The huge stride in efficiency recently has been made possible by direct injection. Engines no longer have to work hard to pull intake air through a mostly closed butterfly valve. Attributing this advancement to govt regulation is preposterous. Just as regardless of whether govt had mandated faster processors, industry would have created them anyway.
America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient
201–210 of 528 posts
Re: America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient
#202I'm not sure that I believe their assertion that cars have gotten lighter. Perhaps the real land-yacht monstrosities have been weeded out (and replaced with SUVs). But it seems like comfort and safety concerns, coupled with more power and better fuel economy have been causing equivalent cars to become heavier (and more expensive) over time. As an example, one of my first cars was an 84 VW GTI. It weighed ~2000lbs. Tr…
A new Fiat 500, Chevy Spark, or Mitsubishi Mirage have weight and performance similar to your old VW GTI. A new GTI is much bigger and despite the name has no real relation to the 1984 model.
> A new GTI is much bigger and despite the name has no real relation to the 1984 model.
Agreed, it's safer, considerably faster and much more luxurious. It is also priced a lot higher.
Re: America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient
#203A few weeks ago I bought a Chevy Bolt EV...according to the dealer it was the first one sold in my state (Utah). I'd been on a waiting list for almost a year. Sure, ICE engines are getting better, but EVs are rapidly gaining and will soon surpass. The Bolt is a bit expensive for a car of its body type, but "gassing up" at home is amazing, the 200+ mile range is great, and the sharply reduced emissions are a weight of…
Electric vehicles are a tough sell now though. The Chevy Bolt EV has a 60 kWh Lithium-ion battery; to charge that fully costs $8.7 in Utah (14.5 cents per kWh). Per the EPA's measure that gets you 238 miles. Gas costs approx $2.24/gallon in Utah. A Prius has a 11.3 gallon tank and a 540 miles range (again, EPA standard). That means that $11.15 would get you the same distance as a full Bolt EV charge in gas. Now, befo…
I think it's possible that the economics of electricity will change dramatically in the next few years. Already, in several states, we see days where solar generation momentarily dramatically exceeds demand - and with solar so cheap now, that's only going to get more extreme. Charging batteries seems like a good thing to do with a power surplus, and it makes more economic sense to charge a consumer's battery than to fill up some grid-storage solution.
Re: America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient
#204For all the talk by liberatians and their ilk that regulation is bad and unnecessary, that chart of median fuel effeciency due to government requirements should give them pause. Wow. Well over a decade of non-progress until a path forward is mandated. Suddently the needle starts moving, with car owners, the environment, and energy import needs as big winners here.
Libertarians are not anti-regulation, they just believe that the good and bad consequences of regulations should be understood. Often, those who are not libertarians will support a regulation simply because they agree with its stated aim... things like "the patriot act" or "the affordable care act". Those names are chosen to sound good, not because they reflect the intent of legislation or the outcome of it. To give…
I'm sure non-libertarians also believe regulation should be understood.
Re: America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient
#205I suspect that people of the future will look back and be amazed that for more than a century we've been legally allowing our slow-reacting bodies [1] to ride around at 80mph in a 2-ton hideous mechanical equivalent of a horse, killing ourselves [2] and simultaneously destroying our cities [3]. I myself used to be a "petrolhead" my 20s and it's quite amazing to observe this awakening when looking in the mirror. I sus…
The obvious question, of course, is what you would've recommended for us to use between 1950 and 2000?
Transportation and moving around fast is pretty dang valuable. It lets us do a lot of things, markets become larger, and the different number of highly specialized people I can interact with increases.
Re: America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient
#206My first car crush was in high school: the 2002 Subaru WRX. It would be fine to get some souped-up monster, and high-end BMWs are always fast, but when I first saw those silly little bug eyes and the trademark blue color? God did I want one. It was weird to figure out that it only came with a 2 liter engine. Apparently turbos help a lot. It was even weirder when the 2005 STI came out with the same engine ... and a bi…
In F1 they now have waste heat recovery systems, as I understand it (please, F1 engineers, correct me if I'm wrong) in the form of mechanically decoupled turbine and compressor wheels on the turbo. The (exhaust) turbine generates electricity which it can feed either to the battery or to the compressor wheel motor (acting like a regular turbo in the latter case). In this configuration, you can also electrically spool…
The coolest thing about current F1 engines is that they eliminate a major inefficiency of turbos. In a modern turbocharged, once the turbo hits maximum boost an electronically actuated wastegate opens to avoid over boosting the engine which wastes all the energy you worked to create.
Coupling the turbine shaft to a generator allows you to recapture that energy normally lost to the wastegate.
Re: America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting stat. 1 death for every 1 million miles. If the average person drives 12,000 miles per year for say 60 years (18 to 80, yes it's over estimating), that's 720,000 miles driven. That would infer your chance of dying in an auto accident is ~70% over a lifetime.
Oops! It was 100 million miles, not 1 million miles, my mistake.
That makes more sense. So your chance of dying in an auto accident is 0.7% over your lifetime.
It's probably less than that since I'm sure the average fatality per accident is >1.
Re: America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient
#208A few weeks ago I bought a Chevy Bolt EV...according to the dealer it was the first one sold in my state (Utah). I'd been on a waiting list for almost a year. Sure, ICE engines are getting better, but EVs are rapidly gaining and will soon surpass. The Bolt is a bit expensive for a car of its body type, but "gassing up" at home is amazing, the 200+ mile range is great, and the sharply reduced emissions are a weight of…
Electric vehicles are a tough sell now though. The Chevy Bolt EV has a 60 kWh Lithium-ion battery; to charge that fully costs $8.7 in Utah (14.5 cents per kWh). Per the EPA's measure that gets you 238 miles. Gas costs approx $2.24/gallon in Utah. A Prius has a 11.3 gallon tank and a 540 miles range (again, EPA standard). That means that $11.15 would get you the same distance as a full Bolt EV charge in gas. Now, befo…
> Electric vehicles are a tough sell now though. The Bolt EV costs $36,620, the Prius $23,475.
You could split the difference -- buy a Chevy Volt for $34,095 ($26,595 after Fed Tax Credit). Drive electric up to 50+ miles per charge, but still get 42mpg when driving on gasoline, with over 420 miles of total range per fueling.
> In general people buying electric vehicles in 2017 are buying them for non-economic reasons. They lose money. Hybrids are likely the best bang for your buck.
I'd argue plug-in hybrids are where the real sweet spot is.
It's only an extra $3k over the Prius, to get ~90% of your driving miles via zero-emission electricity, but still have full gasoline available for any long-distance trips. I think that's a really compelling argument. It's really easy to save more than just $3k on fuel alone, after a couple of years with that car.
Regular hybrids are cheaper up front, but are wasteful. They cheap out on tiny batteries that are way too weak to take full advantage of the vehicle's technology. Stick a wall-chargeable 10-20 kWh battery into a hybrid, and you get the best of everything in one vehicle.
Re: America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient
#209For all the talk by liberatians and their ilk that regulation is bad and unnecessary, that chart of median fuel effeciency due to government requirements should give them pause. Wow. Well over a decade of non-progress until a path forward is mandated. Suddently the needle starts moving, with car owners, the environment, and energy import needs as big winners here.
Based on the libertarians I've talked with about seat belt laws, their argument would probably be to hand-wave it away with "It would have happened anyway thanks to the magic of the market."
So when gas prices went through the roof in the 1970's and there was rationing, you don't think that created consumer demand for more fuel efficient cars?
Re: America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Electric vehicles are a tough sell now though. The Chevy Bolt EV has a 60 kWh Lithium-ion battery; to charge that fully costs $8.7 in Utah (14.5 cents per kWh). Per the EPA's measure that gets you 238 miles. Gas costs approx $2.24/gallon in Utah. A Prius has a 11.3 gallon tank and a 540 miles range (again, EPA standard). That means that $11.15 would get you the same distance as a full Bolt EV charge in gas. Now, befo…
You'd be surprised at how much the maintenance savings are. They could easily make up the difference in price of the car. Especially when you count the $7500 tax refund for getting an EV. It's not just oil changes but everything else having to do with an ICE you get to skip out on. Plus brake changes are far more rare due to so much regenerative breaking. Lastly I would add that you can't directly compare the cars on…
>I don't know about Utah but most energy companies in the US have different rates for electricity during the day or at night (off peak) and you can easily set your EV to charge overnight, saving even more money.
Thanks for mentioning this. It is significantly cheaper to charge at night if your energy company drops the price during off-peak hours. That $8 or $9 drops to like $3 or $4 here in MA with National Grid service. I did some really rough math and figured that it would cost about half as much to charge a Chevy Bolt from 0 to 100% than it would be to fill my current car, a 2014 Jetta, with gasoline. My greenhouse gas emissions will go down by over 50% judging from an estimate I got based on how MA currently generates energy.
That said, I put a deposit down on a Bolt Premier but am not sure if I will be buying it because it is damn expensive, even after tax rebates and such.