Seriously???

Over the 30 year span from 1980 to 2009, the average fuel efficiency of cars changed from about 23 mpg to 25 mpg. As unfortunate as that sounds, let's not pretend that cars have not improved. Improvements were weak in fuel efficiency, but stellar in safety, comfort, style, technology, acceleration, braking, etc. I mean, we went from this...



(mmmm, velour... now go get a napkin to clean up your drool)


to this...




Pretty impressive, and I'm personally willing to live with an average annual increase in fuel efficiency of 0.3% in exchange for my stow-and-go seats, automatic doors, and ipod connection. However now that Obama is putting forward a new standard which will require upping that annual increase to just under 6%, what do people think will happen to the rest of the car's innovations? I mean an engineer can only focus on so many things.

There are two ways to increase fuel efficiency... first is to improve how well the engine works (extremely expensive), second is to make the car lighter. I have a feeling that cars will become lighter more than the engines themselves will become more efficient. What happens when you lighten the frame of a car? It crumples more easily in an accident. What happens to road-noise when you take out heavy noise-dampening components? You have to yell to each other just to be heard. Politicians like to pretend that things don't require trade-offs, but in reality this new fuel efficiency mandate will genuinely mean some level of trade off from your personal safety and comfort to a decrease in emissions of a harmless gas (despite what the EPA would have you think).

To me this is a common sense chain of events, and it's nice to see someone who has already witnessed this. The link below is for an article reviewing Honda's Insight Hybrid. It seems that for this car, Honda tried to both lighten the car as well as make the engine more efficient over all. Read the article, ask yourself if you'd rather drive the Insight over your SUV, then cross your fingers that some miracle happens to save us from this presidency.

The Times Online

Obama/Biden - Change You Can Hardly Believe

P.S. Fuel efficiency could also be improved by having American drivers lose weight (lighter loads for the car to move); but of course the government would never try to dig into our personal lives like that. Just like they would never need to nationalize our banks or take over our car industries... ...

Oh crap.

Labels: politics

posted by Brett at 4:09 PM