Posted on 04/04/2018 7:06:07 AM PDT by reaganaut1
The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday took the Obama fuel economy rules off autopilot. This is good news for consumers, automakers and the U.S. economy, but the Trump Administration’s big test will be negotiating around the political potholes.
Corporate average fuel economy (Cafe) standards are a vestige of the 1970s gas shortages. Like the Nixon-era price controls, the fuel standards were intended to reduce gas consumption. But the environmental left long ago hijacked the rules to impose their vision of an electric-car future.
In 2012 the Obama EPA turned up the Cafe dial and mandated a fleetwide average of 54.5 miles a gallon by 2025 with a midpoint review in 2017. After President Trump won the election, Obama EPA chief Gina McCarthy blazed through the review and upheld the 2012 targets no matter the economic and technological obstacles.
Passenger cars were about half of U.S. vehicle sales in 2012 when gas averaged $3.60 a gallon. But last year they made up only about a third of the fleet mix, and their share has been declining amid lower gas prices. This will make it nearly impossible to hit future targets even with cleaner technologies. By the Obama EPA’s own projections, fewer than 1% of gas-burning vehicles would meet its 2022 target.
Many automakers have met EPA’s targets so far by selling small and electric cars at a loss, and some have shifted production to lower-cost Mexico. Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne has estimated that his company loses $14,000 on each Fiat 500e.
But in 2016 for the first time most manufacturers complied with the standards by using regulatory credits that the EPA provides for efficient air-conditioning systems, electric cars and flex-fuel vehicles that can run on ethanol. These green indulgences can be stored and traded.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
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jOkeass was the fraud.
I read another article about Tesla not meeting expectations.
Frankly, this could kill Tesla.
“Frankly, this could kill Tesla.”
Good!
“Fuel economy” is one of those things that changes depending on who is doing the computations. Convert into something like “fuel cost per mile” and the virtues of gasoline at $2.50/gallon versus $5.00/gallon. Same number of miles travel per gallon, but at twice the cost per mile.
Rationing by price does create an incentive to make internal-combustion engines more fuel efficient, but because so much of the energy is converted to heat instead of actually supplying power to the traction wheels, such gains are fractional at best, and might not be applicable under all circumstances.
Go a step beyond internal combustion engines, and consider the possibilities of an EXTERNAL-combustion engine, by heating some fluid medium up to expansion, and using the heated fluid medium to drive either a turbine or a reciprocating piston with a crankshaft and flywheel, and rotational energy may be used to propel the traction wheels.
Two designs exist, generally, one driven by heated air (the Stirling engine), or one that relies on converting water to steam, and using the heated steam to either spin a turbine or a reciprocating piston design, and collecting and recycling the spent steam by condensation. The heated air system has the advantage of not requiring the condensation of the spent medium and recycling. Both of these design schemes were worked out well over a century ago, and some got pretty sophisticated, considering the technology of the times.
The Doble steam-powered car was perhaps the most highly developed of the external-combustion engines. Jay Leno has done a lot of work with these steam-powered vehicles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUg_ukBwsyo
12 different fuel blends for Florida weather? Total BS!
12 different fuel blends for Florida weather? Total BS!
Totally agreed on that thought. Fuel blend requirements should depend on what is actually required by the vehicle,not on what some idiot politician thinks would be good for the environment. A couple different blends might prove adequate.
Virtually all of the CAFE and emissions standards mandated by the EPA were driven by one source: CARB, the california air resources board.
The EPA had their heads so far up CARBs ass, it wasn’t even funny. Up until the early 90’s, the automakers made two versions of every vehicle offered for sale in the US, either federal (49 states), or california.
It was so bad, that at one point, GM was seriously considering stopping sales to california, and if they did, the others would have followed suit. They were losing money on every california emmisions equipped vehicle.
And to add insult to injury, all of that emmisions equipment and tuning actually ruined their CAFE ratings.
This is why cars and trucks built in the late 80’s and early 90’s had better mileage than most of the current comparisons.
I agree. It is the only viable solution that is easy to do.
Worth repeating often.
N. Theknow wrote: "Need to get rid of all the different fuel blends that make gas prices jump at least 15 cents a gallon at the end of each month."
Here in my state, only one city (largest) failed to meet some EPA standard back in the 80's and as a result the whole state was eventually forced to use gasohol.
The refiners are forced to make E10 and E18 and now you can hardly find any regular gasoline anymore, anywhere. All because of the EPA rule regarding one city where they were able to claim that the air pollution was bad enough to warrant draconian actions.
Let the marketplace decide. Free our industries of the endless regulation and red tape.
End the EPA madness Mr. Pruitt. Real Americans have your six. Keep rolling (back) those regulations! MAGA!
SS1
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