America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient | Hacker News Reader

America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient

bloomberg.com

278 pointsJumpCrisscross515 comments

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 off the mind. It's also super quiet, as you would expect, and boy howdy does it have get-up-and-go. Sure, some of it is psychological because a) it's whisper quiet as it accelerates; b) the raft of batteries in the belly keeps that car planted to the road; and c) there's no pause to down-shift. But I've owned some fast cars[1], and this one feels like the fastest yet.

It's nice that ICE engines are improving, but between the Bolt, Tesla Model 3, and other soon-to-arrive practical EVs, I believe that the sunset of ICE is beginning.

[1] Notable examples in order of speediness: 1973 Dodge Charger (340ci), 1970 Dodge Challenger (383ci), 1996 Camaro Z28 (350ci), 2000 Camaro SS (350ci).

I own a Tesla S85 and recently had a Cadillac ATS rental for a few days. It was an interesting contrast, since the official 0-60 times of the two cars are almost the same, yet the Cadillac felt like an absolute slug by comparison.

I think a lot of it is that there's a great deal of lag in traditional drivetrains, and we rarely do 0-60 in actual real-life driving. More typically we're doing 0-30 or 30-40 or 55-65. Once the traditional drivetrain does all of its clunking around and can start putting down the power, it can compete, and in a 0-60 run that initial period isn't too bad. But in normal driving, the relative significance of the delay is huge. It doesn't just feel quicker, it is quicker for more typical situations.

At this point, the main thing traditional cars have going for them is cost. And that's probably just a matter of time.

I also have a model S, but I have owned a couple of other high performance gas cars that are much more responsive on the 55-65 or 40-70 acceleration test (passing at highway speeds). That's the only common case where the tesla loses to gas vehicles, and then only high performance gas vehicles (e.g. 300HP+ coupe/sedan models).

But the 0-30 thing is exactly right in my experience. Even more powerful vehicles don't have the instant and smooth acceleration feel of an electric motor.

This is due to the rising power curve of ICE.

That's no excuse

There's that, plus the time that it takes for the automatic transmission to decide that yes, you really do want to accelerate, and yes, maybe it ought to get around to increasing the RPMs one of these seconds.

Electric cars opened my interest car performance. I now have a higher performance ICE than I ever thought I would spend money on, but I still miss my tiny little electric Fiat 500e, even though my ICE is definitely better at 40-80mph.

Fiddling with gears, monitoring RPM, what a terrible system. Feels like a steam engine after being in an electric.

>Fiddling with gears, monitoring RPM, what a terrible system.

For some of us, this "terrible system" is one of the best parts of owning an ICE vehicle with a manual transmission.

I can totally see how that would be true. You build muscle memory and positive associations around the operation of the machine. But you've gotta see too how it's akin to turning a rotary phone dial.

In some ways, yes, but excluding dual clutch transmissions, manual transmissions really do have a performance advantage while rotary phones did not have any advantage over touch tone other than, maybe at one point, cost.

I doubt that there are many drivers who can outperform a modern automatic transmission.

Automatic, yes. Semi-automatic, no. With semi, the driver makes the decision, and the system execute it (the best in class is within 10ms IIRC).

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 Gear ratios on the Ford Focus are kinda "weak"). My engine roars but its cool, because my engine's top-Torque is in the 4000RPM to 6000RPM band. When the "spot" opens up, I floor the acceleration pedal and get in just fine.

----------

A fully automatic vehicle wouldn't "know" that I wanted to "prepare" for the sudden acceleration. It only knows after you push the pedal.

A manual driver however, can tell the car to "prepare" for acceleration, so that when you push the accelerator you are 100% ready to go.

-------------

Semi-automatic vehicles (including some "sport" CVT engines I've test-driven) would work. The important bit is to be able to change gears way ahead of time BEFORE you push the accelerator.

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 elitism.

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.

Look, a CVT semi-automatic probably would outperform me. I'm no master driver or whatever.

But a typical automatic transmission? Dude, I have a huge advantage as a human. I have eyes. I can see things the engine cannot.

It takes time for a internal combustion engine to rev up to its ideal torque band. The Ford Focus is a turbocharged engine, which means it only achieves maximum torque above 4000 RPM.

Since most automatic transmissions are tuned for fuel efficiency (ie: 2000RPM band or so), they will perform worse when you're trying to accelerate. The manual driver has the advantage that they can choose fuel efficiency (ie: 2000RPM most of the time), or in cases of emergency... kick it into (low) gear for very high RPM to maximize the torque band.

-------------

ICE Engines are all about tradeoffs, and the manual driver can choose the RPM-band that best matches the situation.

Would a properly tuned automatic beat me in fuel economy? Probably.

Would a properly tuned automatic beat me in acceleration? Probably.

But no automtaic can be tuned to do both at the same time. Since high-Torque is high-RPM only... and fuel efficiency is low-RPM only... the computer cannot be tuned to try to do both at the same time.

Most electric cars have only 1 gear (including reverse), isn't that a manual transmission? :-) It doesn't automatically shift...

Tesla fudged the 0-60 times for the S85 to be slower than actual. They claimed 5.4 seconds, independent testers saw 4.9 seconds or better. I suspect this is at least some of what you saw.

The "lag" at launch would be the power curve...power doesn't peak at low rpms.

>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.

The person I replied to described pretty much the same experience with an EV that costs about the same as the ATS. My overall point is that EVs tend to perform better for normal driving tasks despite having similar 0-60 time because you don't often do 0-60 runs in normal driving tasks. The ATS may well match my S85 in 0-60 time, but there's no way it matches the 0-30 time, which is far more common in normal driving.

I recently completed a day of high performance driving school where we ran M3s and M4s the whole day (these were all equipped w/ DCT, the Competition Package, and Carbon Ceramic brakes).

There is so much more to actual high performance driving than acceleration numbers. You may say "oh yea, cornering!" and while that's certainly delving deeper into it, there's a _lot_ more than just that (and many, many things go into "cornering").

So the M3/M4 w/ the competition package makes 444 hp and does 0-60 in 3.9s, which is "slow" compared to a P100D in Ludicrous Mode. It's actually really fast with just 2 driven wheels, but there's much faster out there. But, now:

- The Transmission. Transmissions are a technical solution to a technical limitation of ICE, namely the fact that the delta of engine speed is much smaller than the delta of wheel speed (even at "just" legal speeds), therefore gearing was introduced. Transmissions are not necessary, and should not be seen as something that's great about a car, if a car is capable of being driven at the full range of wheel speeds its market segment targets w/o a transmission. While the DCT is perhaps one of the best transmissions in the world (on par with exotics found in much more expensive vehicles), it will be a good riddance when it's no longer necessary. No matter how good a transmission is, there will be an imbalance in power when shifting, which _will_ upset the vehicle in a high performance cornering scenario, which the closer you are to the limit (with something like DCT, you will need to be a highly skilled driver to even begin to approach having this matter), the more it will count.

- Suspension and, directly related, vehicle weight. Your Tesla can do 3.x 0-60, but you need high performance suspension and low weight to make use of it in corners. Something like the M3/4, and even more so the suspensions GM has been putting in its high performance products like the Stingray (which trickles down to Camaros and ATS/CTSes), are a world away from just "standard" high performance suspension.

- Differentials, electronics. Limited Slip Differential will make a marked difference in high performance cornering when you're not exactly perfect. All the electronics for stability control, traction control, abs/braking, they all work in tandem. On the M3/4 they work really, really well. I was able to feel like Superman by pulling some feats that simply would not be possible without these advanced systems and my skill level. You would think that this is not so much of a good thing, but it actually works both ways and _can_ be good -- for example, as I got more confident on the AutoCross part of the day, I started to hit some of the nannies, particularly stability control which would not give me full throttle until I had unwound the steering wheel. Now, the instructors had been shouting this in my ear all day long, but actually _feeling_ this really connected it for me and I started to get it and was able to learn _faster_ because of the feedback I was getting from the car due to the nannies keeping me from wiping out. It was quite amazing, and I'm sure that very few of my fellow students realized just how much the electronics had helped them that day.

- Brakes! You need to stop. The simple fact that the M3/4 can be spec'd w/ Carbon Ceramic discs (which also moves from 4-piston to 6-piston calipers) puts it in a different class. We abused these cars all day long, maximum acceleration and maximum braking most of the time. The brakes never faded, it was simply incredible. 35-40 ppl abusing 12 cars (6 M3s & 6 M4s) for about 6 hours, zero fade (and zero mechanical issues out of a dozen cars). This makes it a street-legal track machine (tool), compared to just a car that gets to 60 MPH fast. We were told early on to literally "try to break the brake pedal off," and, because some students had reservations, they insisted "please, you cannot hurt these cars, do absolutely everything possible to break the brake pedal because we want you to experience maximum braking" (this was during a maximum braking exercise early on, which the later exercises built upon), finally adding "n fact, we challenge you, if you can break the brake pedal we'll give you the car for free." God knows I tried. Contrary to what you would think, the brakes had one of the most profound, lasting impressions on me, and I would absolutely, without batting an eye, spec the $8,500 option for the Carbon Ceramic brakes on these cars if I had the slightest inclination of tracking them.

- "Abuse" capacity. I'm not talking about long term reliability, as far as the engine is concerned, an electric engine _should_ be night & day compared to a complex, "cave age" ICE. But there's more to it, there's the drivetrain -- yea, even with a single speed, there are shafts, some sort of differential, in AWD applications even more complicated stuff going on. 35 monkeys trying to break these 12 cars resulted in.. nothing, not a single one of them exhibited any issues. The school ran for the whole week and we were the Wednesday class, so these cars had already been abused in similar fashion the 2 previous days. Now, these cars are engineered to do this, so it's not really abuse since they're made for it. That's why you're paying $80k+ for "just" an M3/M4 (again, with all the right options, the brakes being almost $10k of that), on paper it looks like "wtf, a Mustang GT makes about the same power" -- you're buying a real-deal track machine that's street-legal and, in 4 door guise, can take your kids to school too.

I _cannot wait_ for the time when there will be a comparable machine that does away with all the now-unnecessary complexity of ICE. Not having gearing and the issues it introduces will change some of the dynamics of high-performance driving, it will be superior even in the hands of pros. Until then, ICE is still here with us, and the 0-60 numbers on most/all cars are like MegaPixels on digital cameras.

> and the 0-60 numbers on most/all cars are like MegaPixels on digital cameras.

I think you're telling the same story from the other side. And it's a good one!

I see two major problems to overcome before EVs can start to really intrude on this particular part of the world.

First is weight. A Tesla battery is somewhere around 1,000-1,500lbs. Putting it under the floor helps a lot, but that's a lot of weight to carry around. You can overcome that in straight-line acceleration by suppling lots of power, but other aspects of handling can't help but suffer. I'm not very experienced with this stuff, but I hear that the Tesla handles reasonably well for its size but at the end of the day it's huge and heavy.

Second is heat. The electric drivetrain is efficient, so it doesn't produce a lot of waste heat, but it still produces some. And it's a lot harder to remove. You'll never run into this in normal driving, but with the sort of activities you were getting up to, an EV would start to limit your power output pretty quickly.

Hey, I'm all for people who like track racing, but you know, there's other people who like drag racing, and still others who like being able to floor it from a stoplight and beat that Maserati driver who's scared to even try because he'll make an embarrassingly-loud noise and lose.

Different strokes and all that. And for 2 of the 3 groups I just mentioned, 0-60 times are not like MegaPixels on digital cameras.

Enjoy your track racing!

Not to be a jerk, but how much does such an outing cost? :\

I have an electric _bicycle_ that routinely dusts off ICE cars at stop lights. It just takes a while for all that machinery to start rolling.

I have a pedal-powered bicycle that dusts ICE cars at stop lights. For, like, 5 metres...

Not only does it take a while to get all that machinery rolling, doing it quickly kills your gas mileage. Most drivers aren't drag-racing out of the stoplights.

> Most drivers aren't drag-racing out of the stoplights.

You sure about that? Out here they do.

It's the starting and stopping that kills mileage.

Rabbit starts don't really matter (modern engines don't waste a whole lot of fuel anywhere in the power band).

Its more about the loss, and subsequent regeneration of momentum. Some evs do quite well at this. But the real solution is better civil engineering standards like roundabouts that concerve momentum rather than forcing stops. That would benefit all cars, drivers, and non drivers alike.

I have a pedal-powered bicycle that dusts ICE cars at stop lights. For, like, 5 metres...

I've noticed that too. I'm no athlete, but I can often beat cars across an intersection. Another thing I've noticed is that many cyclists don't shift down before they stop. They have to get up off their seat to even start. Even people in full kit on expensive bicycles do this.

The most 'ludicrous mode' vehicle for 0 to 5 metres has to be the small wheeled folding bicycle. After those first 5 - 25 metres other modes of bicycle will be going past at speed, but, in that initial start you cannot beat the low weight and low center of gravity found on a Dahon style folding bike with gears.

Trackstands are instinctive on the folding bike and the small wheel helps filtering through traffic immensely. The grip-shift gears are also very helpful, there may be only half a dozen of them but it is much easier to rattle through them than it is with conventional shifters. In combination the special features of the 'shopper bike' means that I ace the fixie guys, the guys that don't drop into the right gear, the road-pro's with their pedals to clip in to and the people that best know how to time the lights.

Getting off the seat is risky on a folding bike, putting a foot down easy, but there is no need for that or an awkward track stand, instead, for cool-ness(!) you can put your feet on the frame and coast along with feet up.

Anyway, as fun as it may be to be the fastest and for that to be achievable with simple gear selection on a folding bike, when I am on a different bike and going some distance, I do not care about acing every light through that town center, if I can merely get to where I am going without being sent on a mystery tour of a ring road, to not get lost (losing 5 to 30 mins) then I am happy.

Yep, I have a 6-speed Brompton; I have to make a conscious effort not to pop a wheelie at every light change. Having a 3-speed hub shifter means I'm always sure to be in one of the two lowest gears at a light.

I do appreciate being able to stay ahead of cars for half of each block.

> Another thing I've noticed is that many cyclists don't shift down before they stop.

Heh, I even try not to stop at all, but to slow down a while before approaching the lights in hopes of them turning green before I reach them. Works relatively often. Unfortunately, more and more traffic lights in my town detect when there's someone waiting before changing to green, so you have to paddle all the way up to the light and then stop for a bit.

>I have a pedal-powered bicycle that dusts ICE cars at stop lights. For, like, 5 metres...

But wow do I feel great for those 10 seconds before they catch up.

Yep, me too. Stand on the pedal with brakes on; torque at zero RPM. Though I have an EV too. Can't do that with an ICE unless power breaking.

I've always felt the biggest factor for dusting other vehicles is reaction time from the light going green...

That's because you're going full power and the car driver isn't.

The Bolt EV 0-60mph is rated at 6.5s. That's amazingly fast.

Is it? My diesel SUV is listed 0-60 in 5.8s...

A modern electric car like a Tesla, Bolt or i3 (I've driven all of them) really takes off like a roller coaster. Silent and instant smooth acceleration. They are amazingly fun to drive.

Not any more. A 2017 Camry (family car) with the V6 is 6.1 seconds.

http://www.zeroto60times.com/vehicle-make/toyota-0-60-mph-ti...

> with the V6

Are lots of people actually driving V6 Camrys? When I look at normal sedans the V6 engine is always a significant cost increase and completely destroys the car's MPG

Googling around I see rumor of a 10-15% take rate on the camry v6.

Toyota sold about 430k camrys in the US last year, so that would mean about 43k - 65k. Which is 3-4 times the number of EVs sold that year.

Some perspective: a beautiful 1964 V8 Mustang goes from 0-60 in 7.8 seconds. I'd say both these cars are pretty fast and that you're nitpicking.

http://www.automobile-catalog.com/car/1964/829160/ford_musta...

The list of 6-second cars is pretty long. One that stands out is the 2017 Buick LaCrosse at 6.0 seconds and is currently selling in the $28k range (there are some amazing deals out there at present). Again, family sedan. With numbers that 20 years ago would have been "race car numbers".

That Buick beats the time of the 1996 Saleen S281 Mustang.

http://www.zeroto60times.com/6-second-cars-0-60-mph-times/

Are you in any of the areas of Utah that are prone to a decent amount of winter weather? I'd be interested to know how the range is affected by cold weather. We routinely take 600-2000 mile (round trip) ski trips in the winter, so that kind of vehicle is a non-option still.

I'm in SLC proper, so I'm sure my battery range will be impacted in the coldest months. It'll still theoretically be well above my maximum needs for years to come, but just in case, our second car is an old fashioned ICE (which will likely be replaced with a hybrid one day).

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, before electric vehicle fans jump for joy at the $2.45 saving per 238 miles, we also have to account for the cost of the two vehicles. The Bolt EV costs $36,620, the Prius $23,475.

Therefore for the Bolt EV to make economic sense you have to drive 1,276,942 miles. Or fuel has to get much more expensive, or electricity much cheaper. Regardless, the economics don't add up at all when compared with hybrid gas vehicles.

Yes, I know, lower maintenance, but not $13K lower. And before you talk to me about the cost of driving to and from a gas station, let me remind you about battery loss due to cold temperatures (this is Utah we're talking about, after all).

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, and may remain that way even after Tesla ship their $36K competitor (since no other major metric in the equation changes, electricity is still very expensive, and gas very cheap).

You forgot oil changes in you calc. Also your $8.70 is only $4.19 in Washington :).

Costs are dropping on EVs and will continue to drop as economy of scale picks up. They may not make sense today but there's a good chance they will tomorrow.

>You forgot oil changes in you calc.

Are you, perhaps, being sarcastic with your comment?

Anyway, there are few countries (if any) on Earth where EVs make financial sense for an average person. Their time will come, but buying into it now is not investing – indeed, as the GP commented, you do it for altogether different reasons.

No, he's not being sarcastic. Are you? EVs don't require oil changes. Or muffler/exhaust service. Or transmission service. And their brakes last longer.

Are you non-sarcastically implying that an oil change presents as a major expenditure in owning and using an ICE vehicle?

If so, I get it.. you don't own a car; which begs the question of why are we discussing this?

Yup and if you want to make a true comparison find a 500hp car(that will probably run on premium, get ~25mpg and use synthetic oil). That's what our 85D is.

Did I break even? No, but with prices coming down it'll happen.

>Did I break even?

Well down-vote me to make it up.

Here ya go then: http://teslapedia.org/model-s/tesla-driver/total-cost-of-own...

No, I didn't break even because I came from a '03 beater that I'd been driving for the last 15 years. The thing is, if no one buys EVs there won't be sustained demand. I don't mind spending a bit more on my end to make sure the industry moves forward(I believe they call that voting with your money).

Small nit: The cooling system still requires service, however it's only every 50k miles and runs about $800.

That said last time I broke down my per-mile costs new tires at $1k every 40k was my highest cost by far.

Don't forget battery replacement... Our the environmentalist coast to build a battery

A properly designed EV (Tesla and GM, not Nissan, Kia or VW) has a properly designed cooling and battery maintenance system, and shouldn't need battery replacement for a _long_ time.

100,000 miles changing oil every 3,000 miles at $30 a pop is ~$1000 so yes, within consideration.

>changing oil every 3,000 miles

What? I mean, what? Whatever you want, I guess.

Multiple people where I work change the oil in their cars at this rate. I explained that you can go further with more modern oils, especially synthetic, to no avail. I think you'd be surprised at how much people spend on car maintenance.

In the UK people are told to change their oil once a year or 10k miles. If you do it every 3k miles in the US, which of us is doing it wrong? Either we're damaging our cars or you're wasting money and oil. They're the same cars doing the same distance, and parts of the US are similar climates.

>Either we're damaging our cars or you're wasting money and oil.

The latter.

Most manufacturers recommend 10,000 miles now, some as high as 15,000 (Jaguar, known for being unreliable):

https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/tips-advice/stop-changing-y...

Being as how manufacturers have to cover the warranty issues that could be related to lack of oil changes, I go with what they recommend.

I think the UK we don't even have the same 'lube shops' that you do. The dealerships change your oil at the yearly service.

It's a whole industry that you have that seems to be entirely redundant!

dealerships in the US are nicknamed "stealerships." People typically don't go to the dealership for service once the warranty is up, if at all. The dealerships in my area charge as much as 4x the cost of independent shops for maintenance: $120 for an oil change at the local toyota dealership vs. $30 at the garage 1/4 mile down the road. The dealership is also more likely to find non-existent problems with wear parts like brakes, belts, filters, suspension, etc to upsell you or push you to the sales department.

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 – is easily all that the oil I need between changes. With European prices, that is the equivalent of a single refill (even with my modest tank size), which makes you simply laugh and wonder at all the people that (always) bring up oil changes in the discussion of ICE vs EV. I can't but wonder how many of those actually own and maintain a not-imaginary vehicle.

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.

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.

3,000 mile oil changes hasn't been a standard recommendation in the US for at least a decade, probably longer.

These days, most (all?) cars have an idiot light that pops on every 5-10k miles, based on usage patterns. Some have a more robust algorithm than others. Either way, in my experience, my last 3-4 cars (Jeep, Lexus, Volvo, VW) have all gone about 8k miles between services, as indicated by the light.

In all honesty, the only way you can really know when to change your oil is to have regular oil analysis done, to know when certain variables change that indicate "oil change needed soon" (or worse - service engine now). But that isn't cheap, and it must be done on a regular schedule, and you must also understand the results.

It used to be that the oil change interval was something like 3k miles for stop-n-go traffic (or dusty conditions) - ie, regular city driving. You could go about 6-8k for highway driving. If you were doing off-road driving, the number could be as low as 2k.

Today's oils are better, and so is the manufacturing and other factors; so longer intervals don't surprise me - but you have to be dealing with a newer car, something made in this century at least.

Even so, for my own vehicles I try not to go much beyond 6k between changes, and for one of my vehicles it's closer to the 3k mark (because I want it to last as long as possible - then again, its engine is a known oil-burner, and between oil changes I add enough oil for it to equal an oil change; I could almost just change the filter and do nothing else). The money I may be wasting isn't a big deal to me, plus I get a fresh filter (also, I do my own oil changes, so the numbers are a bit lower depending on what dino juice I use).

Generally, the best way short of an analysis to judge doing an oil change is by looking with your eyes at the color of the oil, by feel (rub it thru your fingertips), and by smell. It's a thing you have to get a "feel" for, and between that knowledge and what your miles since the last change, you can know if you need a change or not.

Another thing you can do (I learned this from a website that tested an analysis company - and to see how long they could really go between oil changes) is to (every 3k) drain a quart of oil out of the engine (you need something like a fumoto plug for this), and then swap on a new filter and refill with a new quart of oil. It's basically a "topping up" procedure, but if you do that, you can go for about 12k between full oil changes. However, you should only do this if you are analyzing your oil.

take the dipstick out, wipe it on your hand and give it a good whiff.

The 'idiot light' is not based on miles, but on how much oil is actually in the engine. There's a sensor in there that if it touches air, essentially, the light goes on. You can trip this on certain VWs if you turn very sharply & you are low enough on oil.

Compare this to GM/Chevy vehicles where this is a 'solved problem' with their on board DICT computer, it measurements the containment (via resistance? electricity?) in the oil & tells you the 'health' or 'life' of the oil until you need to change it. This leads to a lot more reasonable oil change intervals in line with Mobile's testing over the years: 5k, 7k or 10k change intervals are common.

BMW is one of the few brands that recommends once a season, or 10k, because they know what oil is capable of, in so far as they've removed dip-sticks entirely (retarded decision, but hey). However, most dealerships & shops? They still want that sweet money on that 3k oil change. 5k has become the 'open secret' standard, though.

I'm talking about the "Service Required" indicator/message that appears in the central info display, not the "Check Engine Light". Two different things in the VW, Lexus, and Jeeps I've owned.

Interesting. In Vancouver in CDN$ $5.15-$7.72 to charge and $25.80@1.369 per liter to fill up.

https://www.bchydro.com/accounts-billing/rates-energy-use/el...

Yup, hydro is awesome for cheap renewable electricity.

Try to tell that to an Ontarian.

The hydroelectric generation is cheap in Ontario, but not overly abundant. The majority of the power in the province comes from much more costly nuclear sources.

And you get to go in the HOV lanes as well!

Until they get popular.

Maintenance costs are about 1/3 of ICE cars, too.

> The Bolt EV costs $36,620, the Prius $23,475.

The Chevy Bolt has a $7500 electric vehicle tax credit, many states have rebates of $1000 to $3000, and some utility companies offer their own rebates and incentives. That narrows the price difference quite a bit, and drops it well below the average new car selling price.

You're also not going to be producing gasoline at home, while a lot of people buying these expensive early electric vehicles are also early adopters of solar panels.

If you look at the $/kWh trend on lithium ion batteries (over 80% drop in 6 years), the most expensive part in these cars, it's only a matter of time before EVs cost no more than other types of vehicles without the government help.

> You're also not going to be producing gasoline at home, while a lot of people buying these expensive early electric vehicles are also early adopters of solar panels

I'm an electric car fan, but to be fair, unless your solar installation is proceeding more than you can use, and you don't have net-metering, then this is a false advantage here. Every KWh you use to charge your car is one you'll eventually have to buy from (or not sell to) the power company.

> are also early adopters of solar panels.

Solar panels which are paid for themselves by sending money back to the grid. If you redirect it into your vehicle, then you've just transferred the cost from the power company to your solar panel loan.

If you're out of the house during the day, you can sell those kWh to the grid at peak prices, then buy them back at night when they're cheap and you're home charging the EV.

Economics is only a single factor though. Part of the decision for me was that zippy-peppy driving, it's mad fun. I haven't driven a Prius, but I don't get the impression it's so much fun to operate.

Also, I hate stopping at gas stations, not just for the monetary cost, but for the time and general annoyance. Now I just plug in every night, my car is always ready to go. I'm never rushing off to an appointment only to realize that my tank is nearly empty, which will make me late. And I never have to change the oil.

And now I can make my weekly ~140 mile round trips without feeling so much polluter's guilt. Sure, it's a drop in the bucket, but a full bucket is full of drops.

Did you take into account that these cars can be programmed to wait until nighttime to start charging, when rates are lowest?

Anyway, sure, economics is a big factor that will slow adoption, but it won't halt it.

Edit to add: Plus I get $9,000 in total tax rebates. Tasty.

> And I never have to change the oil.

Well yeah, you kind of do need to change the oil if you don't want the gearbox to die an early death. There's also still coolant that needs to be changed regularly as well. EVs have significantly less maintenance, but there's still critical maintenance that must be done on time if you don't want to damage your car.

Coolant on my Nissan Leaf is 75k miles. Reduction gear oil is just inspect; it's a single gear. Brake fluid is the normal 30k miles.

>Reduction gear oil is just inspect; it's a single gear.

Well actually, a Nissan Leaf is going to have 8 gears in the reduction drive. 4 in the differential, 2 to couple the differential to an intermediate shaft, and another 2 to couple that shaft to the motor itself. That being said, ATF does wear out over time, those gears are going to be adding finely powdered metal to the fluid and even just the shearing forces on the fluid literally breaks down the oil chemically. It'll certainly last a whole lot longer than engine oil but eventually that inspection is going to necessitate a replacement.

The coolant on a Bolt EV needs changing after 150k miles (http://imgur.com/7hF0Ijg). What gearbox?

The Bolt is not direct drive, it has a single motor hooked to a fixed gear ratio final drive and a differential in it. It looks like Chevy doesn't actually provide a maintenance schedule for the oil in the gearbox but it's no different than any other gearbox, the oil will wear down from shearing and contamination will build up over time. 100,000 miles is probably a good service interval but Chevy doesn't bother to tell you how often you should change it.

What are you talking about? Here's the official maintenance interval for the Bolt:

http://i.imgur.com/gU4FfdY.png

It calls for tire rotations every 7,500 miles - not a lot you can do about that, and I suspect tire wear will be worse in a torque-happy EV. Skipping them will only reduce your traction, which I suppose could damage you and your car. And of course you have "required services" like brake pads when those wear out and start to squeal; probably less common due to regenerative braking from the electric motor: Engine braking is a habit that takes work with an ICE, but it's the norm in an EV. And you might want to change the cabin air filter when it gets dusty - not that my vehicles haven't gone...a long time...without cabin air filter changes. Skipping them won't damage your car, just your nose. But fluid flushes? Hardly necessary.

Coolant only needs to be changed at 150,000 miles - hardly "regularly". Most ICE cars don't need changes at less than 100,000 mile intervals. In an EV like the Bolt, coolant deals with a lot less heat than an ICE and doesn't suffer microscopic contamination from hot exhaust gasses and oil.

And the Bolt doesn't have a transmission; it's direct drive. Gearboxes (I assume you mean manual transmissions?) typically take synthetic gear lube now with recommended intervals of 200,000 to 300,000 miles. Differentials use the same stuff. I did elect to change the differential fluid in my Jeep at 250,000 miles - but those diffs are taking a lot more abuse than a typical car.

My toyota has lifetime trans fluid, which smart owners change every 100k. Chevy iirc was the 1st to try this in the corvette transaxle. It makes maint a lot harder if you keep a car more than a decade. No fluids additives can last that long. You will just end up replacing whole components instead of servicing them.

And all ecars have at least a differential, and many have gearsets, even if they do not shift. These are mostly heilical/hypoid style gears. That fluid uses shear additives that need to be replenished to abate wear. If you have not changed your trans/diff fluid in over 100k, now is the time. Your jeep, having a solid axle, is tremendously more simple and overbuilt than a normal car too. Extrapolating from that is not accurate.

To be fair, I didn't know that the coolant in a Bolt is supposed to be good for 150,000 miles, that's a good bit longer than I figured. I was thinking closer to 90,000 miles, but you're right, the lower service temperature and also less metal surface area will make it last longer in an EV. But in an ICE, exhaust and oil should not be getting into the coolant at all. If it is, any long life coolant is going to need to be changed out immediately while your head gasket is replaced to fix the oil/exhaust leak. One of the major reasons why coolant has a service life is because of corrosion inhibitors present in it that get used up over time.

You're also right that brake pads are going to last longer, on an EV, they barely wear at all. However, there's the brake fluid that will wear out just as fast as on any car. Over time brake fluid picks up humidity, there's no easy way around this. It'll cause the car to potentially lose the brakes if ignored long enough or even rust out brake lines.

Then there's still every single suspension component that a traditional car has. Balljoints and tie rod ends are always going to wear. If you're lucky, your manufacturer might have chosen components with built in grease fittings so that with regular maintenance you can extend the lifespan of those components but that's the exception, not the rule. There's still bearings, shock absorbers, CV joints, motor mounts, and bushings on various things. Every one of those has a finite service life, just because Chevy doesn't list a recommended interval to replace them doesn't mean that they don't need to be inspected and replaced as they wear down.

As for the actual oil comment though, the Bolt isn't direct drive, it has a fixed ratio gearbox with a differential built in. It only has a couple of gears and the differential, but still, they're helical gears and they need the right viscosity oil. Over time, those gears are going to degrade the oil from the shear forces and add contaminants to it. Contaminants are also slowly going to seep in from the vent, you can't completely seal up a gearbox, you need to have a vent on it otherwise running it is going to push oil out of the seals around the axles. As for the recommended intervals you quoted, that's pretty unrealistics and most manufacturers aren't recommending crazy intervals like that.

Here's the maintenance schedule for a Honda: https://techinfo.honda.com/rjanisis/pubs/om/SI9999/SI9999O00...

It doesn't have that high of a service interval but for something like a 2015 Honda Civic it's still just using their regular long life coolant which is supposed to be good for 5 years or 60,000 miles. Brake fluid is something that's pretty much always going to last around 3 to 5 years regardless of manufacturer. And manual transmissions typically have a much more reasonable recommended fluid life of somewhere around 90,000 to 120,000 miles. Some manufacturers are listing some transmissions as having "lifetime" fluid, but there's also identical transmissions with the same fluid in other vehicles where the recommendation is 90 to 120 thousand miles. There's no such thing as "lifetime fluid", every single fluid in any vehicle wears down in use and picks up contaminants, eventually every fluid will need to be replaced. Any manufacturer who tells you otherwise is lying to you.

Do you have a source for some of your claims? Honestly the recommended change interval of 200,000 to 300,000 is higher than I've ever seen and even on stuff like a 2015 VW Jetta you're supposed to change the manual transmission fluid every 40,000 miles. Here's the 2014 Jeep Wrangler service interval for the manual transmission and transfer case: http://www.wranglerforum.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=198...

250,000 miles is much too long for a differential, I'd imagine the drain plug was probably coated in metallic sludge right? I've seen a few drain plugs out of differentials and transmissions that were all treated way better and still be coated in what used to be the gears.

I think you're confusing service interval items that are "check/verify" with "need to do". I'm almost positive you don't need to check or change anything that extensively on a manual transmission VW.

Also, we figured out a long time ago that sealed transmissions are okay, but it all boils down to how you drive the vehicle. Yeah, if you treat the car like shit, or you get the transmission checked (if this is even possible these days), if it's low then there's something wrong & you'll need to add fluid, or drain & fill. Otherwise? You don't touch it & it's fine. Volkswagens last a solid 200-300k miles before you actually need to do something major, but that's subjective.

Yes, there's all these wonderful suspension components, but I imagine with Tesla vehicles, those components are most likely heavier duty than a regular vehicle, given all the fucking obnoxious batteries. They also probably wear a lot differently & components will fail differently than they will & at different rates compared to a traditional ICE vehicle.

No the 40,000 miles really is for replacement. That being said it does sound pretty low and it is for their fancy dual clutch direct shift transmission. But sealed transmissions with "lifetime" fluid wear out faster than a decent transmission. There isn't some major transmission improvement that allows for a sealed transmission, it's just a regular transmission that you can't perform maintenance on.

As for whether or not it's strictly necessary, you can avoid oil changes altogether and a decent car will make it quite a long way before it seizes up.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/2zoc...

You can do the same with a transmission or a differential, but they'll last a lot longer if you replace the contaminated and worn out fluid with new fluid.

But even just checking the fluid level in a transmission or differential, if the fluid is low, you can't ever just refill it. It didn't burn up, you've got a leak and it'll probably just get worse if you ignore it. There are plenty of vehicles out there with absolutely ludicrous mileage on them, on a modern vehicle, if you keep on top of maintenance, engines and transmissions can last hundreds of thousands of miles.

As for suspension components on a Tesla though, I would expect to spend a decent bit keeping all of them in working order. The suspension on a Tesla is really nice, but air suspension isn't nearly as robust as a simpler Macpherson strut setup on an econobox. It's fancy, but fancy suspension and more moving parts means more things to wear out and fail. You've got 2x the ball joints to fail in the front, additional linkages all over, and more bushings to wear out.

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 price in that way because the Bolt (and Nissan Leaf) are also much nicer cars than the base $23k Prius with many features the Prius doesn't have.

EDIT: oh and one more thing; 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.

>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.

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.

> 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.

Hybrids are cool, but now you have to maintain an electric and gasoline engine. I'm in the market for a new car and when comparing the prices of a new Chevy Volt vs. a new Chevy Bolt, it's not a huge price difference to go all electric and greatly reduce moving parts.

They aren't quite economically feasible now but they are getting darn close. Also, how long do electric cars last? I assume they would last longer with the simpler drive trains (except for stuff like battery replacements) but I'm not sure because they are so new. If they can make them last longer that also would solve the economic issue pretty immediately

Everyone buying new cars is buying them for non-economic reasons. The purchase price of any new vehicle is a tough sell.

If your primary concern is cost-per-mile, it's hard to beat an old $250 moped off Craigslist that gets 100+ mpg.

If you claim you need something more enclosed, an old truck for $2000 might be your answer. In that rustbucket, you're belching smoke into the atmosphere and burning a dollar of gas every 5 miles, but it will still get you more than 100,000 miles before you match the purchase price of the Prius. In those same 100,000 miles, the Prius has been burning gas as well (true, at a whopping 47 mpg) but this gas cost would be enough to buy you a replacement old truck (or, let's face it, a second old truck).

To be more serious, I bought my 2003 Toyota Matrix XRS with 150k miles for $3100, and have been getting about 30 mpg for the past 60,000 miles. Every purchase of a new vehicle - hybrid, electric, or gas - is done for non-economic reasons.

Right. I drove an old corolla many years for this reason. It got 40mpg, got it for a song. 500 in maintenance per year.

Cheap. One kid still has and drives that car. Approaching 400k miles now.

> 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, and may remain that way even after Tesla ship their $36K competitor (since no other major metric in the equation changes, electricity is still very expensive, and gas very cheap).

That may be true in America. Here in Norway, fuel costs 1.7 euros/L; that is, $7/gallon. The calculation comes out rather different.

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.

Honestly you can take the $10k+ difference and donate it to charity or save it up for your kid's college, if you have children. $10k can buy malaria nets for 4000 kids in Africa, if you donate to some place like Against Malaria Foundation. At the moment, I don't see any altruistic outcome from buying EVs. Personally, I am also against using any non-economic arguments in choosing cars, unless you are really rich and the difference is only a drop in the bucket.

Part of the equation is that, conceivably, it's a good thing to give Tesla or whoever enough money to iterate on the things they're designing, so that through the iterations they can make them cheaper.

The cynic in me would say that saving 4000 African children would actually adversely affect the environment, where as supporting development of electric vehicles is at worst trivially beneficial.

Did you get the LT or Premier? Also, do you have a Level 2 EVSE at home? To me, the Premier version is the only version really worth getting (with the DC Fast charging port upgrade at the very least), but the price tag is a bit hard to look at, especially when thinking about the sale tax, dealership fees, registration fees, electrician fees for the EVSE installation (optional, but barely), etc. that go on top.

I deliberately chose the LT, few of the Premier options were desirable for me (I care not for heated seats, heated steering wheel, etc). Some of the driver assist options would be nice, but not enough to justify the cost for me. I'm a safe driver, I don't do anything silly like text or talk on the phone while driving.

Mine came with fast DC charge support, I don't know if they moved that to be a standard feature, or if I just got lucky. I've used public fast DC chargers a few times now.

At the moment I am relying on the equipped 110v home charger and public fast chargers, but I will eventually get a home 220v charger. It's just not urgent because I maintain plenty of range as long as I plug in whenever my car is at home.

One thing to consider is that a lot of stuff works well for electric cars simply because they are not that ubiquitous. For example, many states allow them in the HOV lane unconditionally. However, if they are a higher fraction of the total cars that will stop. I have seen electric car chargers at various parking lots. If you have an EV, you are likely now to find a spot. When they are a lot, the majority of EV won't find a spot. The other issue is overnight charging. People who live in apartments will have trouble finding charging spots, when nearly everybody in their complex also has an EV. In addition, the spike in nighttime power draw on the electric grid is going to be an issue, especially in areas that are dependent on solar power.

I think a large part of the driver for EV currently is as a social status signal. When, that start going away and the inconveniences of EV with respect to ICE start affecting people, a lot of the momentum will stop.

Highway rest areas in CT have EV spots for charging. I see normal ICE parked there all the time. It's infuriating

Electric cars have constant torque. And it's a smaller car then all those listed. That's probably why it feels faster.

I'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. Try to find a car that light today. There is a nice comparison of that car and a modern VW GTI here: http://www.automobilemag.com/news/then-vs-now-1984-volkswage...

I think the same is probably true of most 70s and 80s economy cars vs today's cars. Today's equivalents are much heavier, but much safer, and much more pleasant to drive

I have made this argument before on the internet and I have learned that it is a European vs American perspective.

American cars in the 70s and 80s were monsters. Definitely heavier than modern cars.

For example, here are 10 popular cars in the US from 1984. http://www.caranddriver.com/features/1984-10best-cars-1984-h...

    Audi 5000s: 2850-3100 lbs
    Dodge Daytona: 2830 lbs
    Honda Accord: 2300 lbs
    Honda Prelude: 2220 lbs
    Mazda 626: 2220 lbs
    Pontiac 6000STE:  3000 lbs
    Pontiac Fiero: 2580 lbs
    Porsche 944: 2830 lbs

On the heavy side, no?

Then again, the best selling car in the US in 2016 is the Toyota Camry which is 3,245 to 3,480 lbs so I guess I'm wrong. Maybe US cars were monsters in the 70's then?

But those monsters have been replaced with SUVs, which are just as heavy, if not heavier.

Eg, the 1977 Ford LTD Country Squire Wagon had a curb weight of 4500lbs. It has been replaced by SUVs like the Expedition, with a curb weight of 5500lbs.

Most of the cars you listed are the small side of the ones you'd see on the road in the US in the 80's.

I'm in Canada, and although I wasn't very old in the 80's, I remember seeing lots of Caprice Classics and Crown Victorias, which were around 3500 pounds, possibly more? My family have a Chevy Malibu wagon, which was a mid-size car but was definitely 3000+ lbs. Smaller cars were starting to become more popular, but there were still lots of monsters around.

So there were lots of heavy cars roaming the US and Canada in the 80s - but a new car of equivalent weight will usually use a lot less fuel, and be a lot more pleasant to drive.

Don't forget 'car' is a rather arbitrary category. The car > minivan > SUV 'soccer mom' transition added these beasts:

  Infiniti QX80 – 5,633 pounds
  Toyota Sequoia – 5,730 pounds
  Toyota Land Cruiser – 5,765 pounds
  Lincoln Navigator – 5,830 pounds
  Lexus LX 570 – 6,000 pounds

The Toyota Land Cruiser is not like the others, it's popular with militant groups. And has been in production since 1951.

Meh. The Chevy Suburban has been in near continuous production since 1929. The gap? When they used the factories that made them to turn out tanks for WWII.

That's a connection more or less in name only. Much like the connection between a military hummer and an H3. The 1950 FJ and BJ was a jeep knockoff with a cloth roof. https://www.fj.co/blog/history-of-the-toyota-fj-series/ http://www.toyota-global.com/showroom/vehicle_heritage/landc...

The FJ40 from 1960 is somewhat comparable, but weighed 1/2 (3263 lbs) what the modern beast weighs.

The FJ60 (http://tlc4x4.com/fj60.htm#sthash.nB2cpi4h.dpbs) from 1981 was even closer and heavy at 4246 lbs, but again still 1,500 lb lighter than the current version.

> On the heavy side, no?

No. Car weights in America fell dramatically after the 1973 oil crisis, reached a low point in the mid 1980s, and have been rising since. Here are the 2017 Car & Driver 10 best

  BMW M2 3450
  Chevy Bolt 3563
  Chevy Camaro 3883
  Chevy Corvette Grand Sport 3428
  Honda Accord 3336
  Porsche 718 Cayman 2988
  VW Golf GTI 3027

Ah ok so 1984 was pretty much the worst year to look at when finding heavy cars? That explains a lot :)

Wow, a Fiero weighed 2580 LB? That must have been before it caught fire.

My 1999 Camaro Z28: 320 HP and ~3,400 pounds

My 2016 Camaro 2SS: 457 HP and ~3,700 pounds

Well, half-right at least...

That said, IMO that 2016 car drives like a budget Porsche Cayman while the 1999 car was a glorious tire-smoking muscle car. Ironically, I get slightly worse mileage out of the 2016 edition (22 vs 25 mpg).

Why would that be ironic? It has almost 1.5x the horsepower.

Porsche's are more known for handling than straight line speed. So I am readying the OP's comment to mean the newer versions ride and handling are MUCH improved over its predecessor.

I read it as the 2016 car being a pussified dentist mobile while the older one was a "glorious tire-smoking muscle car".

Even the use of the word "glorious" implies that he enjoyed the older one better. People don't buy Camaros for the handling, even if it may have been improved.

Hey, another member of the two-Camaro club! I had a 1996 Z28 automatic and a 2000 SS 6-speed. How do you like the 2016 (apart from its Cayman-like ride)?

Love it to death! And I've driven both the current Challenger (didn't like) and the Mustang (more practical, but not as fun). I actively chose the Camaro over a Cayman because of the price difference and over a Corvette because of the blind spot indicators and better storage space.

Economy cars have gotten heavier, largely due to safety concerns. Bigger cars have gotten lighter.

So perhaps it would be fair to say that vehicle weights are converging on the low-mid 3000lb range.

Counter point, my 97 Town Car weighed 500 lbs less then my 2011 Crown Victoria.

The new BMW M5 is 4400 lbs. 30 years ago the BMW M5 was 3300 lbs.

The new BMW M5 is also closer to the size of a 7 series from 30 years ago. Additionally, even with AWD being added it's 200lbs lighter than the last gen was. Cars are certainly heavier on the whole than they used to be, but lightening them is starting to happen again and they're much safer than any car from decades past.

Yeah, my 79 BMW 528 was positively tiny compared to current models.

I also greatly preferred its' handling. Newer BMWs feel (to me) similar to driving my parents' Crown Vic (a comment that irritated the BMW dealer considerably).

The e28 M5 is more comparable to a 1 series now.

The e28 has a shorter wheelbase than the 1 series sedan (but is longer overall due to its stylish 80's big overhangs...) It is also narrower than the 1 series.

Well F150s dropped a couple of hundred pounds go to aluminum. The Chevy Volt; I own the second generation; is three hundred pounds lighter.

Now if you go back twenty plus years or more before the age of crush points and advanced passenger safety systems both passive and active, yeah you can find your lighter weight cars. Cars which won't handle a head on with a car two sizes smaller.

Weight is one reason why manufacturers are loathe to commit all out for BEV, that thousand pounds of battery not only takes an hour to charge fully it weighs the same with or without a charge and imparts little range (sorry but if your range starts with a 1 or 2 its commuter range)

now take into account that many nameplates moved up in size classification. Accords certainly were not mid sized when they came out and even Chryslers minivan if not Honda's first weren't very big.

Efficiency gains are certainly there but much is lost with the way people drive.

Do you like the 2nd gen volt? :0

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.

What assertion that cars have gotten lighter?

The article only references gas mileage improvements, which are substantial.

Car models move upscale as they get older and newer models slide in under it. The old 80's Honda Accord is physically smaller than today's Toyota Civic. The spot that was occupied by the Civic is now occupied by the Fit. A 1996 Honda Civic hatchback was about 2600lbs which is the same as a 2016 Honda Fit.

Where does one buy this "Toyota Civic" of which you speak?

The Fit has done a pretty good job - 10 years and 2 generations, and it has only added about 100 lbs to the curb weight.

Ha! Why in the world did I type that? A good car to see the progression of weight is a that hasn't changed market segment like a Porsche 911. Car&Driver did this up through 2011:

http://blog.caranddriver.com/porsche-911-generations-the-leg...

> Where does one buy this "Toyota Civic" of which you speak?

With the right badges, type-r stickers, and engine swaps - anything is possible...

This is so true. My first car was an '86 Honda Civic with a manual transmission; I drove it till it was about to fall apart, and loved the way it felt.

I later bought a manual transmission Fit because it felt and drove EXACTLY like my beloved Civic, but wasn't old and crappy. The way it shifted just felt perfect. Wonder how long it will take till the Fit starts expanding.

Former manual Fit owner here. I dearly loved that car. Fun to drive, transmission felt great, and there was never a time I couldn't find some way to fit whatever I needed hauling inside of it, and maintenance is on par with the lowest of any car. If I ever go back to driving, I sincerely hope they're still making them.

Agreed - the idea that modern cars are in aggregate lighter than the stuff from even the 80s/90s is laughable. I was really enjoying this article right up until the end, where instead of taking average data for car weights they simply compared two models of Camaro that buck the trend.

Granted cars have gotten much safer, but much of that is due to increased crash regulations forcing car manufacturers to make modern cars much larger to account for the crumple zones etc that make them much better at protecting occupants as well as pedestrians in accidents. This in turn is a major factor in why cars are so often much, much heavier today than before. Colin Chapman is probably turning in his grave!

My 2015 Taurus weighs over 4000 lbs @.@

Cars are safer and more comfortable, but the idea that cars are becoming bigger and heavier is more due to marketing pressure that forces car models to become "better" each generation.

The closest today to a mk1 golf/polo is probably the "up". having been in both, the interior space is very close to the golf, the boot is slightly smaller than the original polo. There's even a 120hp turbo version, with slightly better performance than the original golf GTI :)

I 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 suspect it was caused by the revolution in electric/self-driving tech and traveling more and comparing car-centric US cities to other places.

  [1] 250ms delay at best, for young and healthy adults.
  [2] #1 cause, ahead of all guns, including suicides.
  [3] https://progressivetransit.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/cars-kill-cities

I think this is often overlooked. Traction aids and computer control has filled in so much as horsepower and weight increases. It's absolutely mind-boggling that people drive around in giant SUVs with huge amounts of horsepower until you look at the suspension and brakes - which are bigger and more complex than performance cars of just a few years ago.

* still a "petrohead" but I prefer light weight and low displacement (Lotus FTW!)

NA Miata owner here :) Wouldn't mind just a little more in the power department though.

Yes, and of course they will do from the comfort and safety of a confinement bubble such as seen in the Matrix... because absolute safety trumps all.

I sure hope I don't live long enough to see a world full of people scared shitless at moving at 80 mph on a road designed for that; and I quite would like to live some time, too.

I'm not scared of moving at 80 mph; I'm scared of what arbitrary human beings can do (by accident or on purpose) with their vehicle, in the opposite lane of non-divided highways, when we have 160 mph of relative velocity (i.e. ~100k newton-seconds of impulse on impact, assuming 2tn vehicles.)

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 million miles in 1950, to 2.5 PHMM in the 1980s, 1.5 PHMM in early 2000s and now about 1.1 per hundred million miles.

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

They are set to plunge further as automated braking and collision avoidance become standard features over the next decade.

Edits: Corrected to deaths per 100M miles, not deaths per 1M miles.

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."

I think you might misunderstand the statistic. He's saying one out of every 70 deaths. If there were only 70 deaths a year, one would be from a car accident. Far more would be from suicide, cancer, and heart disease.

I grasp that. ~1.5% of deaths is a significant number. People worry about getting brain cancer or being struck by lightning more than they worry about the risk of being annihilated by a machine, despite the latter being more common.

Because you don't make an implicit cost/benefit analysis when you get ebola. You do when you drive. Every time you drive, you willingly take some risk and accept it.

It's the same reason people shrug their shoulders when a mafia guy gets gunned down but lose their shit when a child is killed by stray gunfire. The mafia guy opted in to the risk.

Agreed. Part of the problem is that we use the word "accident" when it's almost always someone's fault.

Everytime I see someone driving terribly I know there's a 50%+ chance they have a sizable dent on their car from a car crash or from them hitting some inanimate object. It's actually a game I play - I'll see someone driving poorly and then say "where's the dent" and look for it. Sometimes I'll even switch lanes to check the other side where it will inevitably be. For certain cars like the Pontiac Grand-Am, my theory puts the dent % and dent damage much higher.

In many ways, insurance and how we treat collisions as "accidents" enables them to drive with no regard. By the time they're dropped from insurance, they probably already hurt someone.

Except that statistically car injury accidents are so rare, they probably haven't.

I was talking about those that get dropped by insurance (usually multiple crashes) and also - you can get injured and not report it.

But anyway, 4.6 M injuries isn't rare. "But there are also millions more who are seriously injured — an estimated 4.6 million in 2016 according to NSC" [1]

[1] http://fortune.com/2017/02/15/traffic-deadliest-year/

One day you'll be so intent on checking dents on other peoples cars you will cause an accident yourself! My theory is that people should be looking at traffic, not at the detailing on someone else's vehicle.

I'm not that hardcore focused on it haha. Most of the time I'm trying to get away from them and get a distance. I'm also checking in on them for any sudden movements.

If someone's car is dented, like real dents from a crash, I take extra precaution. It's a filter that works. I'll notice big dents all the time and then the person drives like shit but I'm aloof and safe. I look for people on the phone (calling or texting) too and avoid them. I'll look for 90+ year old people too; their reflexes aren't as quick.

Knock on wood, but I've never been in a car crash. Apart from when I was stupid as a teenager, I'm very cautious.

Driving through Chicago always worries me. People in big cities like that often drive like maniacs, and the number of BMWs, Audis, and other expensive luxury cars I see missing their bumpers or with large amounts of damage on quarter panels is astounding. Yet they're still zipping in and out of their lanes to get to their exit 20 seconds faster than everyone else.

Ebola doesn't give you freedom to live where you want and work where you want. We live in a world where we can afford to travel what was once long distances to do so, all due to the automobile. We spend tons of time in our cars, and it's safe time because we have to drive 100 million miles before we can expect one death among us or our passengers.

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.

Except road "accidents" are the biggest killer of teenagers aged 10-19, people who are pretty much on the lowest possible spot on the natural mortality curve:

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-39920052

For many of those, it was someone else deciding to drive that killed them.

So yes, if you take slanted statistics and add some "but look over there" rationalizations... well, you still end up at "1 in 3 accidental deaths".

What you should be looking at is comparative injury rates for other methods of transport such as rail or tram. The picture is rather shocking, but even more concerning is the lack of a safety culture in the car manufacturers and ultimately the agencies regulating them and the vehicles on the road. Every plane crash has a root cause investigation, but we still have the same truck designs with massive blind spots because...? By the time autonomous driving becomes a reality cars will still have side mirrors with blind spots, you can't make this stuff up.

A more complete analysis of death rates compares the cause of death vs the otherwise expected lifespan of the person. Cancer and heart disease are major killers, but they primarily affect old unhealthy people.

Car crashes and suicides are much more likely to kill young people -- while they may be a relatively small proportion of "total deaths" they are a much larger contributor to "loss of average lifespan"

Driving is super safe. There is no evidence that driving is any less safe for young people. They just rarely die of anything.

Right. Which is why when they do die from preventable causes it has such a large impact on average lifespan. If we want more humans alive for longer we should not ignore these high impact relatively low frequency dangers.

If you're under the age of 35, driving may very well be the most dangerous habit you have.

If you are under the age of 35, you are essentially immortal, because if driving is incredibly safe and it is the most dangerous thing you do.

Yea, young people almost only die in accidents, so obviously cars would be a large proportion of their almost infinitesimal death rates.

Well yes, that is what we are trying to figure out here?! What is killing healthy people not expected to die shortly?

For people approaching 90, everything from a fall to a cut can be deadly. But that tells us more about 90 year olds than cuts or falls.

Driving is super safe. There is no evidence that driving is any less safe for young people. They just rarely die of anything. Your argument is akin to arguing the most egregious type of death is abortion, because it costs someone their entire lifespan

> no evidence that driving is any less safe for young people

Glad you checked all that evidence for us, saves us the hassle.

1/3 of avoidable deaths is not insubstantial - and traffic accidents aren't the only harm done by autos.

Add in an estimated 53,000 deaths in the US due to transportation emissions.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1352231013...

Potentially millions killed by auto emissions worldwide.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/dec/17/pollutio...

The leading cause of death in the US for people under the age of 25.

This isn't even considering the massive amounts of secondary pollution via production and maintenance of vehicles, the enormous land use and sprawl costs (financially and environmentally), harm done via driving induced stress and sedentary lifestyles.

Cars may be getting safer on those who can afford to be on the inside, but for everyone else outside they're a nightmare. Our climate, resource and many of our social problems are not going away as long as we center society around the car.

Except that some illnesses like cancer are avoidable, it's not just accidents.

Except that buses and trains and horses and teslas kill people and pollute. Even bikes kill people. Every mode of transportation is a killer, so if you want to eliminate travel deaths you can only eliminate travel.

If you eliminated cars completely tens of thousands would likely still die in the US from transportation accidents. But now you've trapped people and forced them to live close to work, do less traveling, and live crappier lives.

Automobiles provide freedom to choose where you want to live and work. They are cleaner than ever and getting cleaner every year.

And the vast majority of the US is empty land.

And the below age of 25 stat is incredibly misleading. People under the age of 25 rarely die of disease or cancer, which are by far the leading causes of death. They rarely die at all which is why car accidents are disproportionally represented for young people. In reality 99% of people who die had a cause of death unrelated to traffic accidents.

> Except that some illnesses like cancer are avoidable

Sorry?

Sorry, keep smoking your cigarettes, it won't be your fault.

1) I don't smoke

2) You can get cancer from many other things than cigarettes.

Most lung cancer is caused by cigarettes. Many cancers have a "lifestyle" component. This does not mean that every single case of cancer is caused by something the person did. It does mean that we need to give people better information. Some lifestyle factors are much stronger than others. Smoking causes a lot of cancer. Alcohol causes less.

http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/lung-cancer/ris...

> Smoking tobacco is one of the biggest causes of lung cancer. More than 8 out of 10 lung cancers (80%) are caused by smoking .This includes breathing in other people’s cigarette smoke.

https://www.drinkaware.co.uk/alcohol-facts/health-effects-of...

> Over the long term, drinking alcohol increases your risk of serious illnesses, such as mouth, throat and breast cancer1. Of course, not everyone who drinks will get cancer. But scientists have found that some cancers are more common in people who drink alcohol than those who don’t.

[...]

> One study has estimated that around 4% of all cancers are due to alcohol consumption

I'm objecting to the general statement that 'cancers are avoidable'. Some cancers are, not all cancers are and there are plenty of people that ended up with lung cancer that never smoked so even that isn't a guarantee.

I used the word "some".

The health benefits from riding bikes more than offset the dangers, especially when they're not forced to share lanes with road tanks piloted by people who don't take their driving responsibility seriously. Driving cars don't yield the same benefits. When you take that into account, driving is much more hazardous to your health.

Also, forcing cities to accommodate cars via zoning has lead to a huge host of problems, from making centers that are no longer walkable, and destroying the social fabric of the city that used to happen via face to face interactions. Anywhere there is fast traffic, people no longer want to walk, because it's incredibly stressful being near speeding cars.

If you want a visible demonstration of the difference, visit some small pre-car cities in Italy, the public places are wonderful, and you can see people bumping into each other and chatting all the time. People walk everywhere. Compare with the sprawling wastelands of asphalt we've created, including on some of the most expensive parking lots in the world in Silicon Valley.

Yes, people in Italy are poor and trapped in small urban areas unable to leave. That's not better.

Have you been to Italy? or Germany or any western European county?

Even relatively podunk towns have typically walkable centers and local transit connecting to frequent regional train service and sometimes stops by long distance, high-speed services.

In Germany, regional all day rail passes can be had for as little as 10 EUR! I imagine the situation is quite similar in Italy.

Sorry, you don't know what you're talking about. They make less on average, but the trains are ubiquitous and can take you from city center to city center in less time and for less money than it would cost to drive, even at US gas prices. They're not "trapped", Europeans travel far more than Americans.

>>If you eliminated cars completely tens of thousands would likely still die in the US from transportation accidents. But now you've trapped people and forced them to live close to work, do less traveling, and live crappier lives.

>>Automobiles provide freedom to choose where you want to live and work. They are cleaner than ever and getting cleaner every year.

I think you're still ignoring the pollution deaths and massive negative external effects the automobile has on society, especically on those who can't participate in an auto-dominated society. The waste is colossal.

Automobiles provide freedom if you're luck enough to not be young, old, poor, disabled etc. Why do we want to design society around excluding huge groups from mobility, when bikes, effective public transit and walkability can open up our country to everyone?

You essentially want to enslave people to push your dated concepts of how to live on them.

My job is 20 miles away, I'm not riding a bike. I don't want to spend hours going to and from work every day. I'm not moving my kids into a shittier house without a big yard in a shittier school district, just so I can bike to work.

I'm not going to move my family in a shitty apartment just so we can have "density" and force everyone to use shitty mass transit.

My daughters dojo is 5 miles from my house, she ain't walking there. I'm not sending her to the shitty dojo down the street.

No one is getting excluded. The young, old, poor and disabled are driven everywhere in cars. If they can't drive themselves, someone drives them. Thats what we do for family members. And soon the car itself will drive them.

Can it not be argued running billion dollar freeways through urban neighborhoods, flattening their commercial districts with "free" (subsidized) parking lots and choking them on pollution is enslaving people at the expense of how you want to live? You still haven't addressed the issue that driving fundementally pushes large costs on others and society in general.

There are plenty of ways to have a accesible city designed for multimodal transportation. Look to many European cities to show how this used to be done. It doesn't take much imagination to find out it doesn't have to be "shitty".

I don't think you really understand what life is like without a car in America. Like it or not, people are being excluded. A third of households in my city don't have a car (likely not out of choice). Transit is sparse. How are they supposed to access job centers, , shopping education opportunities built in the auto dominated sprawl? Hint: you can't build your life around asking other people for rides.

You don't seem open to the idea of a different lifestyle. I get that. At the very least I ask that you consider the real impact your choice of driving has on other people, and how it's subsidized by society.

The sure way to avoid cancer is not palatable to most people.

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.

Average fatalities per fatal accident maybe.

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.

> 2-ton hideous mechanical equivalent of a horse

This phrasing makes me curious: how did "horse-related accidents" rank among the causes of death for people who rode horses everywhere? Or people who rode in horse-drawn carriages everywhere?

Probably high. Those dealing with horses are kicked in the head not infrequently. Marie Curie's husband died after being run over by a carriage.

I'd be interested to see that. While yes people falling from a horse might be in trouble - generally horse will try to avoid danger themselves - and there would have been only so fast that you could ride a horse in a city, due to the roads available for this.

Generally, "cities" were much smaller (and fewer) then; not large enough to have much need to ride "through" one. Most horse-riding (though not carriaging) would involve using a horse to travel between the various towns in an area, via not-necessarily-well-kept roads.

Some non-negligible percentage of horse-riding was also done by the nobility, where the horses were used either for hunting, or for military campaigning—both places where a horse "avoiding danger" can actually be fatal.

Re: hunting, horses would often rear back from predatory-looking animals, dropping their riders and possibly dropping onto their riders, crushing and laming/killing them. "Hunting accident" was the old world's "boating accident."

Re: military cavalry usage, horses could be spooked into stampeding—this was an incredibly large problem when in a closely-packed cavalry formation. Cavalry warfare was phased out upon the introduction of guns not because horses were more likely to die by a bullet than by an arrowhead; but rather because the sound of rifle or cannonfire was usually enough to spook horses un-used to the sound, turning many of the first rifle-era battles into instant routs.

Horses in London 1903: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-5Ts_i164c

I don't think people should generally be driving day to day, but as a passionate driver and motorcyclist, it does make me sad to think that I won't be allowed to tear rubber up and down, say, Highway 1 sometime in the future. Tracks are great and all (and where the real speed belongs) but nothing beats bendies next to the ocean.

I truly hope they don't ban motorcycles. Motorcycles will be much more fun once we no longer have to risk getting killed by an irresponsible driver on a commute.

Though I often see idiots on motorcycles; exclusively on sport bikes. I just call them "organ donors", not that there'd be much left to scrape up.

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.

That, and they drastically reduce housing costs, and increase incomes. Two of the biggest areas we're currently sliding backwards with in modern cities.

Higher population density in urban areas severely reduces the need for cars. It's possible to live in cities developed pre-car (London, Berlin, Boston, New York) without owning a car. Americans have put ourselves in a pickle by building sprawling suburbs, which then require cars to increase the "number of highly specialized people" they can interact with.

There are however many people who find high-density living to be unappealing

Road safety is much better in Europe than the US. The US seems to have a problem with driver education. I actually think the prevalence of automatics is part of the problem as they present themselves as a big toy and convenient luxury rather than as a powerful machine that comes with a lot of responsibility.

I wondered if the design of the roads themselves plays a big part, but I no longer think it is very significant here. In South Africa the roads are basically built to British standards but they have even worse safety than the US. The big difference I noticed there is the extreme variety of vehicles on the road. You get modern, powerful cars just like in Europe, but also rattly old rust buckets that would have failed their MOT test in the UK years ago. This variety makes navigating the roads much more difficult.

Driver education in the US is a joke and everyone treats driving as a right, not a privilege.

If we had far better education and mandatory retesting every 10 years accidents would drop significantly.

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 horsepower. It's a very comfortable ride as well.

But even my parents' larger car doesn't get even remotely as low as 25 mpg. First time I saw a car with less than 30 mpg was when I drove a company van.

When I compare these numbers with my American friends, they're incredulous as to how low they are, and they're not exactly driving SUVs either. What do you get in the place for this lower efficiency? Are American cars that much heavier? More comfortable? Faster?

Very few Americans drive diesel cars, and diesel MPG is not comparable to gasoline MPG. Do your parents drive diesel too? What's the power of your parent's car engine?

Having lived (and appreciated) Europe and their cars:

1. You guy drive a lot less than us. I do trips three times as long as what would destroy me in Europe (twice a month I drive 500 km without stopping and back the next day)

2. Are you using the imperial gallon or the american gallon? Very common mistake (the mile used in the article looks like and probably is the 3.8l gal)

Edit, you're using the right gallon.

Sure (if true), but that's not the point, because driving more doesn't increase mileage. Why does driving more make you prefer less efficient cars? What do you get back from it?

Sorry I forgot to finish the point for 1.

A larger car (more space, inertia and soundproofing) with a bigger engine (lower rpm therefore less noise) with more cylinders (less vibration) is more comfortable and wears you down less. And I loved my wife's no frills stick-shift Versa (4000 rpm at 80 mph really got annoying though)

As to American's driving large distances, based on my personal experience, there's no comparison. American cities are further apart, families are more scattered, families are larger. Don't forget that in many ways America is actually two societies in one. One America lives in places largely undistinguishable from Europe. The other has 90 mile one way commute (a colleague. Mine is only 17).

Driving 500 kilometers without stopping is terribly dangerous for yourself and the people around you. Please be considerate.

It's a matter of practice. 500 km is 312.5 miles. At 60 mph, this is about 5 hours of driving. You can definitely handle 5 hours of driving at one shot. Start at a time when you don't expect to feel sleepy for the next 5 hours and you'll be set.

no it's not. that's 4 hours of highway driving. waking up and starting a drive at 6am and driving until 10am is not any more dangerous than normal short trips and in fact is probably safer since you aren't dealing with intersections.

No, it isn't. It's the difference between driving in the EU and driving in N America.

I can't think of any 500 km route in Europe that wouldn't destroy me. And a little engine screaming for dear life wouldn't help

Cheaper fuel is the reason the US doesn't care as much about MPG

Also worth mentioning that the US gallon and imperial gallon aren't the same size

@kmm's measurements are in Liters per 100KM. The translation is correct.

Diesel vehicles for the most part which has caused European cities (Paris, London etc...) to have terrible local air quality but lower CO2 emissions!

American cars are bigger (longer) and faster. When I've traveled in Europe, I'm always surprised by how small most cars are and how small the parking spots are.

High mpg options exist in the US. Americans seem to prefer to trade gas savings for more power and bigger cars rather than saving some cash, at least at the current price point of gas.

It makes sense - most of the infrastructure was built before the car. So it's not really feasible to accommodate large vehicles.

It's not even possible for them to put the toilet anywhere other than INSIDE the shower in many places because the apartments are so small. Sometimes they even have "floor urinals". I get a laugh out of it every time but they do have some serious size constraints in many places over there.

I would think much of the infrastructure had to be rebuilt after WW2 though, no?

The roads? Rights-of-way & property boundaries didn't get bombed, and one narrowing due to right-of-way passing through historical-significant properties restricts the maximum vehicle size for the entire road/region (https://goo.gl/maps/BzJrXer8HmF2)

Consider this local intersection ('junction'): https://goo.gl/maps/UPjtR5VdSXM2. It's a favourite for the practical driving test: from the left lane, turn right into the side street. It's extremely dangerous, as you have to creep around the corner to the left to get visibility of the oncoming 30mph traffic, without getting so far pass the side street's centre line than you can't safely turn in.

Re: parking spots

My family keeps growing (in numbers, age and size) and as I'm approaching midlife affordability I would love a decent large SUV, like the Volvo XC90 etc to replace my ageing Ford Focus estate.

But for the life of me, I can't imagine the pain of owning such a large vehicle. Parking would be a nightmare. At home, in town, anywhere. I live in Hampshire in England and the parking spots around here are all designed with 1970s Golfs and Morris Minors in mind it seems so not SUV compatible at all.

I already frequently can only open the door 1/4 of the way and really squeeze my stomach in to get into the car. With a large SUV, I would surely have to enter via the boot all the time. They may only be 5-10cm wider on each side, but that is totally impractical around here.

Tesla-esque self-driving/summoning would really solve this as I could just ask the car to reverse a little before I get in, so parking tightly would then not be a problem. For me at least.

Thankfully SUVs would be 4x4 as I also would surely have to go partially off-road when meeting other cars on the lanes around here.

Wouldn't automated reverse parking create problems for others? And leave dents and dings in your door?

Yes. Should really have been a "For me at least*" with a note that it would piss others off until most cars can be summoned.

"What do you get in the place for this lower efficiency? Are American cars that much heavier? More comfortable? Faster?"

I cannot speak for everyone, but as someone who lives in the US and also spends a lot of time in Europe, there is a very big lifestyle difference at play here.

First, I have a five person family (wife and three kids) and you[1], statistically, as a European, have 1.6 children - and as a highly educated HN reader, probably less (on average).

Second, Americans move around a lot more than most europeans do. On the occasions that I have lived in Europe, I always spoke of how interesting it was that we could just "drive to St. Petersburg" or "just drive to Transylvania" or whatever, and otherwise smart and interesting european friends would look at me like I was a crazy person. It is very, very rare to meet Europeans who drive across multiple countries for leisure.[2]

So when I drive five people, weighing over 500 lbs total and accompanying luggage the equivalent of one Europe away and over two mountain ranges[3] I am going to need something more than a lawnmower engine. This is not an edge-case - this is something we do multiple times per year.

That being said, there are some very interesting cultural differences in the other direction ... once while in Denmark I saw a decent sized horse trailer being hauled by a nice, new Audi A8. Basically 100% of the driving public in the US would have considered this a gaping tear in the fabric of reality.

[1] Not you, but you on average.

[2] Zurich to Transylvania is 1800km - about the same as SF to Denver which is ~2000 km.

[3] CA to MN, for instance, over the Sierras and then the Rockies.

> On the occasions that I have lived in Europe, I always spoke of how interesting it was that we could just "drive to St. Petersburg" or "just drive to Transylvania" or whatever, and otherwise smart and interesting european friends would look at me like I was a crazy person. It is very, very rare to meet Europeans who drive across multiple countries for leisure.

Me and my gf did a Bucharest-to-Geneva and back car-trip last year and it was wonderful. There's something to be said about getting up to 2,000 meters in the Swiss Alps using a 1.4l gasoline engine car with 86bhp (probably less now, as the car is already 10 years old), all in third gear. Plus riding on the Austrian and German autobahns, as a car-lover that's pure bliss. Or riding on the Autostrade of Northern Italy in the middle of the night and stopping for an 1-euro ristretto at a gas station which was better-tasting than the majority of coffee-drinks that I had ever had.

But you're of course correct, ours was an isolated experience. I think my car was the only Romania (or Eastern-Europe)-licensed plate on the streets of Geneva (and Lausanne). If only gasoline were less expensive...

"But you're of course correct, ours was an isolated experience. I think my car was the only Romania (or Eastern-Europe)-licensed plate on the streets of Geneva (and Lausanne). If only gasoline were less expensive..."

Good for you! I love to do these trips.

It is so baffling how uninterested most Europeans are in just getting out and driving to parts unknown. It's tremendously rewarding.

Uninterested in doing it by car maybe, but not uninterested. Just that we have good(ish) train, plane, ferry and coach services - most people I know (I'm British) will have traveled a lot in Europe.

Also, don't forget that doing it by car is pricey for us - another comment above quoted $2.50 or something a gallon in parts of the US - here we pay about £1.20 a litre currently - so for example the cost to my brother of driving his van from the UK to northern Portugal (which he does to take his tools with him) can cost about £360 - where as he could fly and then hire a car there for a week or two for less money (if having his tools to do up his house there wasn't the reason for visiting!)

The Audi A8 thing, is that because A8 is an expensive car? Or because it is comparatively smaller? If it's the second one, I've seen horse trailers pulled by smaller cars (even Golf, I think).

No, you see - in the United States it is assumed that any towing or work activities must be done with a truck.

I am not exaggerating at all when I tell you that the minimum acceptable size for this truck is larger than most freight/delivery trucks in European cities.

Here is a completely normal, totally average truck that millions of people in the US use as a daily driver and have on-hand because they occasionally buy some boards at the hardware store:

http://blog.sfgate.com/topdown/files/2015/09/the-14-most-aff...

I don't own a pickup but they are quite fun to drive. Gaffigan has a related joke:: "why are they called a pickup? I'm pretty sure everyone that owns them aren't picking ANYTHING up". haha. So true.

And the scary thing is how many large trucks and SUVs are sold without the hardware necessary to tow a trailer. It's absurd to buy something like a Suburban with a V8 that doesn't even have the potential to be burdened with the kind of load that would differentiate it from a van.

> No, you see - in the United States it is assumed that any towing or work activities must be done with a truck.

I love subtle cultural differences like this where two sides are completely unaware that life could be any other way than it is. :-D

In the 80's and 90's in Sweden, I remember that every single car had a trailer hitch with a tow ball. And if you needed to buy something bulky at a hardware store, you borrowed or rented a small trailer. Every single hardware store has trailers for rent! Most large gas stations has trailers for rent! The only people who own pickups are farmers! Why would anyone want to buy a pickup?

Meanwhile, in the US, tow balls are extremely uncommon, and I don't think I've ever seen small trailers for rent anywhere.

Another funny difference is what camping looks like.

In Europe, it looks like this: http://www.widlundshusvagnar.se/valj-dragbil-och-husvagn-med...

In the US, it looks like this: http://www.rv-camping.org/towing-a-vehicle/

The first time I saw an RV towing a pickup I was completely dumbfounded.. It's on backwards! The car goes in front! Whyyyy?!?

> Meanwhile, in the US, tow balls are extremely uncommon, and I don't think I've ever seen small trailers for rent anywhere.

They may not be as common but are still common. Many people have hitches on their cars. You're correct that there aren't a lot of places that rent small trailers but you can rent trailers small enough to tow with a car for $20/day from Uhaul.

Also, tow balls aren't common because the bumper of a car or truck can't handle a lot of weight, so receiver hitches are more popular. And you're not supposed to leave the hitch in the receiver after you use it (unless you want it to never come out again due to rust).

The reason pickup trucks are used for towing generally is because they are body-on-ladder-frame construction, not unibody with sub-frames. With a receiver hitch attached (which is why you don't generally see the tow-balls on the bumper of pickups), you can haul and pull a lot more weight (because the hitch is connected directly to the frame).

If you have a regular sedan with a tow ball in Europe, you know that you can't attach very large trailer or pull a lot of weight. Knowing how much you can tow and under what circumstances are part of the written driving test in Sweden at least.

But, and here come the funny cultural differences again, for many Americans it's always MAX STRENGTH or nothing. Regardless of the actual future needs, most would go "YEAH BUT WHAT IF I WANTED TO PULL A HORSE TRAILER? I CAN'T? THEN NO!"

Please, there's no need to use all-caps for emphasis (and it's against the guidelines). If needed, please use italics (using asterisk for demarcation) instead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> It is very, very rare to meet Europeans who drive across multiple countries for leisure.

I don't have statistical data, but I have that experience. I have never heard of anyone doing that in Europe. Long car travels are avoided as much as possible. I heard of a guy that did a really long trip by car because was relocating and didn't want - or was too expensive - to move his dogs in any other way. He was not happy about it. I always see going by car as painful, while using trains is a good experience (https://visitsweden.com/getting-around-sweden-train/) and by plane is just fast.

But when people wants to visit the USA, to travel long distances by car looks like something you want to do. I know Europeans that have done that, in the USA.

So maybe it is not just a matter of taste, but it is geography or you just want to do what you see in the movies.

>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 expensive and a hassle, especially for a family.

If you want to visit cities in the Northeast you probably don't need (or want a car). But elsewhere it's between convenient and necessary.

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?

Too far apart does mean that A to B is so much further than A to B in Europe. It means that there's nothing in between them, so it would be insane to build a passenger rail line (i.e. high speeds, high priority on the queue, locomotives, ect). A 1000 km length of track in Europe serves 10, 15 cities. In the American west it serves the passengers of 2.

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.

> Especially out West, for vast areas of the US, there really are no good alternatives to driving ... > And most of the cities are too far apart to reasonably take trains between them.

Heh, that's a very USian response ;). That's largely because the US doesn't have proper long-distance trains. In a lot of other countries you'll be about as fast or faster with a train rather than a car, and can comfortably work for most of that time. Even if a 6h car-trip becomes a 7h train-trip, I'd almost always take the train.

Compare driving Cologne-Frankfurt Airport by car (2h, if the traffic gods smile), and train (45min). That's a faster track, so not quite representative, but even Berlin-Freiburg on mostly slower tracks - I've done that over a hundred times - is ~6.40h train vs. ~8h by car.

I don't see the US getting comparatively nice long-distance trains anytime soon.

> For example, there's very limited ability to visit most National Parks without a car.

Yea, that's true. I've so far done that with rental cars, works well enough unless you're going in winter... Hm, I should plan a trip soon.

You need a certain population density for high speed rail, or even decently fast rail, to be economically viable, don't you?

I've had brief experiences with high speed rail and I loved it. Much more comfortable than the whole taxi/airport/plane scenario. Though I do understand HSR doesn't scale for very long distances.

The US has a comparable train to your Berlin-Freiburg route.

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

Unsurprisingly, it goes through a high population density region.

Even a route like this one wouldn't service all that many people and isn't even halfway across the country:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/directions?engine=osrm_car&rout...

(It does a decent job of passing metro areas; Pittsburg, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Des Moines)

> The US has a comparable train to your Berlin-Freiburg route.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acela_Express

Well, it lags by over 100km/h of allowed speed (and more in practice I tihnk), but then the fast trains in Germany can't use their top-speed in a lot of regions either. The network isn't even remotely as varied. But, as you say:

> Unsurprisingly, it goes through a high population density region.

Everything in Germany is extremely dense compared to large swathes of the US. It'd not be feasible to have every medium sized city on a high-speed train network in the US.

But the situation on the US west coast, where I now live, is really kinda bad. There not being reasonable "public"/rail transport between Seattle<->Portland<->SF/Bay Area<->LA is hard to understand from a European/German perspective, although I see the political perspective of it being hard to do.

You really get used to that tho. I recently went to a conference in Stockholm, and reflexively wanted to hail a cab from the airport to the hotel/venue. Just to remember to check public transport: 15min less than by car.

> Second, Americans move around a lot more than most europeans do.

I think it's just because flying is so inconvenient/expensive in the US. Sure, I could drive 10 hours from Lisbon to Barcelona, easily spending $100+ in gas and tolls.

Or I could pay 50-100 to fly and be there in 2 hours.

When I was in Europe, flying could be a weekly opportunity to visit other countries (with the cheap 20eur tickets). Now instead, I try to drive to avoid all the hassle.

Sure, but if you were taking a family of 5, suddenly your $100 plane ticket turns into $500. Driving becomes much more competitive as soon as you start adding passengers to the vehicle.

> It is very, very rare to meet Europeans who drive across multiple countries for leisure

Then you've never been to the south of France in the summer.

It's filled with license plates from all over the EU. Mainly Dutch, UK, German. I've even seen Estonian plates.

It's ~1200Km from the Netherlands to the south of France. People do it in camper vans all of the time.

Indeed. There are places in Croatia where you see more German plates than Croatian in the summer.

Also Italy, north Spain, Croatia. And Germany/Austria/Switzerland in winter season.

It might not be as widespread to travel long distances by car as it is in the US, but it is definitely not "very, very rare". I would even say it's common for many Dutch, Danish, German, Belgian, Polish (from what I can observe).

I witnessed that as well in Europe. They don't like driving any distances and they have some great countryside and fun roads. In London - people seemingly stay really tight to where they live and work. They have no problem flying to other countries, but exploring their own city and country or even neighboring country is a chore to them.

I think a lot of it is because there are so many different and interesting countries nearby combined with super cheap flights. And many have good public transportation and don't own a car, or if they do - they own an Urkel-mobile which does the job for short trips and fits into tiny parking spots where they live and around town. And gas/diesel is a lot more over there too. So it's a lot of things that sway travel choices to the tube or trains and planes over cars.

Regarding car size - yes you lose something like 7 HP for every 100 pounds. So if you do have a bunch of passengers and gear you need something with more power and you also need something with more comfort/room which leans towards vans and SUVs.

I'd say it is the cost of fuel vs the cost of public transport. I've taken the train London-Paris for £58 return, or flown to Spain or Greece for less than £50 return with easyjet or similar. Even with 2 or three of us travelling it would cost far more than that to do it by car (plus have to sort out European insurance and breakdown cover), and then struggle to find places to park in Paris, and pay through the nose for it.

Instead I can get on a train to Paris for just over 2 hours, or I loved leaving work one day at 5pm, getting the plane to Amsterdam for £27 each way, and arriving there at 8pm UK time (9pm Dutch time), and was in the city centre drinking by 10.15. If I'd tried to do that by car...

As a guy from Belgium, who lives half the year in the bay area, I can confirm. Maybe because Belgium is so small, but when I'm in the US I have no problem driving an hour just to get to a walmart. In Belgium, this crosses half the country and I only do it on very select occasions. In the US I even drive from SF to LA and back every month, when in Europe I wouldn't even consider driving that far.

Each time I spend some time in the US, I'm thinking: 'I should drive to more places in Europe', but as soon as I'm back, my European stay-at-home mood kicks in.

> we could just "drive to St. Petersburg" or "just drive to Transylvania" or whatever, and otherwise smart and interesting european friends would look at me like I was a crazy person

Well, yeah, do you know what the roads are like? There are no interstate or federal highway funding. And a train or a flight is faster…

I would compare your US story to AU; I did multiple Adelaide <-> Nowra trips with my parents as a kid, and at uni we'd think nothing of driving 2 hours to a party (4 for a 21st).

Why? Because driving was way cheaper than flying, and way faster than trains; and because we'd still need a car at the other end to get around Nowra since the public transport there was non-existent.

> Zurich to Transylvania is 1800km

You forgot to mention: 4 different languages (Swiss dialect, German, Hungarian and Romanian) and one border (Swiss - EU).

This lifestyle is not unique to the US, but the big, inefficient car thing seems to be. South Africa is on a similar scale to the US and probably much more mountainous in general. Yet most of the cars there are European sized. And it's not just because they can't afford bigger ones; many of them can. It just seems that if they are going to choose one vehicle they choose the one that makes sense for every day of the week, not the few times a year they drive for 8 hours across multiple mountain ranges.

I live in the UK and I'd been told by Americans "you just don't understand" many times. But I can tell you now that it's perfectly fine to make day long road trips across mountain ranges in something like a VW Golf. You don't need a 3L+ monstrosity.

American cars (read SUVs and Trucks) are much, much bigger. I drive a Mini Cooper (R56S) which is probably about the same size as your Astra. Most of my co-workers and non-"car guy" friends think it's impossibly small. Even "small" CUVs (a smaller, more car-like SUV popular here in the States) dwarf my car. Vanishingly few US folks would want to drive something with under 300 hp and fewer than 4 doors. Not to mention the interior space people think is "appropriate".

Your first sentence really covers it. We have really cheap gas, so we don't care that fuel economy is bad. Every time someone I know comments about how poor gas mileage their car gets I respond with "what are you willing to give up"? They aren't - they want a giant SUV with hundreds of horsepower and they want to get 50-60 MPG.

There are a ton of Priuses on American roads, which I think are a bit larger, will easily meet or exceed those fuel efficiency numbers, and do it all while burning gasoline instead of diesel. (Diesel is more energy dense, so it's easier to get better MPG numbers with it. Diesel is also more expensive in the US, so it's not cost effective unless the efficiency gain is significant.)

It's not all that hard to find efficient cars here. The Honda Civic is rated at 32MPG city/42 highway (and our ratings tend to come in a bit worse than real-world driving will give you), Toyota Corolla is 30/42, Chevy Cruze is 31/47. You can do worse if you want, but you don't have to.

Good points, but diesel's higher MPG doesn't have to do with the difference in energy density but in cycle efficiency.

The Diesel cycle is, all things equal, inherently less efficient than the Otto cycle. Hoever, since it allows much higher compression ratio it's efficiency ends up being very high (20 vs. 30 traditionally) [see Faires]

> I always wondered why American cars are so inefficient. Seems such a waste of your significantly cheaper gas

Cart before the horse? Cars are inefficient because gas is dirt cheap. If gas were expensive, people would shift away from guzzlers. We have documented evidence of this happening after both the 70s gas crisis and the shift towards hybrids/EVs during the $4/gallon gas $100/barrel of oil days.

It's a pretty easy optimization game to play. If we increased gas taxes instead of flat demanding a fleet MPG (which the manufacturers simply game by making one or two hyper-efficient compliance vehicles which lets them continue to build guzzlers), you'd see how quickly the market would turn...

Opel is owned by GM (well, until March 2017). You're actually driving an American car. Assuming the 2015 and up model year it's platform sharing with the Buick Verano. The big difference here is that your engine is a diesel, and that makes a big difference in city driving when you're idling a lot.

I've just come from a trip around the US national parks, and noticed something similar.

I rented the cheapest, smaller car that I could, which was a 2015 Dodge Dart which would probably be about mid-range in the UK. It claimed 30 miles / gallon for optimal driving. Converting, that's 36 miles / UK gallon.

I don't actually own a car at the moment, but for a few years I owned a 1995 Peugeot 106 which normally got just under 50 MPG, say about 40 miles per US gallon.

Makes for a pretty disappointing comparison. 20 years later and still 25% behind?

Well you can't compare the two unless you mention the fuel type.

Looking at the Wikipedia article for the Peugeot 106 most of the engines that were offered in the 1995 model year only put out around 100 HP. Since you had a "cheapest" rental Dart I'm assuming it had the base engine which is rated at 160 HP of power, around 60% more powerful. Comparing the curb weights, the 2015 Dart is also around 70% heavier than the 1995 106 which is expected since the Dart is a segment larger than the 106 and it would have all the safety and "infotainment" technologies developed in those 20 years. The increased power of the Dart makes up for the increased weight, and at US fuel prices it still probably costs less to fill up for the average US driver than your 106 would in Europe even though it's more efficient.

For comparison, I own a 2012 Chevrolet Sonic (known as the Aveo overseas) with the 1.4 L turbo engine (rated 138 HP). I have a mostly-highway commute and my lifetime average MPG(-US) is 38.0. On a long road trip I take once per year I have gotten over 50 MPG (measured by dividing the fuel I consumed on the trip by the distance I traveled) despite the vehicle only being rated at 38 MPG highway by the EPA. You can easily exceed the EPA highway rating on most cars if you accelerate gently and don't drive too much faster than 70 MPH.

> American cars are so inefficient.

They don't have to be -- the Chevy Volt (Vauxhall Ampere) is one of the most efficient cars on the planet, and is designed and manufactured in America (including the battery).

Many Americans just prefer inefficient cars, and vote with their wallets. For some, it's a badge of honour to have a car that's really huge (SUV moms) or loud and spitting out smoke (Muscle Cars / Pickup Trucks), as a cultural identity statement.

US made such a phenomenal win with cheap gas that Europeans still mis. Exposure to cheap energy EMPOWERED people across vast country. Robust chevy v8 powers everything for decades and still going strong: from cars, trucks, boats, generators - you name it.

This came exact opposite in the old continent. The fact we drive efficient lawn mowers is just a sad testament for this failed energy policy.

The US got the "win", but everyone will pay the consequences... I'm not sure that was a very good policy

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?

My 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 bigger turbo. And it was yet weirder when I looked at a 2014 BMW 3 series ... and they have twin turbos and tiny engines.

To me, the last 15 years have been car manufacturers figuring out that with the right kind of engineering, you can get rid of turbo lag, and if you don't have lag or reliability problems, turbos make everything better. Smaller, faster, more fuel-efficient. My dad's sedan has a twin turbo these days. It gets 35 mpg.

I get that it's only one piece of the puzzle, but it's been so fun to see that tech go from niche-y to ubiquitous.

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 up the compressor wheel from the battery, giving exactly zero turbo lag, and they can also recover impressive amounts of energy that would otherwise be wasted - about 1 kWh in a 90 second lap.

[For a longer while, we've had anti-lag systems on racecars that basically burn petrol in the manifold, always keeping the turbo spinning. These are horribly fuel-inefficient and destroy turbos etc. quickly.]

I sincerely hope that electrically coupled turbo systems are adopted in road cars. The recent Audi/Bentley top-end (diesel!) SUVs with electric turbos are promising in this regard, but I don't think they do waste heat recovery per se.

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.

Volvo has something similar in their latest engines, they call it power pulse. It's building up the turbo with an electric compressor and opposed to audi e-turbo the pressure is also stored in a pressure tank instead of constantly pumped by the compressor, which at least on paper sounds like it would reduce the lag even more. Anyone got more experience?

F1 nerd here. The turbo and compressor are still mechanically linked. Mercedes pioneered this eras engine with the exchaust side and intake side on opposite ends of the engine, and still managed to connect them with a shaft. If you know anything about turbos, think about this for a moment. They have mechanically connected two components with a shaft along the entirety of the engine block, rotating with 100.000 rpm. That is amazing.

They have an electical motor on the same shaft that will either harvest or keep the turbo spinning. This beautiful arrangement means that they design the turbo to extract as much energy as posible, and control it with the motor, rather than rely exclusively on the wastegate. This as you state, means that they can recoupe quite a bit of extra energy. I would not be surprised if we see non turbo charged engines, with an exhaust energy recovery system for hybrid engines.

"To me, the last 15 years have been car manufacturers figuring out that with the right kind of engineering, you can get rid of turbo lag, and if you don't have lag or reliability problems, turbos make everything better. Smaller, faster, more fuel-efficient. My dad's sedan has a twin turbo these days. It gets 35 mpg."

I think this is a mistaken interpretation of what is going on.

What I believe is happening is that ever-increasing emissions and fleet efficiency requirements have seriously clamped down on what carmakers can produce, with technology and feature creep continuing to add weight to the car.

That is why we see cars going to smaller and smaller engines (basically the entire Volvo fleet is 4 cylinder now) with increased reliance on turbo/super charging to achieve necessary horsepower.

But these things are not equal - smaller engines vibrate more, they are louder, they are most likely inline and therefore have badly balanced "secondary forces" and they are going to have trouble achieving displacement larger than 2.5L.

I have no skin in this game since I don't care at all about ICE or ICE car culture and I want to transition to fully electric vehicles ASAP.

But never forget, kids: there is no replacement for displacement.

Turbocharged cars (exhaust driven) are more efficient partially because they capture waste heat from the combustion process. A manufacturer can tune the engine and gearing to have a really good "sticker" EPA economy rating, but that generally doesn't translate to a good "actual" economy rating (because people are always gunning the engine to get that sweet boost).

Unfortunately small turbo engines have higher emissions (forget the specific component, the other advancement of direct-injection has higher NOx emissions I believe) and manufacturers are now moving back to larger-displacement naturally aspirated engines because people don't drive like the EPA test works.

> But never forget, kids: there is no replacement for displacement.

Said no one who has ever compared this generation's Porsche Cayman/Boxster to the previous generation.

trjordan's right, the engineering of the small-displacement turbocharged motors has become completely amazing. You could scale up (ooooh... put AWD in too, for some reason!) but the cars are already overpowered.

Turbos do not make anything more fuel efficient, they simply allow you to have the fuel efficiency of a small engine off boost, and match the power of a larger engine while on boost. It's still a tradeoff however, there's always some lag and delay to throttle response, extra piping and cooling hardware, and more backpressure in the exhaust means it loses efficiency compared to a naturally aspirated variant of the same engine.

> if you don't have lag or reliability problems, turbos make everything better. Smaller, faster, more fuel-efficient.

No. Mazdas SkyActiv-G do the exact opposite, because, as Mazda states it: "When you add forced induction the combustion becomes harder to control, resulting in lower efficiency". Car companies collectively research EVs and high compression Atkinson style engines, because the real world efficiency are significantly better.

But for driveability, a fast responding turbo makes sense, but a larger NA engine is better. Neither is good for efficiency. My EcoBoost Fiesta, driving 80kmph (50mph), gets around 4.0L/100km (around 59mpg), but 130kmph (80mph), is around 6.5L/100km (36mpg). This is expected due to how drag works, but the kicker is city driving. It's worse, and I can drive a Mazda 6, a significantly bigger car, with a bigger engine, in the same city, same driving, more efficiently.

Mazda has a turbocharged SkyActive-G 2.5 these days they're using on the CX-9 and it's been pretty well recieved - https://insidemazda.mazdausa.com/press-release/mazdas-turboc...

It makes a ton of torque very low down low (300 ft/lbs) which makes it very suitable to push around a midsized CUV.

According to their engineers it was a compromise because they needed a more powerful engine, and adding a turbo was simpler and faster, than design larger one in line with their SkyActive-G design philosophy.

>To me, the last 15 years have been car manufacturers figuring out that with the right kind of engineering, you can get rid of turbo lag

I own a Fiesta ST that comes with a 1.6L turbo-charged engine that produces about 200hp/210+ft-lb of torque...on 87 octane. If I drive the speed limit I can get well over 40mpg (~5L/100km). I can't recommend these cars enough (if the small stature suits you). The fit and finish isn't great, but it's a piece of machinery when it comes to performance.

http://www.caranddriver.com/ford/fiesta-st

> It was even weirder when the 2005 STI came out with the same engine

The 2005 STi has a 2.5L engine, not the 2.0 found in the WRX. It's the same block as the Forester's 2.5L turbo.

Article is interesting but gets a few things wrong:

1. Starting the analysis in 1975 is misleading (the Ford administration). The most interesting cars are from the late 60s early 70s before emission regulations, oil crisis, car bumpers, ect kicked in (and dealt a huge drop in power, increase in weight, ect).

2. Cherry picking a muscle car for its weight is also misleading. Muscle cars weren't light. Some had 6 or 7 liter engines (That's a lot of iron!). They were quick-ish because they were powerful. Muscle cars might be the only cars to have lost weight in the last 40 years, since its ridiculous to have a "sports" car weigh as much as a family SUV.

Look at the accord, or the civic and see the weight gains.

In fact, cars have been getting lighter but over the past 5 years, because they've become ridiculously heavy. This is new and excited (they're still whales though)

3. Yes my SUV has 300 hp, which is insane. But I go around a mountain corner much slower in it with it's 4000 lb than I would a FIAT 127 (kids, remember to downshift to keep the drum breaks cool!).

Point is, a car isn't a good performance just because it has a good weight/power. Just the weight itself is important (light always wins for the same power weight ratio).

I'm mostly familiar with the GM A-Body (Chevelle, Skylark, Le Mans). Curb weight for the mid 60s versions we're around 2800-2900 lbs.

Minor nit:

1. I think you have to start with 1975 because emissions requirements are the biggest component of why car performance started to drop in the late 70s. It's really hard to compare a car with and without emissions equipment.

2. Like others have said, model bloat accounts for a lot the weight gain within a specific model. The Accord used to be a small sedan that's grown into a full size. The modern Civic is bigger than the 92 Accord my family had when I was a kid.

3. A Nissan GT-R weighs nearly 2 tons as well and will outhustle the Fiat and the SUV around that mountain :)

I have a 2016 Ford Mustang GT/CS and consistently get 23-24 MPG with mostly highway/freeway driving. It's unreal that a 5.0L V8 with 435HP (stock) gets that good gas mileage. The materials and fit & finish is better all around too.

We are truly living in the middle of another "golden age" of automobiles. Watch out though - here come the EVs :)

Now if they could just work on making those cars quieter. So they don't deafen me when I'm trying to enjoy a nice day with the windows down.

You don't buy a 5 liter V8 to be quiet.

I'm the guy in the car over wanting it to be quiet. I'm saying I find those cars extremely annoying.

We get spoiled a bit by how amazing noise suppression in modern vehicles is. A modern car rolling 60 MPH down the highway makes almost no engine noise, it's all aerodynamic whoosh and tire noise. Pretty impressive for a machine that's creating several thousand tiny explosions per second.

Actually, assuming about 2000 RPM at 60 mph in a 4 cylinder car you are getting more like 17 detonations/second

Shame on me! Mixed up my units.

Note that we haven't accounted for _n_ cylinders either. For a 4 cylinder engine you'd average ~67/second. :)

2000 / 60 seconds * 4 cylinders ~ 133 detonations/second.

Maybe in a 4cyl 2-stroke! In 4-stroke engines, a cylinder will fire once every other rev.

I'm more annoyed by the ridiculous "mufflers" kids seem to think are a good idea.

I think it's posing in the extreme. I recently got an SV650, and no matter what pipe you put on the thing, it's just not going to sound like a Harley or Busa or whatever. Mildly disappointing but then again, if I tried to get it to sound like a bigger bike, I'm kinda just lying.

Nothing amuses me more than a riced out camry with a glasshatter pipe hitting high revs and then just kinda putting off the line. All bark no bite.

> I think it's posing in the extreme >Nothing amuses me more than a riced out camry with a glasshatter pipe hitting high revs and then just kinda putting off the line. All bark no bite.

Yep

shrug you can't always get what you want, man. If he's tearing up and down your local neighborhood street that's one thing, but it's hard to feel sympathy for someone annoyed by a loud car when its out and about among hundreds of other cars.

Can't you just roll the window up till he's gone? It's not like it's hard to avoid a loud car.

First, what do hundreds of quiet cars have to do with one really annoying muscle car that likes to rev their engine at stop lights to show how cool they are?

Second, how do I know that I need to roll my window up when I arrive at that stop light?

Third, it takes about 10 seconds to roll all of my windows up. By that time my ears are already ringing.

Sorry, I had a car pull up beside me yesterday under a bridge and rev their engine. My ears are still ringing.

shrug, guess I can't always can't always get what I want.

If it's too loud, you can always call in with his plate. Enough reports and he can get ticketed for an illegal muffler. Happened to a buddy of mine back in Texas, and he totally had it coming.

Actually, the stock setup on the 2015-2017 models is pretty tame/quiet. Most of the super loud cars are after market exhaust/mufflers.

On the other hand, I drove a VW Passat 2.0TDI Bluemotion over last weekend - did 450 miles and averaged.....60mpg. That's insane.

I mean, I'm super happy that my 2.0L petrol 381bhp beast gets 30mpg on the motorway, but we can still do a lot better.

Was that with or without the defeat device though?

It was a brand new 2017 model, rental car - so I suspect not, but who knows what they are doing internally.

You can't compare diesel and petrol cars on a fuel-volumetric basis. You have to use mass because diesel is more dense. There is 15% more fuel in a gallon of diesel than in a gallon of petrol.

24 MPG is embarrassingly bad. A 1970s Datsun 240Z gets the same fuel economy. Compared to a modern luxury car, a new BMW 3 Series will get 80 MPG on a freeway. There's nothing wrong with buying a gorgeous car like yours, there are plenty of reasons to have one, but trying to claim it's environmentally friendly is just ridiculous.

Which BMW 3 series gets 80mpg?

https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/bymodel/2017_BMW_3_Series.sh...

Are you talking about the i8?

Whoa there. I never said it was "environmentally friendly". That is indeed ridiculous. Just saying that for the amount of power it has, it gets better than expected gas mileage.

Also, it looks like a 1970s Datsun 240Z averages significantly worse: http://www.fuelly.com/car/datsun/240z/1973 - further proving my point, and the one of the article in question.

The most useful result is that almost everything on the road can go uphill without slowing down. Even heavy trucks. This requires not just engine power but better cooling.

I see you haven't met my 2000 corolla. :-)

Median car horsepower has increased 50% since your car was made!

Not for Toyota Corollas incidentally. The 2001 model 1.8L Corolla RunX with 189hp is still just about the most powerful Corolla ever made. New Corollas top out at 138hp.

They can go up just about any grade without slowing down, though (unless you're talking about "slowing down" from some speed near the limit of the car's performance and transitioning to a steep grade, I guess).

Given the CVT and the soft suspension and brakes designed for being a mild-mannered passenger car, it'd be a little goofy to make an option for a much more powerful Corolla. You'd end up with something not a lot of fun to drive, or a completely different car.

Your 2000 Corolla was made roughly at the middle of the charts on that page. It's nearly 20 years old.

I'll bet it would run circles around my dad's 1984 Hyundai Pony. Trying to go up a moderately long hill with 3 or 4 people in that car was an adventure that would usually result in lots of others cars passing us angrily.

Is truck heaviness primarily bounded by legal weight limits or whether or not trucks can get up hills?

Legal weight limits are lower than what the truck can pull. Basically a truck has enough gears that it could pull any load up any hill (though it may be slow). The limit would be when the traction wheels spin out.

I think it's weird that they didn't weight any of the charts by how many of each car were sold. It only measures how many car configurations were available.

> Cylinder deactivation debuted about 10 years ago

No, it debuted over 100 years ago, and was standard on every Cadillac V8 for sale in 1981 - 36 years ago. Sure today's versions are better, but the quote above is about as literally false as one can get.

[1]https://www.hemmings.com/magazine/hmn/2008/04/Cadillac-V-8-6...

They have to be a lot more efficient to haul around all the extraneous shit that people have demanded be put into cars over the years. Of course it's always extreme in "Top of the Line" products like this Bentley (http://blog.caranddriver.com/it-takes-a-lot-of-wiring-to-kee...) but the trickle-down effect is inevitable. Happened with air bags, IIRC. Look how many companies are adding variations of "Auto Pilot" or driver assists.

Basically we painted ourselves into a corner. Technology and Distractions have an inverse relationship with Driver Attention and Performance. People don't like hearing that, but I don't like having to honk at people weaving into my lane because they're on their phone at 70 MPH.

The sensors and actuators used in active safety driver assistance systems are light and take up very little space. Most of the extra weight comes from passive safety improvements such as stronger unibodies. Those are far from extraneous.

Plus cars are simply growing because most people prefer larger vehicles. A long drive in a tiny penalty box car is a miserable experience.

Another "hidden" weight adder is the dreaded "NVH" (Noise, Vibration, and Harshness). Basically car manufacturers add "heavy stuff" to make the car quieter and ride better.

Driving is massively safer now than it was even 20 years ago. Automated safety systems are big reason why, and we aren't too far from fully automated braking/lane holding systems being cheap enough to be standard equipment, and reduce accident rates substantially more (even with distracted drivers).

People are going to be on their phone at 70 MPH no matter what do-dads are in their car. The best we can do is take the human element out of the equation.

>People are going to be on their phone at 70 MPH no matter what do-dads are in their car

Somewhat disagree. It's not a distraction panacea (based on various studies) but if we had voice recognition and natural language processing in cars that really worked well, there would be a whole lot less temptation to look down at a screen or type.

Not justifying people who do so. Just observing that better tech would largely eliminate any reason to do so.

Well I was alive before cell phones and I'll tell you people will find plenty of reason to not pay attention at 70MPH.

Fair enough. Although I suspect that the level of distraction has gone up.

The MPG chart is of median MPG among production vehicles, not mean, and not mean weighted by person-miles driven.

https://insta724.com/

The chart makes me sad. My Subaru BRZ (2013-) "sports car" comes with only 200hp. Many people looking for more power install aftermarket superchargers.

That's what makes the car perfect. Kudos to it's designers for resisting the demands for more power every year. There are other cars that offer more power (too much for the street in probably every case).

Yeah, but it's only ~2800 lbs. And my FRS can easily average 40+ mpg on road trips. Sticking with 200hp seems like a good choice.

Feels like electrics are pulling the averages up. Tesla's current top-of-the-line Model S P100D is 588hp and even their mundane family baby-seat-in-the-back sedans come at above 300hp.

Also, both Teslas and several hybrid car manufacturers report power figures that are physically impossible to obtain in the actual car - either because the battery can't deliver enough power, or because of arithmetically summing power figures of two motors that attain peak power at very different operating points.

Case in point, you quote the actual P100D measured power as 588hp, but the marketing wank says it's 760hp. That's a big difference.

There was a class-action lawsuit by 126 owners in Norway against Tesla over this on the P85D, and over the fact that they use "rolling start" 0-60 times; Tesla settled that in dec. 2016, compensated the owners, and changed their Norwegian marketing. (Wikipedia Model S page has references under the "Controversies" heading.)

Same thing could be said about the Toyota AE86 in its day. The AE86 came out around the same time when the e30 M3, the mk3 supra, and the FC RX7 were also being released. The AE86 made "only" 128hp, the RX7 turbo made 200hp, and the mk3 supra made 230hp. Guess which one became the icon of drifting in Japan?

Take one look at the grassroots drift scene over at Ebisu Circuit and you'll notice that nearly everyone's running Silvias, Skyline GTSTs and AE86s. Hardly anyone is taking cars with over 300hp to the track... Too much power.

The Subaru BRZ, and its Toyota equivalent (FRS/86/GT86/FT86) sharing the same platform, was designed to be the spiritual successor to the AE86.

yes, that's why I pointed it out. :)

A nearly perfect car. I say "nearly" because of the slight torque dip in the mid-range. It's too bad no one is buying them because they don't have "enough power". I am waffling on either a BRZ or a MX-5. I'm leaning towards the MX-5 because it seems like the BRZ/GT-86 may not be around much longer.

Those are both great cars in their element. When the MX-5 debuted in 1989 it had IIRC 110 horsepower, and for many motorsports purposes was utterly dominant. There is something to be said for balance in a sports car.

I once owned an FR-S (totaled from someone rear-ending it on the highway, going to buy another next year) and currently I own a '90 Miata and a '94 Skyline GT-R. Comparing between the ND Miata and the BRZ I would go for the BRZ in a heartbeat.

Two reasons:

1. The NC/ND Miata crowd is a much older demographic, keeping their precious car in the garage over the winter, keeping it bone stock, bringing it to the dealership instead of working on it themselves and only taking it out on sunny days. I don't click with that crowd.

2. The aftermarket support for the FR-S/BRZ/GT86 is completely overwhelming. Want a completely different exhaust setup or want to run flex fuel? Turbocharged? Supercharged? There's quite a few choices to select from. ND Miatas have some selection, but not nearly at the same cost or availability.

You can get rid of that torque dip quite easily if it's bothering you, by the way. Just need new UEL exhaust headers and a tune. You'll even make a bit more power when you're finished with it, so win/win.

Personally I'm loving that people aren't buying them because it's been keeping the barrier of entry way down. They truly are remarkable cars... There's a lot more to a car than the numbers. The suspension/geometry and chassis with 55/45 weight distribution, MacPherson struts, Torsen limited slip differential comes standard, and low center of gravity due to its boxer engine are top-notch compared to something like a 370Z.

Hmm, that's surprising. I am a bit of a track rat and figured the Miata had more aftermarket support. Flyin' Miata has a ton of parts and upgrades. I don't see a lot of Miatas on the track where I am, the ones I do see have a substantial number of mods.

Most of the BRZ/GT-86/FR-S I see in my neck of the woods are all blinged out visually with not many good "handling/performance" mods (aside from giant supercharger or turbocharger setups which IMHO is the last thing one should modify).

> "sports car"

lol

Why'd you get a BRZ? Bonus question: uh why did Toyota/Subaru make them

>Why'd you get a BRZ?

Good looking (subjective), reliable, quick, fun to drive?

Why did you buy your car?

What's a car

I like the look of a BRZ but it's wildly impractical for what I need (small family car than can go on garbage roads).

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.

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

Cars are far more reliable than every before. The median age of cars on the road has been steadily creeping up for years.

Turbocharging does not make an engine less reliable: every big rig on the road is turbocharged and designed to go hundreds of thousands of miles while seeing engine loads unheard of for passenger cars..

I'm not sure why people have the perception a 10 speed auto is less reliable than a 4 speed auto. Planetary automatics, by design, add gears exponentially. Almost all 5+ speed automatic uses a Lepelletier gearset, which is basically a traditional four-speed with another planetary gearset in front of it. It's not that different from how big-rigs turn a four-speed manual into a 12-speed, or a 6-speed into an 18.

Fact is, as gear ratios grow in autos, they get more robust. ZF builds 8-speed automatics capable of 1000ft.lbs of torque which is way more than the gold standard of four-speeds (the GM 4L60e) could handle in it's highest output applications (380ft.lbs).

The machinery we build is more reliable than ever because of improved manufacturing tolerances, CAD stress analysis, better understanding of materials, etc, but manufacturing isn't perfect and materials aren't perfect.

When you add more complexity, you add more opportunities for failure, that's just a fact. Twin engine airplanes have twice as many engine-out emergencies as single engine airplanes.

I have the perception that 10 speed transmissions are less reliable than four speed because I've messed with the innards of both. There are size and weight constraints in cars, and you have to get those 10 gears into similar space where you used to get 4, particularly in transverse applications. Transmissions almost never fail due to the gear set failing. What happens is that some chunk of a clutch plate breaks off and causes havoc, or some solenoid gets weak and allows for clutch slippage and the clutch plates overheat and damage the fluid, which cascades pretty quickly. Big rig transmissions are seriously big and heavy duty, car transmissions are dainty things by comparison. Your Getrag example is an exception - it's a high performance transmission meant for expensive cars. Yes, once cost isn't a constraint, things do get beefier and more reliable.

My point was that the complexity of these things makes it very hard to fix them, so cars reach end of life sooner. You could have Jimbob's Local Transmission Shop rebuild your transmission in the past, now Jimbob is over his head. He has to send it out to a rebuilder, who will charge several thousand dollars for this thing, so it's only cost effective to fix cars which are relatively new.

Turbos are used to make smaller engines behave like bigger ones, they help generate more heat and more pressure to develop more power, but weight and size are still constraints, so everything operates closer to maximum stress tolerances. I've been racing cars for almost ten years, and on hot days, it's not the naturally aspirated engines which blow up, it's the turbos. As with transmissions, big rig turbos are not constrained by size, weight and cost like passenger car turbos. They have gotten a LOT better, don't get me wrong, but a turbocharged engine is a much more complex system than a naturally aspirated one.

In my opinion, the sweet spot for technology/simplicity is behind us. Cars built between about 2000 and 2010 have simple port injected engines, very good engine management systems which result in very clean emissions, and generally no turbos. You can cost effectively keep one of these things running forever, and what happens is that the body and interior fall apart before the engine quits being cheap to maintain.

I'm a car guy, I love working on the things and hacking on engines and ECU's. Don't get me wrong, I think new cars are wonderful, but they're becoming tightly integrated systems with little in the way of user serviceable parts - throwaways like cell phones.

They picked an interesting starting point for their comparisons, which was 1975, several years after the following:

1) HP ratings went from SAE gross (at flywheel with no accessories) to SAE net (at flywheel with accessories and stock exhaust) 2) Smog controls (AIR, EGR, and cats) 3) Lower static compression ratios to handle unleaded fuel

That said, computer-controlled spark and fuel, and now direct injection, makes modern cars a lot more fun if maybe a little same-looking.

The EPA data only goes back to 1975. https://www.epa.gov/fueleconomy/download-co2-and-fuel-econom...

Yeah, it turns out that a lot of environmental and energy stuff didn't exist until the 1970s.

Nixon created the EPA, Carter the DoE, 1970 and 1977, respectively.

It wasn't until the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo that concerns over automobile efficiency even registered for most Americans. Gas was cheap. Cars were big. Life was good.

(That being the thinking, if not the reality.)

I've definitely seen it in my last two vehicles.

My old 2003 Ford Explorer had a 4.6 L V8 with 239hp. 0-60 in 8.8 seconds. 14/19 mpg. 4,381 lbs

My current 2014 Ford Explorer Sport has a 3.5L V6 twinturbo with 365hp. 0-60 in 6.0 seconds. 16/22 mpg. 4,697 lbs

These are incredible times for performance ICE powered vehicles. You can buy a very fast car from the showroom, but the aftermarket and hot rod world has a cornucopia of options to build (or buy as crate motors) just about as much power as you want. Street driven twin turbo drag racing 'door' cars running 7 second quarter mile times are common. With electric performance in drag racing and hill climb (such as pikes peak) rapidly improving to it's an amazing time to be alive...except for the shortage of race tracks where these cars can be safely put through their paces.

What the heck do you need all that horsepower for? You got the speed limit anyway. If you'd make the cars lighter and put in a 100hp engine you'd end up using half as much gas. Yikes!

So they can win social Top Trumps at parties? Beyond "dick swinging" the utility is probably limited.

I was driving a 1960's Classic Mini Cooper the other day, just leave my body in there if we crash.

This part was interesting, fuel injection has been optimized to the point of modeling the way the fluid vaporizes so it perfectly mists out, making sure to never hit the walls of the pistons:

> It’s also put to use in the Camaro V6, the middle-of-the pack, Goldilocks choice that makes 335 horsepower. This machine highlights one of the most critical things in engine evolution: direct fuel injection. Carburetors that mixed fuel with air disappeared from assembly lines long ago.

> But it was only in the 21st century that engineers perfected the practice of shooting a mist of gasoline directly into the cylinder. Less fuel is wasted and the engine is more powerful because it stays cooler. (The gas actually evaporates before it explodes, cooling the cylinder in the same way that sweat cools the skin of an athlete.)

> “Today, we can model it, we can visualize it, and we can make sure the fuel ends up in the air, not on the cylinder wall,” said Prabjot Nanua, director of Detroit-based GM’s advanced engine and racing engineering.

The most fun car I've ever driven was my 1985 Toyota Tercel, with all of 65 horsepower.

I don't think any car I've had since then has gotten better fuel economy than that old Tercel. But the old Tercel probably polluted the atmosphere a lot more, and I'm sure it would've disintegrated if I'd ever been in a collision with a larger vehicle.

I beat the hell out of my '96 Tercel. Took it every where (hiking, camping). Not a single amenity. Loved that car. 42/mpg highway.

Still brings a tear to my eye.

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.

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].

Past a certain point (like, not being able to maintain highway speed limit up a modest grade), I am not sure this extra horsepower is such a good thing.

The thing I really notice when driving lower usable power-to-weight vehicles like a heavy truck or an unpowered bicycle or a car with a dying clutch or is this: they force you to think further ahead, work harder at predicting the possible movements of all other road users and in short, be a better, safer, more aware driver. I actually find them more fun (except on the track or an empty parking lot of course) too for this reason.

Is it possible excessive horsepower is making us shittier drivers?

It is much more fun driving a lower powered car at the limit than an overpowered on at 25%.

(source -- owner of 1990 miata. 120hp, 2000lbs. Steer the front with the wheel, the back with the throttle.)

>It is much more fun driving a lower powered car at the limit than an overpowered on at 25%.

Motorcycle enthusiasts understand this concept. Driving an overpowered (for your experience) bike isn't fun compared to throwing a smaller bike around.

Yep. I think I made a slight mistake in buying my last car as I wanted to prioritize power, so I got an AMG with 381bhp - and yeah, the car is a monster, it does 0-60 in 4 seconds, but I very quickly found out that when going on some twisting mountain roads it's just too much power to really have fun - you get out on a straight, and are instantly doing 80mph+, on a 60mph-limit road, so you just end up cruising until the next turn which is neither interesting nor fun.

In a lower powered car, on a sufficiently technical road it's hard to stay at the speed limit, so you end up working the car and having loads of fun(like I am sure you do in your Miata). In a super powerful car that part is gone, and the drive becomes slightly less enjoyable because of it.

For a good anecdotal, non-American example:

My grandmother lives in quite a hilly town. Her old car was from the mid-80s, with few airbags and basically zero crumple zone, so at a certain point her kids (my mom and uncle) persuaded her to get a new one.

Her worry was power - the old car was a pretty upcharged model to make it uphill to her house, and she was not looking forward to figuring out which new models had the same power-to-weight. Turns out she needn't have worried - you can't even find a car in her preferred (pretty small) size range with that little power anymore.

I try to drive as little as possible to stop destroying the planet, no need to travel 100s of miles, there's lots of interesting things close to you, and if you walked to them you'd live longer too

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.

When I visited America, the first thing I noticed when getting out of the airport was the big ass cars everywhere. Most of the cars in my country is smaller.

Superminis are very popular here. As of now though, I drive an Chevrolet Tahoe and it's rare to meet a car as big as it is.

Why there is not much big cars here it's because there is heavy taxation on both the cars CO2 per km and on the gas itself. Gas in Sweden costs maybe 3-4 times as much as it does in the US.

This doesn't take into account that manufacturers used to under-rate the horsepower on their cars. Legend has it for the purposes of insurance and the NHRA.

There were also corporate rules. At one point, GM wouldn't allow one of their cars to have a better power to weight ratio than a Corvette. The answer for Pontiac was to sandbag on the advertised power.

Another implication of all this power is that there is now little need for "passing". Everybody can reach the speed limit easily on almost all roads.

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.

The last 3 cars I owned here in Germany had the following real life consumption:

45 mpg (bought 2002) 35 mpg (bought 2013) 42mpg (bought 2017)

I'm fairly certain that the reason the 2002 car was that efficient was because there was less emission regulations back then. They could simply use a more efficient burn at the cost of more polution. This was exactly what the VW scandal was all about.

It was a VW Polo Diesel and the others are gas :)

Would love to see a similar article on motorcycle improvements. Seems like the line between top-of-the-line MotoGP bikes and the most expensive street bikes is becoming quite thin.

https://www.clippp.com/

I'd love to see a chart of the power/weight ratio of engines over time.

Not particularly impressive. You can make an engine significantly lighter by changing the short block from cast iron to aluminum. The only problem is long term reliability (if an aluminum block ever overheats, it is significantly more likely to destroy itself than cast iron).

My car as a cast iron engine block; alas, it doesn't have replaceable cylinder liners nor are bigger piston rings manufactured, so when the workshop managed to crack a piston they ended up having to change the entire engine. Yet another example of the throwaway society, eh... :(

Ages ago, reading Popular Mechanics and Scientific American as a kid, I thought ceramic turbine engines would become the norm.

2016 Ford Taurus SHO has an Ecoboost 2.5L engine with twin turbo and I chipped it and added high performance intake/exhaust. ~550hp, 25 mpg. My beater from 98 was worse on mileage at 150hp. Strange.

If there's an affordable, reliable car that performs well that's better than what Honda and Toyota have to offer, I'll sure as hell buy it. I don't care if its a Chevy

Article title is misleading you, this isn't about American-based car companies it's about the cars Americans drive including Honda/Toyota/BMW/etc.

Would love to see a similar article on motorcycle improvements. Seems like the line between top-of-the-line MotoGP bikes and the most expensive street bikes is becoming quite thin.

Direct injection is a mixed bag: on my 2010 VW CC you have to "decarb" the intake valves every 30-40K miles because they do not get washed by the fuel.

In what applications will electric engines not be able to replace internal combustions engines? I don't want these improvements to go to waste long-term!

Small scale power generation.

>If a 1976 driver were to somehow get his hands on a car from 2017, he’d be at grave risk of whiplash. Since those days, horsepower in the U.S. has almost doubled, with the median model climbing from 145 to 283 stallions.

1976 was right in that era where gas prices took a huge jump, and to keep Americans from buying the more fuel efficient Japanese cars US car makers were producing seriously underpowered vehicles with better mileage. I wouldn't be surprised if that year represents the nadir of horsepower in American cars.

> I wouldn't be surprised if that year represents the nadir of horsepower in American cars.

And yet, a graph in the article shows more than 25% drop in horsepower from '76 to '83. Are you claiming that was entirely due to an increase in Japanese car models dragging down the average even as American models bounced back?

For 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."

Individuals have immediate, direct incentive to wear seat belts. Seat belts are not a collective action problem the way climate change is.

When health costs are socialised - and insurance is a way of socialising costs - it does become a collective action problem, because the negligence of the few increases the costs of the many.

That is applicable to alcohol, unhealthy foods, lack of exercise, improper sleep, smoking, etc. Should we ban all those too?

At some point unhealthy foods might get banned, or other mechanisms like the soda tax put in place to help push things in the right way.

You can't take an all-in or all-out approach to things. Each case is its own contextual matter that must be independently considered. If you want to see an example of where anything goes, the world has many examples of lawless societies. Not somewhere I'd want to live.

> You can't take an all-in or all-out approach to things

Sure, but its important to notice that the grave inconsistency with the which we apply policy has to be a consequence of systemic failures.

For example, cigarettes have to show pictures of diseased people, but cheese doesnt have to show pictures of obese or diabetic people. Cars dont have to make a diclosure that "you might kill people with this" and show you pictures of that. The picture policy on cigarettes is pretty morbid to me.

And then the defense for it is that "its good for people". Doing the wrong thing for the right reasons does not provide me satisfaction.

This is one of the downsides to socialised medicine - people feel the right to judge people for their weight, for example. Taxes are high on tobacco because of the harms. Here in the UK, there's support for minimum alcohol prices, to stop alcohol getting too cheap. We already have loads of bans on smoking in different contexts. If politicians could find an easy way to try and force poor people to eat less fast food, they would; they don't have much moral compunction stopping them, rather they feel they have the right, because obesity etc have costs that need to be managed.

> Taxes are high on tobacco because of the harms. Here in the UK, there's support for minimum alcohol prices, to stop alcohol getting too cheap.

I will argue that the reason taxes are high on tobacco is because its become social suicide to defend tobacco. The taxes are high on tobacco because its an easy case to make that gets no opposition. Alcohol is next in line.

I'd argue that if something is bad but popular its hard totax (i.e. special TV tax, special Netflix tax, special Facebook tax), or that something is good but unpopular its too easy to tax (tax foreigners, tax the poor, etc).

I think the argument would probably be more like "New cars would be substantially cheaper if it weren't for these regulations." Their preferred means of dealing with the pollution problem would be something like a carbon tax (assuming they're the type to actually believe it exists, anyways)

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?

Clearly not, or not enough to make a difference. America didn't stop producing gas guzzlers after the 70's. If anything mpg went down as trucks got bigger

The article clearly shows mpg getting rapidly better in the 1970's, with an inflection point right at the passage of the mileage target.

Moreover, as soon as the government-imposed target was met, carmakers stopped improving mpg fuel efficiency and made no progress on that front for 20 years.

Average fuel economy almost doubled from 1975 to the late 80's.[1] I agree that trucks hurt that trend overall, but there are a lot of consumers who value fuel economy even in the absence of gov't regulations.

[1]https://i0.wp.com/www.curbsideclassic.com/wp-content/uploads...

Gas got really cheap in the mid/late 80s after it got really expensive in the late 70s.

The seatbelt argument is not about saving people's lives, its about not forcing people to do a precaution. If you can make the argument that you can force someone to use a seatbelt for his own protection, can you ban alcohol? loud music? driving altogether? bad food? Bathtubs?

What is fundamentally different of the seatbelt than the other million things that endanger our lives everyday and we live with ?

I'm guessing the probability for death is far higher, or rather, the public safety benefit greatly outweighs the tiny cost.

We also have regulations on building safety and construction, or would you rather not force people to have the precaution of getting a structural engineer when building homes and buildings?

Alcohol has been banned for a while, but eventually it was decided as a society that we were willing to accept that risk and negative outcome. Bad food is also banned via food safety standards via the FDA. I could keep going on... but ultimately everything comes down to a cost : benefit analysis that's done collectively as a society. Recently we have the example of marijuana being rethought as a society and now those bans are largely going away. Things can shift in either direction.

> I'm guessing the probability for death is far higher, or rather, the public safety benefit greatly outweighs the tiny cost.

The tiny cost? First, its a tremendous cost! Why allow any 2 types of cars with different safety features? If safety is paramount on a car, then we should only one model: the safest.

Second, the probability of death varies wth many activities. For example, biking is very dangerous in SF. So are many outdoor activities like mountain climbing. Or diving.

There is a case for the seatbelt because when people die in a car accident, there are externalities, but forcing the seatbelt to protect someone is a paternalistic idea.

> We also have regulations on building safety and construction, or would you rather not force people to have the precaution of getting a structural engineer when building homes and buildings?

In this case, this is the safety of others. Very different to the safety of yourself: the whole concept of libertarianism is self-posession,that who you are is only owned by yourself. It is surely acceptable to use the powers of the state to protect one from others.

> Alcohol has been banned for a while, but eventually it was decided as a society that we were willing to accept that risk and negative outcome.

We have countries in the modern world that have banned alcohol still. Its purely cultural, its not a foundational moral or economical trade-off. And the negatives of alcohol are pretty bad!

> Bad food is also banned via food safety standards via the FDA

Depends on the definition of bad: if you mean toxic, sure. If you mean food that degenerates health, definitely the opposite. Sugar for example, could simply be banned to a very positive result in public health.

> Recently we have the example of marijuana being rethought as a society and now those bans are largely going away. Things can shift in either direction.

This is the appealing point from the libertarian stance: you dont need to depend on the mood of the moment for the direction of policy to benefit you. Marijuana would have never been banned under a libertarian conception. And neither would cocaine and other drugs, provided the harm is done only tos elf, and not to other.

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 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 safer.

Libertarians value having a clean environment just like anyone else does. The question is how to create regulations that are fair and don't create disincentives for innovation. Note that several automakers needed government bailouts partly due to the cost of complying with fuel economy regulations. But rather than letting those companies fold and allowing Tesla to rise to prominence much sooner, our regulators propped up the makers of the most polluting cars, a move which set back US emissions significantly (compared to the counter-factual I described).

I'm sure non-libertarians also believe regulation should be understood.

You spend a lot of words there describing what libertarians don't do and defending them from what I'm guessing you'd call a straw man.

So... am I right that you, as a presumptive libertarian, support the fuel efficiency regulations passed in the 70's and 90's, as witnessed by the evidence in the linked article? If someone expert told you that similar regulation passed today would have a similar effect, would you support it?

> am I right that you... support the fuel efficiency regulations passed in the 70's and 90's

No I would prefer a carbon tax charged per vehicle based on miles driven per year and the pollution emitted from the vehicle.

> If someone expert told you that similar regulation passed today would have a similar effect, would you support it?

What effect did it have? Do you think automakers would have continued to use 1960s era engines?

The question to be asked is not whether I support it but whether a different policy might have been far better. I think a tax would have had a far less distortionary effect on the economy and potentially a more beneficial effect on the environment.

> What effect did it have?

I genuinely don't understand how a technical person can look at the graph in the linked article and ask that question. This is just willful disbelief..

Perhaps the technical person in question understands the difference between correlation and causation.

The actual question implied was: "What effect did it have relative to other feasible alternatives."

Sounds great but it's a regressive tax when you consider that it disincentivizes people actually using their cars. Once they've bought their new, fuel efficient car you want them to drive around and create economic value. This tax will ensure that less value is created.

Your "far better" proposal is potentially worse.

Carbon equates to gallons of gas used, so from an environmental perspective we'd want to reduce unnecessary use to reduce the carbon impact.

Some libertarians believe that but in my experience at least an order of magnitude more have a philosophy which boils down to “you can't tell me what to do!” with some serious magical thinking about markets, trickle down economics, and the inherent merit of rich people.

> Libertarians are not anti-regulation

Yes, they are. See https://www.lp.org/issues/the-economy/

"Libertarians believe that the only proper role of government in the economic realm is to protect property rights, adjudicate disputes, and provide a legal framework in which voluntary trade is protected."

First, the Libertarian Party is not "all libertarians".

Second, environmental regulation falls out of property rights, since pollution spreads onto people's property. If you pollute a stream, the stream carries the pollution to someone else's property and damages it.

And the libertarian response to that issue is not the ounce of prevention, but the pound of cure.

Rather than have a priori environmental legislation, the libertarian position is to wait until the (possibly irreversible) damage is done, then try and find the person who did it (if you can, and good luck if it was a variety of entities), then take them to a court, then prove them at fault (not a given, especially if more than one party), get a judgement of fiscal damages against them (hopefully they have enough money for recompense, but not enough money to tie you up for years), then actually get the money from them, and finally put that money towards cleaning up the spill (again, if it's not irreversible).

Not at all. A perfectly viable libertarian response to your hypothetical is a carbon tax or pollution tax - some cost applied to a negative externality.

Did I miss the stampede of Libertarians advocating that?

The Libertarian Party in the US does not represent the values of all (or maybe even most) libertarians. At its core, it just means not restricting people wherever possible, it doesn't necessarily mean having as little government as possible. Not all libertarians equate "freedom" with "low taxes" and "starving the government". You'll find that libertarians are a very varied group in terms of their beliefs.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism :

"Some libertarians advocate laissez-faire capitalism and strong private property rights,[7] such as in land, infrastructure, and natural resources. Others, notably libertarian socialists,[8] seek to abolish capitalism and private ownership of the means of production in favor of their common or cooperative ownership and management, viewing private property as a barrier to freedom and liberty.[9][10][11][12]"

It would be great if you'd clarify that you are generalizing about mainstream libertarianism thought in the US.

US libertarians are a special breed that hacked up classical libertarianism to fit within the framework laid down by the US Constitution.

Basically they are believers in the US Constitution first and libertarians second.

Not a rigid definition but neither is the parent post

It's not difficult to fit classical liberalism into the US Constitution. Both are children of the Enlightenment, and have the same philosophical underpinnings.

The article is about America's cars, so it's pretty contextual that we're talking about the US here.

That sounds like a "motte and bailey" argument to me. It's common sense that "the good and bad consequences of regulations should be understood." That's a position that's trivially easy to defend. Libertarians usually argue for a great deal more than that: civil liberties, non-interventionism, laissez-faire capitalism and the abolition of the welfare state. But these things are not obvious simply from understanding the consequences of regulation; the arguments for them have to stand on their own.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey

Just as patriotic and humanitarian rhetoric is used to justify certain polices that are far from patriotic or humanitarian, libertarian rhetoric is also sometimes used to justify lax regulation, crony capitalism, etc.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/No_True_Scotsman

I love these rationality links. :)

I think most people who call themselves libertarian today have betrayed the first principle of libertarianism (my body and the fruits of my labor belong to me and me only) by adopting stances and definitions that are actually antithetical that principle.

Are you a Real Libertarian, or a ROYAL Libertarian? is a must read.

http://geolib.com/essays/sullivan.dan/royallib.html

> 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 safer.

Seems like this tax burden would fall disproportionately on the poor who couldn't afford to upgrade their old clunker in the first place.

Perhaps, but if new cars were cheaper then there would be more (and newer) used cars on the road. No matter who is driving it, an old clunker that creates 20x the emissions of a new car is harming all of us every mile it is driven.

> Those names are chosen to sound good

Are you saying that the name Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act was chosen for something other than descriptiveness?

> The question is how to create regulations that are fair and don't create disincentives for innovation.

That's not what I've heard libertarians advocate. They generally advocate for regulations that don't restrict - that is, no regulations.

> 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 safer.

You have picked a bad example.

"Pollution" in the sense you're using it is entirely independent from carbon emissions. Old cars pollute because they have poor emissions controls. Carbon emissions are directly proportional to fuel consumption regardless of emissions controls. For example, a fifty year old VW Beetle gets the same 30MPG as a brand new car, which means it emits exactly the same amount of carbon, but much more pollution, meaning particulates and smog.

The purpose of fuel economy regulations is not to reduce particulates, it's to reduce carbon emissions and oil imports. There are separate regulations covering particulate emissions for new cars, but nobody complains about those because highly effective modern emissions controls are a solved problem. How to make a big fast car that gets 100MPG is not.

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.

The correct solution to carbon emissions is an energy cross charge. You tax carbon (trivial to do at the pump for gasoline) and use the money to subsidize non-carbon energy. That lets you use half as much carbon tax for the amount of price differential you're creating between carbon and non-carbon energy, and it takes no money out of the average person's pocket. It just means you pay more for gas and less for electricity, which makes you want to use less gas and more electricity by buying an electric car.

In other words, CAFE is stupid but not for the reasons you said.

Great points, thanks.

> 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?

Isn't the problem the pollution emissions, not the age of the car? Charge people an emission tax based on manufacturers' guidelines, and then switch to periodic measurements after the car is greater than N years old (N>5). That way, people can buy new, polluting vehicles as they wish & their budget can stretch to.

This is the UK's approach, which works because cars have a yearly check for roadworthiness.

As a libertarian my view is that in the short term often government does act faster than the market. The problem is that the in medium and long term the market can't act.

What does that mean?

Once the government enacts a solution, there is reduced incentive for the market to come up with a better solution.

For example, people want clean cars. Government mandates cleaner cars. Cars are now clean enough to make most people happy, but still somewhat dirty. If government didn't act, the overwhelming number of people who desired clean cars may have pushed the market to switch to electric cars. That's happening much more slowly now, because the solution the government implemented was "good enough" for most people.

Meh. I saw this kind of reasoning on P & T's Bullshit, where they had a local business owner complaining about government regulations mandating the minimum number of parking spots for people with disabilities. Both Penn and the guest were crapping on about this while standing in a nearly empty parking area, and both saying that if it weren't for government regulations, the local businesses would create more disability parking spots, to pull in more business.

The elephant in the room, of course, was that the government only mandated the minimum - there was nothing stopping the local businesses from creating more than that which, of course, they absolutely did not do. This is the essence of libertarianism in reality - a whole lot of complaints on restriction of activity and "if we were more free, this would happen", but never any follow-through.

The environment is an unpriced externality so it has to be controlled by the government. Also, the needle starts moving with Tesla, Volt, GM etc. Breaking into electric. The government has helped there too. I am a libertarian and I am totally ok with that. Market solutions will almost always be better than government ones BUT some things can't be solved by the market. Whether perverse incentives or unforeseen issues, I would rather a gov solution than no solution and am not averse to a combination

> The environment is an unpriced externality so it has to be controlled by the government.

Yes, and a commons, and must be protected for that reason. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

I would like to point out this is due to confusion by almost all peoples who haven't formally studied the economics of regulation.

There are in fact, two types of regulation: "Safety and Soundness" and "economic."

Economic regulation is almost always a bad thing and results in gross market inefficiencies like barriers to entry, cronyism, and destroys any hope of a functioning capitalist system. Think trucking regulations in the 70s and before...

Safety and soundness is almost always a great thing as it helps ensure we are able to have a healthy and functioning society. Seat belts is a great example of this...

Where most people, and I agree, it's generally libertarians and republicans go wrong on the is conflating the two types of regulation or not being able to see which kind of regulation it is clearly. Granted it's not always easy to know which...

A prime example of people getting it wrong is with banking regulation. Banking regulations, for example a lot of people thought Glass–Steagall was economic regulation and it was not-- it was in fact a safety and soundness regulation that made unbelievably great sense. It's destruction cost the world greatly because it allowed unsafe markets to be created, corrupted, and later destroyed as a result.

Energy and environmental regulation is another one where it's strictly safety and soundness regulation but people complain about the cost. Then they start calling it "economic regulation" because there's a cost associated with it. Well there is a cost associated with everything including not protecting the earth and its inhabitants. I without hesitation say the cost of a de-regulated environment will be dramatically higher than the cost of implementing and progressing with the regulations. Unless of course one would prefer extinction.

Yes some business and markets may go under because of safety and soundness regulation but this is because they were not correctly accounting for the true cost of business. If they had been, it would have NEVER been profitable.

Edit: I'm very, very left but it's solely a result of my economics education. I started life right, then moved to a pseudo libertarian outlook, and finally abandoned all of that to move to the far left. Because it's what makes the most scientific sense-- and economics is in fact a science.

Can you please point out the exact parts of Glass-Steagall that, had they been left in place, would have prevented the GFC?

Copied from wikipedia because I'm lazy, and you could've googled this easily:

> The separation of commercial and investment banking prevented securities firms and investment banks from taking deposits, and commercial Federal Reserve member banks from:

* dealing in non-governmental securities for customers * investing in non-investment grade securities for themselves * underwriting or distributing non-governmental securities * affiliating (or sharing employees) with companies involved in such activities

It prevented mergers and acquisitions which allowed the banks to become too big to fail.

> and finally abandoned all of that to move to the far left. Because it's what makes the most scientific sense--

Can you share some literature for the non-academics? My personal study into economics turned me "pseudo libertarian", i dont see myself going to the left. I wonder what ideas could.

> and economics is in fact a science.

Thats a very right-wing approach to economics!

>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 bunk. If you have a field that has multiple "schools of thought", then it's not really scientific because it means there aren't experiments to reproduce. If it's not reproducible, it's not science.

So most 'economics' studies that compare things like government structures, entitlements, etc are about as useful as trash. There are so many confounding variables that can't be controlled for that it's really easy to ignore all of the ones that disagree with the author's premise.

> 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 to go learn it. So go learn you some economics for make benefit your brain.

> Well there are large portions of economics that are bunk. If you have a field that has multiple "schools of thought", then it's not really scientific because it means there aren't experiments to reproduce. If it's not reproducible, it's not science

You can have different schools of thought, take super symmetry vs multiverse in physics right now. I also don't know how you can go from multiple schools of thought to not being reproducible and thus not science. Different ways of looking at a problem will yield the same answer if it's correct. Im aware of nothing in economics that goes against this. The different schools of thought are trying to solve largely different problems. Assuming I at all understand what you mean by this...

> So most 'economics' studies that compare things like government structures, entitlements, etc are about as useful as trash. There are so many confounding variables that can't be controlled for that it's really easy to ignore all of the ones that disagree with the author's premise.

Can't be controlled for yet. Neuroscience will put all the social sciences out of business one day. 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. Have you studied economics? Or can you more thoughtful provide examples?

>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.

> There are in fact, two types of regulation: "Safety and Soundness" and "economic."

You're just creating terms that only mean "good regulation" and "bad regulation" and arguing that all we need is to have the good regulation but not the bad regulation. The business of separating the one from the other is the whole issue.

> Yes some business and markets may go under because of safety and soundness regulation but this is because they were not correctly accounting for the true cost of business. If they had been, it would have NEVER been profitable.

Problem: Minors are gathering in outdoor community spaces to consume alcohol.

Solution 1: Impose liability on operators of community spaces. Many community spaces can't afford the expense of constant monitoring and close down.

Solution 2: Impose liability on stores that sell alcohol to minors. A liquor store that had been doing significant business with minors goes out of business.

Both solutions mitigate the same problem but different regulations impose the cost on different people.

It's also trivial to devise regulations that will simultaneously be effective and inefficient. You can easily prevent elevator accidents by prohibiting elevators.

> You're just creating terms that only mean "good regulation" and "bad regulation" and arguing that all we need is to have the good regulation but not the bad regulation. The business of separating the one from the other is the whole issue.

For starters I didn't create those terms. The second issue I have is your statement is completely unqualified, that the problem is separating them. Please qualify how they are the same or provide evidence. Right now you're just making things up or so it appears.

> Problem: Minors are gathering in outdoor community spaces to consume alcohol.

For one you assume it's a problem. It may or may not be. Your solutions are at best a false dilemma and are limiting choice when there could be and are a multitude of other options. If there's a point you're trying to make with your example it has gone well over my head.

> It's also trivial to devise regulations that will simultaneously be effective and inefficient. You can easily prevent elevator accidents by prohibiting elevators.

Yes... You can trivially make anything work or not work. What is your point? Are you attempting to say there is a triviality to making something safe and sound and/or economic in regards to regulation? I really don't at all know what your point is here. What is the relevance of this in the conversation?

Right now I'm very honestly, very, confused about what you're trying to say.

The category "economic regulation" is just a different name for government corruption. It can't be distinguished from safety regulations because they're overlapping rather than independent.

Protectionist taxi licensing regulations nominally exist for safety reasons and might in fact do both things at the same time. The "safety regulations" around nuclear power plants were specifically designed to make them not economically viable, by a baptists and bootleggers coalition of anti-nuclear weapons activists and fossil energy companies.

The distinction doesn't provide a useful filter, it's just a restatement of the fact that cronyism is bad.

> For one you assume it's a problem. It may or may not be. Your solutions are at best a false dilemma and are limiting choice when there could be and are a multitude of other options. If there's a point you're trying to make with your example it has gone well over my head.

Suppose hypothetically that under-aged drinking is a problem. That there are a multitude of other options to solve it is the entire point. The different choices have different economic consequences, so whoever is writing the legislation gets to decide who they want to kill and who they want to save.

A pure example of "bad" economic regulation would be completely naked. There would just be a law that says that only GM can sell cars. But that never really happens. Instead it gets dressed up in some ostensibly legitimate justification.

The MPG chart is of median MPG among production vehicles, not mean, and not mean weighted by person-miles driven.

It's unproductive to discuss political labels. It's sufficient to say this is a case where regulation was helpful - as are most cases involving protecting common resources.

Issues are independent from each other. Continuing to discuss each point as it fits into the frameworks of the popular ideologies only serves to polarize when productive change requires unification.

This is a huge meta-issue that I wish people would watch out for.

When one says "Libertarians are wrong about X", and someone answers (as several did here) that Libertarians don't necessarily believe X, you're not arguing about X but about the definition of the word "Libertarian". But all too often that argument can then continue indefinitely, with both parties thinking they're arguing about X, even though they may not actually disagree about anything except definitions of terms.

Exactly. Not to mention the inevitable "No true Scotsman!".

This is the fundamental root of the degradation of political discourse over the past few decades, IMO. Conversations without labels I've found almost inevitably result in previously opposed party members finding common ground and shared paths to improvements.

Policy discussion should revolve around 2 questions, IMO:

1) What should the world be like?

2) What could be done to make the world like we want?

People will often find that different aspects of those two questions cut across party-line ideologies in surprising ways.

Which is why I said 'and their ilk', generally meaning people who want favor the market to make decisions instead of the government. We do have a political party in power who's promise is to remove regulations, __especially__ those involving common resources (including this very one on cars!), so it's not irrelevant point.

I agree with you that labels create sides, but the reality is those that want labels (e.g. each respective party) attach their label to their causes and vocabulary. Regulations (and the abolishment of) is one that the right seems to want to claim.

You just doubled down on labels. Way to miss the point.

>generally meaning people who want favor the market to make decisions instead of the government

People who favor no regulation aren't against all regulation. You see the difference, right?

>Regulations (and the abolishment of) is one that the right seems to want to claim

Show me where everyone on "the right" wants regulations gone. It's about as relevant of claiming that everyone on "the left" wants to throw the federal government deep into debt for a bunch of unfunded social programs because of Bernie's proposals.

CAFE, as written, is hot garbage. It sets a ceiling on fuel economy, not a floor.

The difficulty in writing good legislation (then or now) is that other markets that value fuel economy more have already created some great cars. As a consequence, the easiest workaround is to import those cars and sell them here. That would predictably lead to job losses in an industry with an influential union.

(most) libertarians are perfectly happy to structure a market to internalize the externalities of pollution, since it's not practical to privatize air O2 and CO2.

A different, possibly more market-oriented, solution would have been a carbon tax on emissions instead of mandated efficiency standards. I think it would have gotten us to a similar place. But there's not anything inherently anti-market in saying "you cannot fill up collectively owned air with emissions."

Libertarianism are against regulations they consider paternalistic and which prevent free exchange of goods and services -- for example, minimum wages and taxi unions.

While small l libertarians may support that, my experience is that Libertarian political parties in the US and Canada are firmly against any action on climate change.

To put an even finer point on that, big L Libertarians would like to see the governments (federal & state) stop subsidizing insurance for people who build or live in flood plains and tidal regions.

So you could argue both sides of that, although I get your drift.

Reason I mention that is they believe the market should be the master, and currently, the government won't let the market work in this particular area.

You should see the things the Libertarian party fights about internally...they aren't anywhere near as unified as you claim.

The Libertarian parties are tiny in the US. Every libertarian person I know ends up making a sacrifice of ideals and votes with Democrat or Republican when it comes to elections.

The Libertarian parties in the US are not representative of many libertarians.

Does anyone here know how accurately current sensor technology could map O2 output on a satellite? I.e. could we get down to, say, 10 meter precision?

Here's what I was thinking: Take the current approach with the Carbon certificate and decentralise it using blockchain technology (e.g. Ethereum) hooked up to (to be made) publicly available sensor data on O2, as well as a public data on land ownership; Give every patch of land globally a wallet address. Make an App and API for the payment process, based on liters of gasoline / oil bought / electricity used for a certain area / KM of flight taken (convert to Mols of CO2 assuming a perfect flame). Distribute the payments evenly among O2 wallet addresses. For unclaimed land and international waters, make a fund that can be distributed among national governments, e.g. by how much unclaimed land and coastline they have.

At first the payments are completely optional, made by users that want to become carbon neutral. However, businesses and governments can choose to use this system to easily implement mandatory carbon neutrality without the need to trust a third party. Blockchain powered Dapps allow just this - having code running on a network that everyone can audit, but no-one can change.

Atmospheric sensors have to be deployed at the location they're sampling, so step 0 is: cover the earth with air quality monitoring stations. Step -1 is convincing someone to pay for this (governments have limited funding for this, so choose their monitoring sites carefully & extrapolate from the recorded data).

There's a few sites which aggregate the public datasources, like http://aqicn.org/map/world/

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 extremely useful idea doesn't have a simple solution.

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

Its spacial resolution is on the linked page:

> OCO-2 records how much sunlight is reflected off the CO 2 molecules in an air column. OCO-2 makes measurements in three different spectral bands over four to eight different footprints of approximately 1.29 km × 2.25 km (0.80 mi × 1.40 mi) each.

It's air columns, so again you would have a hard time proving that the source of the detected pollutants came from the area & excluding the case that they drifted into the area at a higher altitude.

Obviously compelling improvement will result in... improvement. That, or manufacturers couldn't adapt with regulations and would have to drop out of the market. The US auto industry is mature and wealthy enough to be able to handle the burden.

However, in a general case, market forces should theoretically be pressuring the manufacturers to improve in that 10 year standstill. The real question is why they didn't compete. You could fill up an entire book exploring the economic motivations that might stifle that, though.

There is probably some low key argument here about how these regulations price out new entries into the industry, but what was the last successful gasoline car startup in the US that survived? I remember Delorean, launched 75 and bankrupt in 82. Doesn't seem like an industry that is disruption friendly, especially when Chrysler seems to be on deaths door. I'm surprised they float every year. The only real disruption is coming from parallel industries in Tesla, and the volume of Tesla sales is a blip on Fords and GMs revenue.

Delorean had an issue with its founder being a raging cokehead, using company funds to smuggle drugs into the country, so that's probably not the best example to lay at the feet of regulation.

I'm more interested in the last attempt at a gasoline car startup that actually worked. Ford and GM absorbed a bunch of different auto makers like Cadillac and Lincoln, but most of those were founded pre-1950.

My point is that there is something to it if, on one hand, the industry stagnates without forced improvement through regulation like CAFE while at the same time nobody can enter the market disruptively. Since the stagnation period indicates that trying to brush it off as legitimate competition is wrong, it implies there is market collusion or some other force impeding disruption of a noncompetitive market.

Doesn't it strike you as dubious?

As in there is some way people are cooking the books. Hello VW!

That the moment the government says 'though shalt be more fuel efficient' the numbers go up. Is that the mix of cars they offer for sale rather than by the numbers with real fuel economy?

The US is a fair sized share of the global car market but it's not even 25% any more I think. It would be interesting to look at fleet efficiency in other countries.

Well if the government sets out to mandate something, it has the power to punish those who don't comply. So when the edict comes down to improve fuel efficiency, auto-makers comply.

Other dimensions not mentioned in the article: safety and affordability. A quick search shows that the affordability of cars has declined steadily, which makes it harder for the bottom of the economic ladder to get into a car. No car means it is harder to get to a job and climb up the ladder.

It looks like road fatalities have declined over time, but I couldn't find data on non-fatal injuries.

Also very interesting to see a whole lot of "they" and not a lot of "we" when defining what libertarians believe.

> median fuel effeciency due to government requirements

As if engines weren't improving due to other factors as well, like market forces for lower fuel costs and improved overall technology? What if there were more sensible regulations that taxed externalities directly, like pollution taxes? This is a pointless, illogical politicization of a topic more complex than you're aware of.

Maybe the government should force mass transit modes... much bigger impact...

I used to be in the auto industry and it probably has nothing to do with regulations.

It's a leap in technology, analogous to the jump from carburetors to electronic fuel injection.

Specifically, there's been a huge advancement in turbochargers in the last ten years. Advances like water cooling, ceramic bearings, and ceramic wheels. Turbos are far more efficient, durable, and well behaved than they were just ten year ago.

The massive advancements in turbochargers coupled with dual variable valve timing and direct injection means we can get huge amounts of efficiency and power out of the tiniest of motors.

Customers want power and fuel efficiency, the government mandating it did little to enhance that. There's plenty of loopholes for auto makers to skew their mileage numbers and make regulations basically useless. The driver behind faster and more efficient engines was customer demand and the technology to make it possible.

It seems clear, to me at least, that the regulations were intended to motivate auto companies to create technology to improve fuel economy and then deploy that technology widely in production. That there has been subsequent technical advance is evidence that the regulations were effective, if anything, rather than the opposite.

Yes, as soon as they sense competition from electrical vehicles

I just came back from Boston, every other car was a SUV

there's nothing better than a german cars !

My '87 Camaro weighed 3300lb. The equivalent model today weighs 3700lb. A '77 weighed 3500.

My 2001 corvette weighs 3040lb dry, a new Z06 is 3700.

Tell me again how things are lighter?

The new ones seem...poofier...larger...maybe less dense?

Less mass per cubic meter?

How is this article not called "Too Fast Too Fuel Efficient?"

The arbitrary speed limits on US highways have hurt US Auto industry and world auto industry a lot in terms of kinds of roads we build and the kind of cars we built.

Imagine how much innovation that could not happen there.

I've always been baffled by the lack of progress in increasing MPG for automobiles.

my 2001 toyota echo: ~35 mpg

my 92 VW cabriolet: ~28 mpg

my 2001 ford ranger 4x4: ~25mpg

These vehicles all got better or equivalent of vehicles made 20 years later.

1992 Golf Cabrio:

MPG: 28 city/ 32 highway

HP: 110

0-60: 9.5 secs

Length: 153" Weight: 2193 lbs

2017 Golf Cabrio:

MPG: 25 city/36 highway

HP: 170

0-60: 6.6 secs

Length: 167" Weight: 3,000 lbs

Over the last 25 years the VW Golf has gotten almost 50% larger, is far safer, far more comfortable, far faster, and has basically identical gas mileage.

This is one of the points of confusion for me. I didn't buy a cabriolet to take kids to and from school, to haul gear around or to beat some other kid in muscle car off the line. Increased safety is a nice, but bigger? faster? I would trade speed any day for better mileage. But apparently better mpg is less of a demand than bigger and faster.

> my 2001 ford ranger 4x4: ~25mpg

The 2001 Ranger 4x4 got 17 city / 22 highway mpg, and that was only for the manual transmission

If only the auto industry hadn't canned Henry Ford's efforts to mass produce cars with hemp-composite materials.[0]

They would be arguably faster, lighter, more efficient, and safer than anything on the market.

But, ya know. Car wrecks are good for business, and efficiency is bad for business.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srgE6Tzi3Lg

In other words, a Trabant.

Hemp is not a magic fiber, it's just able to be grown with a much lower environmental impact than cotton. Otherwise its just another fiber.

And if you're involved in a tragic crash where the wreck of your car catches fire, at least you'd die happy, eh?

(yes, I know hemp grown for fibers doesn't contain THC or whatever the active ingredient in weed is called. It's a joke, you see)

There's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forged_composite

Not as good as hand-spun fibers, but cheaper to produce..

Not sure if it per se is that innovative, similar tech has been used for a long time for (cheaper) pleasure boats, though with chopped glass fibers and polyester resin.

Oh I neglected to think about carbon fiber. That is probably the way forward.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com