Posted on 08/12/2002 8:16:08 AM PDT by dubyagee
No gas hogs in LaLa Land
ROWLAND NETHAWAY Senior editor
Californians are strutting about congratulating themselves for their new state law requiring higher automobile fuel efficiency.
They believe that California's new state law will force car manufacturers to stop producing gas-guzzling vehicles responsible for global warming.
The logic behind the new law requiring greater fuel efficiency from car manufacturers is a faith-based belief that the automobile industry is involved in a giant conspiracy to deny the public fuel-efficient cars.
Ford, General Motors and the other car manufacturers, according to these anti-big business addicts, have the secret to 300-miles-per-gallon internal combustion engines locked away in a safe somewhere. The car industries make immoral profits by keeping this information from the public.
These urban-myth conspiracy theories have been around since the invention of automobiles.
Since I was a boy I've heard stories about the invention of new spark plugs, carburetors or fuel additives that could allow cars to run for hundreds of miles on a gallon of gas.
Generally, the stories included specific details about how the inventors of these miracles had been paid off and threatened to keep their mouths shut, if not simply murdered. Their supposed inventions were guarded more closely than the Coca-Cola recipe.
Same conspiracies, different era
Fifty years ago, these fanciful tales were voiced by run-of-the-mill drug store and pool hall conspiracy buffs.
In recent years, it has been the greenies, environmental groups, anti-globalists and Californians who think that government laws can force General Motors et al to finally release these secret fuel-efficient technologies.
It was cockamamie nonsense in 1952 and it remains just as harebrained today.
Car manufacturers wouldn't have to offer zero percent interest rates to sell cars if they could build cars with the size and power that buyers want and also get hundreds of miles per gallon.
Every car, SUV and truck owner in the nation would line up to buy such a vehicle.
The oil industry might not be pleased with 300-miles-per-gallon cars and trucks, but, hey, that's the breaks. There will always be uses for oil.
Since no knowledgeable person expects revolutionary efficiency breakthroughs on the venerable internal combustion engine, about the only way to increase fuel efficiency is to decrease safety by making cars and trucks smaller and lighter.
Anti-SUV acolytes may want to see everyone in scooter cars and public buses, but that's a hard sell to motorists who don't feel better about themselves driving around in lightweight, cramped, underpowered vehicles.
The last I heard, the car manufacturers said they would contest the new California fuel-efficiency law.
I suggest that the automobile industry simply ignore the California law.
Californians think their state law will force the car industry worldwide to build cars to California's standards.
Instead, car manufacturers should notify all the car dealers in California that they will be out of business on the day the state's new fuel efficiency standards go into effect.
If Californians want to own a new car, they will have to move to another state.
After a while, California would look like Havana, Cuba, where the cars are caught in a 1950s time warp.
Californians want the rest of the nation to pay to subsidize their lifestyles, which includes a gluttonous appetite for oil, electricity and water taken from other states.
There will be a lot less self-righteous strutting in LaLa Land if the auto industry simply ignores California's new fuel-efficiency law.
Rowland Nethaway's columns appear on Wednesdays and Fridays. E-mail: RNethaway@wacotrib.com
Uh, if you don't mind me asking, what state do you reside in?
Maybe. However, I think the car company approach is going to be to argue to the courts that only the feds have the power to mandate fuel economy standards. Personally, I think they should have financed an initiative so that the voters of California could have slapped this idiotic law down. And they would have.
Spare me your excuses, pillager of the earth. Wear a poncho and strap the briefcase onto the back of the cycle. Rent a car on the days when you need to drive around clients. As for snow and rain, who cares? Sure, a four-wheeled vehicle would be marginally safer for you, but it wouled be substantially more dangerous to everyone else on the road. If the accident rates for four-wheeled vehicles factored in the fatalities they cause, then it would be seen that motorcycles are vastly safer for society.
Nope, the bottom line is that anyone who can get by with a sedan could get by with a motorcycle just as well. I myself, of course, am not such a person—my lifestyle requires both an SUV and a minivan. But I operate on a higher moral plane where I can make such decisions dispassionately. Everyone else scuttling around below me in those rice-burning econoboxes had better have a good excuse for needing four seats and a roof, or else they ought to be driving motorcycles.
Is that enough, or do I actually have to put in the </sarcasm> tag?
Basically, you read these stories about innocent Christians being bombed in Bosnia three days after the Saudis ink some huge contract for American military aircraft, i.e. you begin to get the idea of how some of this money sent off to the islamic world for oil comes back to this country, and the conclusion you start to draw is that SUVs kill Christians.
I mean, if the choice is between feeling sorry for you and your SUV or for those Bosnian Serbs, guess what?
That's aside from me no longer being able to ever see further than the stinking SUV or van one or two cars in front of me in traffic of course, or the fact that all SUV and van drivers appear to attend the same driving school, i.e. "tailgating isn't everything, it's the only thing", and their lights coming in straight on top of people in ordinary cars.
Again, somebody using one of these things the way they're intended to be used, for business, hunting/camping trips etc. etc. causes me no problems; the guy who drives around in traffic in one of them, which appears to be 90% of their owners, should be taxed into tommorrow.
One delightful possibility for a happy ending to the American love affair with the SUV: the same insurance companies which got rid of the "muscle cars" of the mid and late 60s might finally get the message on vans and SUVs and get rid of them for us.
I have the secret right here:
Suppose you want to do 300 mpg, in a vehicle that goes 60 mph. Then a gallon's journey, 300 miles, takes 5 hours. A gallon of gas contains 115000 btu of energy, or about 121 megajoules. This energy is burned in 5 hours, for a rate of 24 MJ/hr, or about .00667 MJ/sec = 6.6 kJ/s =6.6 kW. One horsepower is about 750 Watts, so a 100% efficient 6.6 kW engine would be about 9 hp - about the actual power delivered by a small riding lawnmower.
Now lets consider a man on a bicycle. 10 mph is not too hard to sustain for a rider, about 200 W output. Air resistance goes as the cube of velocity, so going 60 mph would require 63, 216, times the power. 200 x 216 = 43200 W or 43.2 kW. Our hypthetical vehicle needing only 6.6 kW do 60 would have to be about a sixth as hard to push as a man on a bike. Have you ever pushed your car?
The "secret" to such a vehicle is that it would have to have less air resistance than a man on a bike, and not much heavier. Such a vehicle would be extremely light, fragile, and especially unsafe at highway speeds, and would be blown off the road in a good crosswind.
This is the secret that the Big Three have locked up in their safes ... that a vehicle with a lawnmower engine weighing less than a moped and with much less air resistance than a man on a bike, will get 300 mpg.
My bicycle has a 750cc motor on it and gets 50mpg, and it's very unlikely your SUV would keep up with it.
Wrong answer.
Do agree that we need a rail system to make traffic lighter?
"Yeah, that's a grea idea".
Would you use it? "No" Why not? "I would have to leave earlier. It isn't close enough to my building. I have to drop off the kids at school. I have to run errands during lunch or on my way home. It's faster to drive." Or any other multitude of reasons, that other people should get off the road, but not them.
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