Love to see a Prius that got 25 MPG better than the current ones.
Here’s something like one.
No problem. Just buck Toyota and plug your Prius in.
One of my early cars was a 1970 Buick Skylark. It got 16 mpg highway, 10 city.
It probably had more towing capacity than a Prius. But it couldn’t do any of those other things.
Most of the SUVs on the road couldn’t do those things either. And even if an SUV could carry a sow to the slaughterhouse, nobody’s going to use it for that.
I’ve also owned two Ram-50 pickup trucks. I wouldn’t have used either to carry full-grown sows. I’d have used the 1987, but not the 1982, to tow a small-to-medium-sized boat if I’d had one. The washing machine and the tall tool chest (laid flat on its back), yes.
And nobody’s going to argue that the Prius is an adequate replacement for a full-sized working pickup truck.
Apples and oranges.
FWIW, I no longer own a pickup truck, but the fact is that if I ever need a cargo vehicle for the day, I drive five minutes to the local U-Haul, and for $30, I’ve got one. I can do that every weekend for what a Prius would save me in gas over a full-sized pickup truck.
Of course reduced transportation costs encourage more transportation. But that doesn’t mean it would offset that much of the savings.
See Figure 11, about 1/4 of the way down this page. Notice how, even with the boost in fuel efficiency during the 1980s, and cheap gas from about 1986 through the rest of the millenium, it took until the mid-1990s for petroleum consumption to reach its 1979 peak.
And I see a lot of Hybrids with only ONE person in them.
Ahem. Just trying to make a point. You may see me in Denver in my SUV. What you may not see is my two dogs in back. Or you might see my Wife. What you will not see is the $6000 bike in back (we prefer not to use a rack if we can).
You will not see me towing my trailer around just for fun.
And what you won’t realize is that we both use 4 wheel drive every day for six months out of the year (260 inches of snow where we live so far, with more on the way).
Let’s suppose that we can make hybrid/electric/natural gas/fart powered personal vehicles available for the general public. We already have propane and natural gas buses running in some major cities. Is there an acceptable and working replacement for the modern semi truck or diesel locomotive? We’ve got hundreds of thousands (if not millions, I don’t have the stats) of trucks crossing this country carrying goods to everyone. Are biofuel semis capable of generating the same power and reliability as diesel? Can we have a powerful enough locomotive that runs on a different fuel source? I know that Virgin Airlines flew a biofuel jet but how practical is that as a solution for the airline industry?
A “Manhattan Project” for new fuels would be great but only if it takes care of all transportation, not just personal transportation.
Can your echo pull a trailer from a tractor trailer? Can it carry 75 people like a bus? Can it carry 150 people cross country in 5 hours like a plane? Arguing that the Prius can’t do what a pick-up or SUV can do is silly.
Yes, not everyone is going to be able to use a Prius-like vehicle every day. so what?
Look, the idea of a “Manhattan Project” is just stupid. You can’t solve the problem of expensive gasoline by throwing money at the problem, that’s the opposite of solving the problem of expensive gasoline.
We can develop alternative fuel vehicles, but those vehicles are going to be more expensive to build and run than conventional vehicles, because, duh, if they weren’t more expensive they’d be the conventional vehicle and gasoline would be the alternative.
I understand that people are sick and tired of paying high prices for gas, but people are gonna have to get used to it. Gas prices might go down in the future, but they’re not going to go down very far, and then they’re going to go back up again. And this is simply due to reality. There is only so much oil in the pipeline, demand for that oil is increasing due to increased prosperity in China and India, and there are no prospects for lots of new oil in the pipeline.
This is simple economics 101, with steady or decreasing supply and increasing demand, what happens to the price? Alternative fuels aren’t going to be cheaper than gasoline, all they do is moderate the increased demand for gasoline. So gasoline is never going to hit $20.00/gallon, because at that price you can run your car on vodka. But you can’t wave a magic wand and declare that from now on cars will run on ethanol and that the ethanol will be cheaper than $4.00/gallon gasoline, because that’s not reality. You can declare that all cars will run on ethanol, but they’re going to be a lot more expensive to run that gasoline powered cars. You can subsidize the price of ethanol so that the price at the pump is lower than for gasoline, but all that means is that you pay for your gas on April 15th rather than when you fill up, and that strikes me as a pretty inefficient way to run a railroad.
We should be increasing taxes on gasoline and transportation fuels to pay for all the externalities they generate, not subsidizing them. A $2.00/gallon tax on gasoline is going to be far more effective at promoting alternatives to gasoline than any Manhattan Project style corporate welfare project.
A ridiculous statement.
So long as a new fuel provides a more economical solution for any given energy use, it has value. 100% biofuel blends are unlikely in the near future, but 5% biofuel blends are already common (and actually appear to have positive aspects on total lifecycle costs for engines) and 20, 50, or 85% blends are all something that will displace demand for conventional diesel.
People can hem and haw about the relative virtues of their Toyota Prius cars or their need to haul cow-manure in the back of their Ford Excursion, but so long as the fossil fuel market encourages or discourages this behavior appropriately, I really couldn’t care less. The market will find solutions to $4.00/gallon gas.
As has been noted, if they could do this they WOULD be doing it. Because they would be making money hands over fist. Even if you think the US manufacturers are in some kind of conspiricy with Big Oil™ to keep us Americans in gas guzzlers, folks in Europe and Asia, especially Japan, are under no suce constraints. Do THEY have mainstream vehicles that get 75 MPG on the highway as an average?
Even if it were possible for auto manufacturers to ramp up to produce enough cars that COULD get that much mileage in 18 months (something that is pretty much impossible in and of itself), they could never in a million year ramp up to build them in the kind of quantity you are talking about here. Nor could anyone, not even the US, afford your plan. You are essentially giving the cars away for free, on Uncle Sams dime of course. Do you have any idea what your program would cost? Billions don’t even come into it. Hundreds of billions more likely, perhaps trillions.
Again, this would cost a ton for no real return. The oil would be extremely expensive because getting oil out of shale is still not a developed and cost effective technology. Oh, you can do it…but it costs more per barrel than even the current high costs of traditional oil. Which means you’d have to heavily subsidize it to make the oil coming out of it worth selling…which means we are going to pay MORE in the form of taxes for this oil, even if the price at the pump drops because of artificial price controls.
This of course doesn’t even touch on all the other problems both engineering and from a social engineering price control standpoint.
How would this help? AFAIK most of the big offshore reserves are already being exploited. Are you thinking that with this initiative you’d somehow find more reserves that haven’t as yet been found?? What leads you to believe that?
BTW, lets leave aside for a moment the impossible engineering and other stuff and focus merely on your initiatives to get more oil. Isn’t this sort of counter productive at any rate? I mean…we wan’t to reduce our dependency on oil as far as it’s use in personal transport…right? So…shouldn’t Bush be giving a speech about a new focus on alternatives like hydrogen, biofuels, solar, fuel cells, etc?? Not that I think that would be wise either, mind…but it would be a damn sight better than your own proposals.
Well, take out the ‘oil-fired’ and replace it with ‘CO2 emmitting power plants’ and I’m all over it. I’d like to see the US really push nuclear power in the next decade. With a lot of the new nuclear power plant technology I think plants can be made quicker and cheaper (and smaller) than the last designed and built plants in the US. Couple that with an initiative for building large scale solar plants in the South West (and figuring out efficient ways of getting all that energy back into the grid) I think we could really take a bite out of our dependence on CO2 emmitting plants (especially coal fired) in the next decade.
-XT
I have a similar fantasy. It doesn’t involve Bush, so it’s a bit more grounded in reality.
In this one, President Obama gives a Kennedy-space program speech, to the effect that: by the end of the next decade, US auto manufacturers will have 90% of the vehicles coming off their assembly line not powered by fossil fuels. A new govt administration will provide research funding and facilitate delivery infrastructure; the market will determine which technology (hydrogen fuel cell, battery, plug-in electric…steam…whatever) wins.
My own fantasy speech would be President X giving a speech that the US is now fully committed to not only sending people to Mars but establishing a perminent outpost there as well as on the moon and dramatically increasing our exploration of the rest of the solar system, with programs to expore moons like Europa in great detail.
I don’t think the government needs to have a ‘Kennedy’ style crash program to help manufacturers sell products that the market itself is going to be demanding in the decade to come. I can’t think of a bigger waste of money than that to be honest…and I think the government has no place in sticking its thumbs into the mix and trying to decide by fiat and funding what the great next technology is going to be. The market is already figuring that out between the tack the Japanese are taking, the one the Europeans are taking and the various strategies US manufacturers are taking wrt alternative fuels and alternative methods for personal transport. The rising cost of fuel is going to bring about more change than the government throwing more money at the problem ever will.
While no amount of market forces are going to get us to Mars or get a higher priority on space exploration. THAT is something the government actually can do that private industry really can’t at this time.
-XT
I think if this president gave that speech, the Cabinet would immediately vote to declare him mentally incompetent under the 25th Amendment.
That’s a speech some Ron Paul/Ralph Nader hybrid might give, but for anyone else, it’s bonkers.
Why not just slap a $10/gallon tax on gasoline and let market forces sort it out? Or $20/gallon? Or whatever value you calculate will reduce gasoline consumption by 90%? The best way to announce it would be a $1/gallon tax increase per year until consumption is at 10% of 2008 levels.
But this would be a disaster, because now gasoline would be expensive, yet I offer no money to fund alternatives! Except, it’s exactly the same scenario as you propose, except in my scenario the government doesn’t pour the money into corporate welfare (“research funding” and “delivery infrastructure”) put pours the money into the general fund.
The problem is not that there is no existing technology that can replace the gasoline engine. The problem is that there is no existing technology that is cheaper than the gasoline engine. And pouring endless money into finding cheaper engines is backwards, if we really want people to pay less at the pump we’d be better off just directly subsidizing gasoline.
You Manhattan Project people need to decide what the goal is. Is the goal cheap transportation fuel? Not gonna happen without massive subsidies that would be better spent subsidizing conventional transportation fuel. Or is the goal to end gasoline dependence? Then tax gasoline into oblivion, and then whatever turns out to be cheaper after we’ve taxed gasoline out of the market is the fuel of choice.
We already have dozens if not hundreds of alternatives to gasoline. We don’t need massive corporate welfare research programs to develop alternatives, they already exist, except they’re expensive. But you can’t wave a magic wand to make them cheap, no matter how much money you spend.
Why the heck should we send people to Mars? So far as I know, all the interesting scientifc research and exploration could be done far more affordably by unmanned probes (and without risking any human lives).
By directing NASA to focus on putting a man on Mars, Bush has basically killed a number of – in my opinion – much more interesting scientific endeavors. Or so the astrophysics bloggers at cosmicvariance.com have lead me to believe.
I can think of a number of good reasons to expand manned space flight, including missions to Mars…but lets not hijack the thread, ehe?
-XT
The goal (or, my goal, since it was my post) is to end gasoline dependence. The alternatives at this moment are more expensive, but they will eventually decline in prices. The “Manhattan Project” approach is to hasten that day when alternatives are economically feasible.
For example: let’s suppose at the moment, it’s more expensive to run a car on hydrogen than on gasoline. We could shrug our shoulders and wait for the price of gasoline to rise to the point where that’s no longer true; or we could work toward reducing the price of hydrogen cars (or whatever technology does turn out to be the most practical). I vote for the latter.
And if hydrogen doesn’t turn out to be the best or most optimal option? Then you have wasted billions only to find out down the road that there was a better alternative…and to see those billions basically go down the drain.
-XT
You read about these 200 MPG cars-and find that the achive these numbers by:
-accelerating to 50 MPH, then switch the engine off
-coast down to 10 MPH-then turn on the engine, accelerate back up to 50 MPH
My question: this sounds very inefficient-why is intermittent operation more efficient? It doesn’t sound righ to me.
The gasoline engine is most efficient at maximum output and at idle. At about 50 MPH is where wind resistance begins to build up significantly.