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America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient

bloomberg.com

431–440 of 528 posts

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

#431
post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice intention, but have you been to suburban america? There's nothing there.

Sounds like a good place to not live then.

This sounds like you think they should die. The US lower/middle class live according to their means, and the housing created for them to live in is horribly dependent on cars. You are fortunate to have falling into a location/social class where your potential properties are pedestrian-friendly & close to point-of-interest. Hundreds of millions of people do not share your fortune.

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

#432
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US only about 1 out of every 70 deaths is from an auto accident. As a single cause of death, it's not even in the top 10. Less than 1 in 3 accidental deaths is auto accident related. More people commit suicide (42,000) than die in auto accidents (40,000). http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/282929.php Deaths per mile driven have plummeted over time. From 24 per million miles in 1921, to 7 per hundred mill…

1 out of 70 is pretty damn huge. We have global campaigns about preventing cancers that are less dangerous than car accidents. There was panic over Ebola, which killed essentially nobody compared to car accidents. Yet the general response to 1/70 people deaths being because of cars is "meh, oh well."

Well fortunately car accidents aren't contagious like Ebola. If Ebola had spread it easily could have killed far more people than car accidents, hence the panic and need to quickly address it.

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

#433
Soccer Moms' Revenge

https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/articles/soccer-moms-reven...

Once we unloaded our gear, luggage, tires and a bunch of other junk from the same Honda Odyssey—a minivan, remember—that had just carried us 400 or so odd miles while watching DVD movies in air-conditioned comfort while sitting our bourgeois asses on cushy leather seats, it proceeded to storm around the autocross course in 49.09 seconds. In other words, it cruised to a near dead-heat with the Porsche [356].

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

#434

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.

Direct injected engines still have throttle butterfly valves, or something complex like VANOS to simulate one with valvetrains. Air and fuel must mix at a correct ratio, if you're requiring little power, you need little air and little fuel. Lots of air and low fuel gets you detonation.

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

#435
These new engine technologies are really cool if you enjoy driving performance cars, and it's amazing how it's possible to comply with EPA requirements while delivering so much power, but all these systems add a lot of complexity.

Direct fuel injection, turbos and fancy transmissions are the min technologies which make these powerful efficient cars possible, but they're all impossibly complex to service!

DFI leads to carbon fouling of intake valves, because port fuel injection "washed" fuel over the valves, cleaning them and burning up residue. Turbos are high RPM, high heat parts which have nowhere near the longevity of a modern engine, and there are lots of cars with 8 and 10 speed automatic transmissions to get every last bit of efficiency out of the engine.

All these expensive technologies make for less reliable cars that need more maintenances, and cars are much younger when scrapped because they're simply not economical to fix. Your local transmission shop won't rebuild a 10-speed auto, they'll buy a remanufactured one from a specialist, which costs many thousands.

It's a bummer for a weekend mechanic like myself, that cars are becoming so impractical to run for a long time. I consider it wasteful to scrap a perfectly nice ten year old car because of a bad transmission or blown motor, but there are increasingly more of these.

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

#436

These new engine technologies are really cool if you enjoy driving performance cars, and it's amazing how it's possible to comply with EPA requirements while delivering so much power, but all these systems add a lot of complexity. Direct fuel injection, turbos and fancy transmissions are the min technologies which make these powerful efficient cars possible, but they're all impossibly complex to service! DFI leads to…

I’d be interested to hear more about the tradeoff between conserving fuel and conserving the machines that burn it.

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

#437
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It is also priced a lot higher.

Taking into account inflation, it's only priced slightly higher. 8400 dollars from 1984 becomes something like $19500. Which would get you a Honda Fit, which is probably a lot more similar to that old GTI.

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

#438

A 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…

For what it's worth, I've been driving an EV for three years and haven't spent a cent on fuel. My work parking garage has a free charger, as does my wife's. half a mile from my home there are free public charging stations as well. I could charge at home, but free electricity is awesome. I don't expect this to last forever of course, but it has made my car costs infinitely cheaper to run.

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

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I own a Tesla S85 and recently had a Cadillac ATS rental for a few days. The MSRP on the Tesla is twice as much as the ATS, so I would expect performance differences. > and we rarely do 0-60 in actual real-life driving. Many people would be mostly satisfied with great handling over speed in daily driving, but don't know what that feels like in a car.

My point is not just that the Tesla performs better, but that it does so despite a similar 0-60 time. The price difference has nothing to do with that.

>The price difference has nothing to do with that.

Price has nothing to do with performance?

0-60 time is 0-60 time, regardless of how it feels. "Performance" can be measured. Maybe I'm still missing your point.

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

#440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't there a more scalable solution? I'm imagining reflective stripes at specifiv GPS positions, so satellites can target them with lasers and measure the reflection. Too much refraction?

The refraction doesn't matter, its the precision. Given a reading (of 02 ppm), how can you prove that it matches the reading a ground station would have made? How could you filter out the noise from materials in the ~100km of atmosphere between the satellites and the targets? More pragmatically, could you explain it in a courtroom & convince the jury that it works? I understand that you're disappointed that this extr…

Nah, I'm not disappointed, just trying to understand the limits of current sensors. I also don't think it needs to be extremely accurate - maybe there's even proxies that could be used, like the shade of green on cloudless days for land coordinates, however this opens up a lot of abusive avenues of course.

Btw. how about something like OCO-2? I couldn't find anything about its spatial resolution, but it seems to allow ground measurements of carbon sinks and sources.

https://oco.jpl.nasa.gov/science/MeasurementApproach/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbiting_Carbon_Observatory_2

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