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America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient

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Re: America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient

#511

Post by valuearb »

refurb wrote: post #207
valuearb wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Our odds are likely many times better than that. Deaths per 100MM are provably going to be cut in half over the next few decades, if not more. Automated driving assistants alone will do that, even without fully automated cars.

Re: America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient

#512

Post by closeparen »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #178
ghaff wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But when people wants to visit the USA, to travel long distances by car looks like something you want to do. Especially out West, for vast areas of the US, there really are no good alternatives to driving. For example, there's very limited ability to visit most National Parks without a car. And most of the cities are too far apart to reasonably take trains between them. So you're left with flying which gets expensiv…

I don't understand this comment: >too far apart to reasonably take trains between them // It's way nicer IMO doing inter city travel by train. One of my favourite journeys ever was from Wales, via England to South France. Aren't railways one of the main ways to do long journeys between cities?

No. A handful of city pairs have reasonably popular rail service (Milwaukee-Chicago, Boston-New York) which you might use becasue the freeways tend to be congested. The duration is comparable to a drive in clear traffic.

For any other route, a family would fly and then rent a car if upper class or drive if middle/lower class.

Amtrak sometimes serves these routes, but costs more than flying and takes days instead of hours (3 days Chicago to SF, 24 hours Chicago to New York or New Orleans, and if Chicago isn't on the way, you'll need to detour through Union Station). The max flight time here would be ~6 hours.

Re: America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient

#513

Post by darksim905 »

wayn3 wrote: post #509
darksim905 wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What vehicle do you drive that you can get away with 18k mile oil changes? And are we discussing actual gas or that diesel crap?

thats a pretty standard recommendation from practically all german car manufacturers - to change oil roughly every 30-35k kilometers - which is about 18k miles.

I've never seen that anywhere in the United States. 10k miles is the highest I've seen for BMWs & if it isn't that, people say the typical advice is "once a season" depending on how you drive.

Re: America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient

#514

Post by laughfactory »

Faster and more efficient doesn't equal good for the environment. Buying a new car is almost always a net negative for the environment. It doesn't even matter if it's more fuel efficient, or electric. What matters is the vast amount of resources required to produce each vehicle, and the amount of toxic emissions and waste generated in the production process. And, even if it's electric, the electricity has to come from somewhere. And electricity frequently comes from environmentally unfriendly sources like coal power plants.

So if you're in the market for _any_ new car, keep that in mind: you're not doing the environment any favors, nor your bank account.

Re: America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient

#515

Post by hueving »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #356
hueving wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Because it's what makes the most scientific sense You need to justify that, otherwise it's pointless claptrap. The far left advocates for lots of government-provided services, which means markets without competition. I'm not aware of economic theories that strongly back the idea that no competition is best for social utility. > and economics is in fact a science. Well there are large portions of economics that are b…

> You need to justify that, otherwise it's pointless claptrap. The far left advocates for lots of government-provided services, which means markets without competition. I'm not aware of economic theories that strongly back the idea that no competition is best for social utility. I don't need to qualify it. You can study it. You don't walk up to a physicist and ask them to qualify relativity they say it's science and…

>Have you studied economics?

Yes, a significant amount about pricing and market theory. Very little of it supports significant government intervention into markets.

Look at net neutrality for example, the reason ISPs can be assholes is because of regulatory capture effectively granting them local monopolies. Google, one of the richest companies in the world, had to give up on Google Fiber because local regulations blocked them at every step. Now we're left with cable being the only viable high speed connection (fast enough for HD video, etc) for huge swaths of the US because of excessive regulation.

So the only feasible way forward by most left-leaning people is even more regulation on how traffic can be handled. Nothing to introduce more competition, just more fuel for the regulatory capture fire.

>And to make such a broadly sweeping statement is just full of so many fallacies I'm not sure where to start addressing them so I won't because it's pointless.

I'm not sure you are using the word 'fallacies' or the phrase 'full of' correctly. I'm making one assertion in that context, and it's that any large-scale economic study that tries to extract findings by looking at the after-effects of a policy change is little more than tarot card reading because there is no control group.

>Or can you more thoughtful provide examples?

Lookup any economic paper that tries to argue the importance of something like the New Deal. There is no control group, so you can provide as much analysis as you want but there is no way to really say whether or not it was the reason for the recovery because there are far too many confounding variables.

The same thing will happen with the analysis of the quantitative easing programs by the Fed. Doves will produce a wealth of things seeming to show that it prevented the second great depression and hawks will produce a wealth of things claiming that it prevented the important aspect of cutting weak companies from the market.

>I don't need to qualify it.

You most certainly do. You can't state something as brazen the left making the most scientific sense without citations.

Re: America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient

#517

Post by clarry »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #330
grandalf wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> To give you an example of the folly of fuel economy regulation, consider that 90% of automotive pollution is created by the oldest 10% of cars on the road. Does it really make sense to force all buyers of new cars to pay extra? Why not charge a tax that increases for every year a car gets older, so that the person driving the smoke-emitting clunker has an incentive to upgrade into something that is cleaner and safe…

> The correct solution to the smog problem is to impose emissions limits on all cars. If your old car pollutes too much you either pay to retrofit some modern emissions controls or you don't drive it on the road.

That's not really nice. Some poor fellow with his old beater he drives less than 2000 km a year gets to walk home and look into spending big money because his car didn't pass some arbitrary limit. The next guy who passes the limit by a hair may drive all the 30 000 km he wants and can easily afford?

Re: America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient

#518

Post by exprA »

darksim905 wrote: post #505
exprA wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I'm at the other end of spectrum by simply following what the manufacturer proposes: I change my oil along with the filter every 18,000 miles, and so far, after 100,000 miles (and then some) have not had any issues. (My car is rather cheap, or in EV sense practically free, so I'm not all too concerned, either.) The engine does not consume too much oil, either, so a single 4L bottle – about a gallon I think –…

What vehicle do you drive that you can get away with 18k mile oil changes? And are we discussing actual gas or that diesel crap?

It's a VW Polo from the early noughties. Petrol, albeit a rather small engine to match the car :)

To clarify my earlier post, I meant of course that a single bottle of oil is enough for the refill (between 3 and 4 litres) and more than enough for any top-ups for the about 30000 km before the car starts to remind of the end of the “Long Life” maintenance cycle. Oil is certainly not up there when it comes to costs of owning a small car, ICE or not.

A cursory look at used oil: it's still rather like the stuff that goes in, albeit black, of course. Without specific tools, I think it's impossible to tell it apart from oil that's used for, say, 10000 km.

Re: America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient

#519

Post by mikeash »

darksim905 wrote: post #506
dragontamer wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. As eeks points out, fully automatic transmissions are kind of awful at making decisions. I have a case when I was driving into work this morning. I got stuck behind a funeral procession going 35 MPH on a 65 MPH interstate highway (Uggghhhhh) I look to my left-mirror, and I see a spot I can feasibly make, I just gotta time it right to get "into" the flow of traffic. So what do I do? I drop to 2nd gear (The…

Automatic transmissions are better & smarter than you. you may have to drive a little differently if you're driving an automatic in the scenario you described, but saying that it doesn't ''know'' what you wanted to do means either your transmission is virgin & hasn't learned your habits, or, had a different driver for several years & is shifting at the wrong points. This 'ready to go' thing is all hogwash manual elit…

Unless it's hooked into a sophisticated camera system, how could an automatic transmission possibly learn that I'm going to want a lot of acceleration in a couple of seconds once this car passes me?

By the way, I'm not a manual elitist, but rather an EV elitist. I like not having a transmission at all.

Re: America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient

#520

Post by therealdrag0 »

kmm wrote: post #60

I always wondered why American cars are so inefficient. Seems such a waste of your significantly cheaper gas :) I drive an Opel Astra H 1.7 CDTI and I can get up to 50 mpg (4.7 l/100 km) on the highway, and I never dip under 40 mpg (5.8 l/100km) even when doing a lot of city driving. I understand that my car is comparatively somewhat smaller (1200 kg) and underpowered (100 hp), yet I can't imagine needing more horsep…

I drive a Scion xA in America, it's only 100mpg. I think small cars like this (Honda Fit, etc) are catching on, at least in cities. But even still I only get 32-38mpg; maybe from worse aerodynamics?
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