilling to discuss alternatives.
Hard to say. I suspect the Focus does better around town because it uses stop/start technology (which should be on every car with direct injection ANYWAY).
I hate to get into this kind of triviality, but the issue had been your claim that:
The responses you got in return, such as mine:
Your defense of your claim:
And my correcting your mistake: you compared very dissimilar models. When comparing apples to apples for mileage the increase is not quite 38% (better than most), the CO2 reduction 23% (and decreased for total GHG emissions), and the change in oil use about 20%.
My last cite, which makes a strong argument for diesels with these sorts of numbers, concurs in their different examples. Overall 35% better fuel economy and comparing the comparable versions of the same vehicle for well to wheel CO2 about 15% better for the diesel than the petrol version. One can make a good argument with those numbers, but they are not “doubling”.
I think that if want to compare a diesel’s price in America to the Volt, your closest comparison is the VW diesel Jetta. True it is a smaller car but still. It uses “the same engine that gave Volkswagen a Guinness World Record for Lowest Fuel Consumption.” It gets 30 city/42 hwy and similarly appointed to a Volt runs $24,195. The mpg difference btw between the gas and the diesel VW Jetta is the gas getting 23 city/33 hwy - about 30-35% mileage increase - not doubling.
The rationales behind a tax on GHGs and a mileage tax have only a little to do with EVs. Many believe that the first (even if it was exclusively a carbon tax) would be the best way to address the issue of global climate change. The second is motivated by the fact that cars are, in any case, using less gas per mile driven, will use less in the future, and the gas tax has been inadequate to fund the the Fed’s share of highway upkeep as it is. If EVs do take off they will drop even more. But EVs and diesels and other fuel efficient vehicles use these roads too; they should not have a free ride, so to speak. We’ve had debates on these things before if you want to search and find them.
A TDI Golf is slightly more than $20K (though better apportioned too) and gets only slightly less than your hypothetical US-spec diesel Focus.
I too would like to see more small diesels sold here (honestly an uninformed car buying populace is really all that’s holding them back) but it just really isn’t that different from what we’ve got. The Volt is a genuine step towards a new transportation paradigm.
When I was in highschool in the 1960’s, we had a visionary physics teacher who predicted, confidently, that by the time we had kids of highschool age, the internal combustion gas engine would be as obsolete as a Ford Model T was to us then.
He wasn’t as confident as to the replacement technology, but thought a gas turbine was the most promising, followed by electric.
Looks like he was way off the mark. Our kids have kids beyond highschool age, and his prediction has yet to come true.
The Focus sold with automatic in America, the 2.0L gas one, gets “25 City/34 Hwy” on the American cycle and 35.3 in the European combined cycle. The 2.0L diesel automatic sold in Europe gets 48.6 in the European combined cycle. It would get about 35 City/47 Hwy in the American cycle, about 38% better mileage than the gas model. NOT 60.
Now assuming 12K driven a year and today’s prices of a national average of $2.82/g for gas and $3.07 for diesel that comes to 400 gallons a year of gas at a cost of $1128 and 293 gallons of diesel at a cost of $900. $228 savings a year at current prices so the extra cost would take almost 9 years to pay off. By the same purely economic analysis it doesn’t pay for most consumers at today’s prices, and that’s for a very mature technology with economies of scale.
As established, electric doesn’t make economic sense at today’s prices either. The difference is that electric is an emerging technology that will get much cheaper. Gas and diesel however are unlikely too. The technology is mature and prices will rise. America has a long history of giving the emerging energy technologies a leg up, from research subsidies for nuclear (as well as loan guarantees) to help with renewables and energy to tax credits for hybrids up to a certain volume sold. Electric also increases our energy independence today rather than maybe getting cheap enough biodiesel someday in the future.
BTW that mileage is about 34% more than the highway mileage listed for the gas version. Very consistent thing that.
Again, there really is no need for one vehicle to be the best choice for all people and all needs.
If you need a car to travel long distances on the highway then a newer diesel is great. Relative to a gas powered car it produces significantly less CO2, uses less oil. And as prices go up, as they likely will, you’ll probably break even with the extra cost over enough years.
If you are a city driver, or even a suburban commuter, and don’t do long distance driving (or at least won’t with the car you are buying) then a pure BEV may be the better choice. Compared to the diesel it does much better at CO2 reduction (complete “well-to-wheel” analysis, even assuming no improvement to the US electricity generating mix), doesn’t send money to foreign oil producers. Fully loaded the Leaf will cost you less than the fully loaded Golf TDI (or a fully loaded Prius), including the cost of the home charger.
If you are mostly a commuter but feel the need to have the ability in that car to drive longer distances, then you may want to consider a Volt, at least at the lease price. If gas prices go up substantially it may end up paying for itself. But even with substantial gas price increases buying it outright is foolish from a dollar and cents POV. Still … each consumer will have to decide on the value they put on the intangibles - the rarely stopping for gas, the satisfaction they get from knowing they are helping reduce GHG’s and decreasing our dependence of foreign energy sources.
There is currently, and increasingly will be, no one size fits all. Especially as these batteries commoditize and people try to guess the risk of future gas price volatility. My household is a two-car family (actually three car as we are storing my eldest’s vehicle for him, a 127K mile Volvo wagon, while he lives out of country for a few years). I anticipate my next car to be a BEV for me to use for my daily commute and errands about the city. But when my wife’s car eventually also gets replaced I can see going with a diesel then. We will be having a kid in college most of the next 13 years and having a car to take on highway trips outside of BEV range seems like something we should have. Another household will have different needs.
Here’s a question that I wonder if anyone here can help me with: the potential market for true BEVs with our current infrastructure are households that either pretty much exclusively use a car for commuting, say 60 miles a day or less, or fairly rarely need to go much farther and have access to another car for those purposes (a two car family) and who have a garage; those who are not current potential market segment either need that car, with some non-insignificant frequency, to travel into range anxiety-provoking range or beyond (over 60 miles on cold winter slow traffic days when the heater will be at full draw), or don’t have a garage that they can use for charging. What are the sizes of each of those segments?
You really don’t see the difference? The cars are actually about to be sold. Many manufacturers are bringing them out.
I don’t care to debate your high school teacher as being relevant. He was not.
I also made no claims the ICE was going to be switched off. It will be a long process, but it is starting.
Capstone and an Israeli company ETVM - are developing the concept too. They are beginning to be used as range extenders for plug-in hybrid electric buses.
You’re being disingenuous in your argument. The gas mileage for the high mileage manual focus is 62 mpg. You’re trying to dilute the argument with an automatic transmission and then substituting different engines to make a point.
If the European focus is brought to the US it would get 62 mpg with a manual and 60 mpg with an automatic. It wouldn’t suffer the winter efficiency losses the Volt has shown (30%). It wouldn’t lose the bulk of it’s efficiency after 40 miles.