Sorry–that wasn’t an opinion, just a joke. Probably shoulda used a smiley.
We are doing that in a few weeks - although we will just borrow one of my parents THREE SUVs (and no smaller cars) and let them use one of our sedans.
Ahem. While I do not sport the stickers you mention, I did vote for George W. Bush in 2004, and I do support our troops. I also drive a Honda Civic LX that gets 32 mpg on a bad day. You’ll take my lovely little gas efficient import away when you pry the steering wheel from my dead fingers.
A friend of mine at work, single, living fairly close to work, is leasing a Hummer. The big honking tank kind.
I sort of shake my head every time I see the thing.
Trade the Malibu for a mini-van?
London to LA: 5,382 statute miles. Add in the round trip. Fleet average fuel consumption for airliners: 4.82 L/100km per passenger. If our differences are indeed slight, it’s probably just rounding errors, since I did some of the math in my head.
But if we want to be more precise, a mile = 1.609344 kilometers. That means a round trip distance of 17,322 km. That means one person will consume 835 L of fuel flying to and from London. That’s assuming economy class, btw. If you fly first class, you can add another 300-400 liters to that.
If you’re taking a family of 3 economy class, you’re burning 2,504 L of gas.
So let’s see how that compares to various car options available.
First, let’s assume the average person travels roughly 20,000 km per year (Auto leases vary from 16,000 km to 24,000 km, so this probably a good approximation).
Here’s the fuel efficiency ratings of some of the least and most efficient typical vehicles:
Toyota Prius: 4.1L/100km (averaging city/hwy)
Honda Fit: 6.4L/100km
Honda Accord: 8.4L/100km
Ford Escape: 9.2L/100km
Ford Explorer: 13.7L/100km
Cadillac Escalade: 14.3L/100km
So there, you have 3 cars from most fuel efficient to average, then three SUVs from average fuel efficiency to worst. Let’s see how much fuel they burn in a typical 20,000 km year:
Toyota Prius: 820L
Honda Fit: 1280L
Honda Accord: 1680L
Ford Escape: 1840L
Ford Explorer: 2740L
Cadillac Escalade: 2860L
First thing to note: If you take your family of three to Europe for a vacation, you will burn almost as much fuel as someone who drives an Escalade for a whole year. And if you come home from your trip and drive your Prius all year long, patting yourself on the back for being cosmopolitan and green, you will actually be responsible for burning about 500L more fuel in that year than someone who stays home and drives his Escalade.
And notice that there’s a huge gap between the truly gas guzzling SUVs and the smaller ones. A Ford Escape (that’s what I have) gets very similar mileage to a Honda Accord. Any mid-size SUV only burns slightly more fuel than a mid-sized sedan. Certainly any difference in consumption is dwarfed by even a small trip by air somewhere.
Let’s add a little more perspective: A Liter of gas has about 35MJ of energy. A kWh is about 3.6 MJ. So let’s say a Liter of gas is about the same as 10kWh.
Therefore, if you have an extra personal computer in your home of typical power consumption which you leave on 24/7, as I’m sure a lot of people on the SDMB do, you’re using about 1752 kWh of energy, the equivalent of about 175L of gas.
One more little fun fact: Let’s say you’ve got an old Pentium P4 computer, and want to upgrade. The old P4 uses roughly 80 watts of power. Now you upgrade to the new super duper fast killer machine with a fancy graphics card so you can play World of Warcraft at max resolution. You also upgrade to a nice new 20" LCD monitor. That combination may consume over 400W of power. Leave that puppy on for a year, and you’ll burn 3504 kWh of electricity. That’s the equivalent of about 350L of gas. The old computer would have burned about 70L of gas.
So upgrading your computer from an old slow one to the latest game killer costs the equivalent of 280L of gas, or almost 10% of the energy needed to drive an Escalade for a year. Just so you could play your video game.
The point here is not to bash anyone for their lifestyle choices, but to make people realize that focusing on SUV drivers as especially wasteful is misguided. The fact is, we burn far more energy per capita than most other people, and SUVs are not the reason. We use more energy because we live in bigger homes, drive more, air condition and heat our homes more, buy more stuff, use more electricity for all our toys, fly more, and eat more. The U.S. and Canada are huge, and therefore we have more transmission line losses and spend more energy to move ourselves and our goods around.
SUV’s are a very visible symbol of excess, but SUV drivers are no more wasteful than you are, since SUV’s only make up a tiny bit of our overall energy consumption. And your own habits may may make you more wasteful than the SUV driver and you may not even realize it.
So have a little more tolerance, and look in a mirror before you start throwing stones.
My biggest fear with people getting rid of their SUVs is that eventually I’m going to have to replace my truck so I can haul a family and I won’t have any options. I’ve tried a variety of diffrent cars trying to get fuel milage Rangers, Jeeps, small SUVs. I’ve rented small and mid sized cars and driven sports cars and luxury cars. The only thing that I fit in (and by that I mean not touch the steering wheel with my knees, able to see stop lights with out ducking or able to close the door without opening a window and pullingon the outside) are trucks and large SUVs. I don’t know if that counts as a need but I’m not getting rid of my truck and I complain about $100 to fill my tank.
Looking at the single-occupant vehicles (from the bus, these days) here in LA is a bit of an eye-opener, too. Pick-up trucks in the carpool lane are almost exclusively banged-up work vehicles: Latino workers going from workplace to workplace. Gleaming, gigantic 4WD vehicles clutter the single-occupancy vehicle lanes.
On the Prius, you also have to consider the gross amount of energy that goes into making and disposing of batteries. I read that you have to drive a Prius 100,000 miles before you begin to offset the cost of the energy that went into making the car. Also, the difference in savings between a 30 and 35mpg car is much less than you gain from going from 20 to 25mpg. Also, if you cruise frequently on the highway, a Prius loses most of that hybrid advantage because it’s running entirely on gas. I just wonder if these smug people tooling around in their little wind-up cars know how wasteful they really can be.
If you’re really serious about saving the planet, you don’t have to go buy a fancy new electric car. Buy only used cars get at least 20mpg, and convince one other family to do the same. It’s so easy and it’s so sad that we can’t even get this right.
Your point is taken, overall, but your estimates are off by an order of magnitude on the computer thing. A computer with a 400W power supply is not pulling 400W every single second that it’s running… only when it’s running at maximum load. Playing at a sufficient pace to pull 3500kWh per year, you’d be dead from exhaustion in a little over a week.
Of the other examples you cited above, home heating is by far the biggest offender. Air conditioning is a common target of vilification, but it takes less energy to maintain a temperature of 15 degrees below outside temp for 3 months than 40 degrees above outside temp for 6 months. And all of that is nice, dirty, smoggy coal power.
Hey, buddy, did I say I went to the guy’s house and started grilling him? No, this smug insufferable twat in a chatroom started informing all of us how his family bought an SUV because they neeeeeded it, and I asked why that was.
So yeah, wanna talk about rude? No, better yet, why not talk about being a shithead and jumping to conclusions.
Don’t know. All I know is my total transportation expenses, including the supposedly SUV-mandatory trip to CostCo, costs me $20 a week (for a CTA 7 day pass). And when I’m not home in Chicago, I’m not paying for for a pass. But more importantly I’m not paying for the car, insurance, maintenance, taxes on the car, license, city sticker, etc. And the time spent on a bus or train instead of behind the wheel of a car is time I spend reading. In the same backpack at different times I carry a 50 lb bag of kitty litter plus a 25 lb bag of cat food, or my power tools.
I’ll admit, my “Urban Sherpa” lifestyle isn’t for everyone, but there are enough people who drive their SUV to the gym to walk on the treadmill and lift weights. I prefer to get my exercise in the wild.
Didn’t expect to catch a lot of flak about the groceries comment. I spend $100 at Costco and usually fill up my trunk. Go fig.
Pollution/gas consumption is only a small part of the SUV hatred. Some of those things are giant, and can really obstruct your view. They make parking more difficult, and they are much more likely to flatten me like a pancake in an accident than a car.
I suspect they are not selling unless they can come up with a bucket of pixy dust.
Twenty five feet of snow last winter. 4x4, low range and ground clearence sort of helps with that. And no, the thousands of people that live here aren’t just going to sell there homes and move into the city.
It’s summer now. End of June. It hasn’t snowed in over two weeks. Winter is only a few months away.
I’m mostly a true liberal, so I don’t care what others drive. It’s none of my business.
I just wanted to add my “well done” for the OP. Snark is cheap, but this is one of those rare occasions where it’s such high-quality snark that it’s worth it.
Yes, I know that, but my estimates aren’t off by an order of magnitude. First, I did say that I’m assuming the thing is on 24/7 (say, you run the SETI at home screen saver). Also, I threw in a nice big LCD monitor that consumes 70-80W. And there’s certainly not an order of magnitude of difference between max power and min - For example, a Dell XPS 400 consumes 258W at full tilt, and 149 W at idle (not standby). That’s a pretty typical figure - a CPU at idle consumes about half the power it does at full-tilt boogie. Some top-end gaming rigs can consume more than 600W of power at full tilt.
I also didn’t include the power consumption of a 5.1 speaker system like most gaming rigs have (10-30W). Or the power consumption of your cable modem and network router. (A cable modem can use 60kWh per year - 6L of gas just for your cable modem)
But just to give you an example of how we often focus on the wrong things - remember the SETI at home screen saver? How many environmentally conscious people are also science lovers and have SETI at home running on their home PCs, thereby leaving them on and out of standby mode 24/7? If your computer consumes 200 W of power when left on, and 5W in standby, then running the SETI@home screen saver is burning 195W per hour of use. Let’s say that you use you computer 8 hours a day, and it uses the SETI@Home screen saver for the other 16 hours. That means your screen saver is burning up 1138 kWh of power per year - 114L of gas being burned so you can help search for ET, or about 10% of the difference between driving a Honda Accord and a Cadillac Escalade.
If I looked at the energy footprint of my IT infrastructure at home, it’d be pretty bad. I have a cable modem, a wi-fi router, and a network server computer running 24/7. I have two desktop computers that are running at least 12 hours a day. I’ve got a high-def cable box that runs 24/7 and uses 45W of power even when switched off. There’s the equivalent of 40L of gas just so I can have high definition TV. According to the eia, cable boxes consume 2.9 billion kWh per year in the U.S. - equivalent in energy to 290 million Liters of gas. To put that in perspective, that’s the equivalent of a typical year’s driving for 1,000 Cadillac Escalades.
And we’re not even hitting the really big energy consumers - things like refrigerators, air conditioning, big screen TVs, clothes dryers (65 billion kWh per year in the U.S. for clothes dryers alone), and other major appliances. Did you know that clothes dryers consuming 65% of the energy that our lighting does? With all the focus on CFL bulbs, I don’t hear a lot of people talking about hanging their clothes on a clothesline. That’d be too much hassle, y’know? Our dishwashers consume 30% of the energy as our lighting does - how many environmentally-conscious people hand-wash their dishes?
I don’t think people realize just how much energy we really consume, and how little of it is consumed by SUVs.
WTF?
Seriously WTF?
Flight attendant: "Captain, we just had 10 passengers move from economy to First Class.
Pilot: “Oh Shit now we won’t have enough fuel to make it to London, get those people back into economy fast!”
Seriously, you wear what sounds like a backpack meant for hiking on a city bus? And are the people laughing with joy the ones you’re knocking over as you move about this bus?
I just want to express my sympathy for the OP and those who applauded him.
Unfortunately for those who resent and envy SUV drivers (for a variety of reasons, some good and some ludicrous), these vehicles and variants of them will be around for a long time in hybrid and other gas-saving versions.
Mrs. J.'s hybrid Ford Escape gets 32-34 mpg in combined city-highway driving. It serves our needs well, even though we don’t really need it, you understand. And while it’s on the smaller end of the SUV scale, it’s still plenty big enough to intimidate and run over lesser vehicles and pedestrians.
Sorry about that. 