In the last ten years, everyone and their brother bought vanity pickup trucks and SUVs. Now, suddenly, everyone is shocked, shocked that oil prices have gone back up. Will anyone ever learn?
The best selling cars for quite some time have been decently fuel efficient in the US.
Even when gas prices are expensive - the US has never been selling a lot of cars like the Fiat 500.
But in practice that sort of situation only applies during road trips. Most people's actual highway driving is driving in traffic, which is a lot less efficient.
The highway cycle is actually not all high speed driving.
Is that statistical, or anecdotal? It's counter to my personal driving patterns. Even in moderate congestion my Hyundai gets mileage closer to its "highway" MPG than "city" (when using cruise/distance control).
When I had cars I used them mostly to get out on weekends or for longer trips on vocations. May be I’m an outlier but during the pandemic time work from home is common and this allows to avoid driving in traffic.
My Toyota Yaris gets over 50mpg on motorways, so about 50% better.
All those sedans would be way more fuel efficient if they were motorcycles too, but I don't think you'd agree that they're comparable.
Honestly any time I have a larger item either being hauled to my place or away from it, it's someone else's vehicle, e.g. delivery of a new appliance or pricing it to move quickly on craigslist so someone comes and takes it away.
It's true for everyone I know who has children and owns a house in the burbs. The cost of taking delivery from everything from TVs, lawn mowers, dirt, mulch, Costco trips, adds up and SUVs aren't really more expensive than sedans.
Like I get you, I live a very privileged urban apartment dweller life and can afford to just pay for people to move things for me the few times I need it but renting tools and labor is expensive for a family.
People who specialise in it? Like moving vans or toe trucks?
> but renting tools and labor is expensive for a family.
Compared to the extra cost of the vehicle and gas? I mean how often do you buy new furniture? People ask how I manage without a car: simple I bus or take a cab. "cabs are expensive" per trip sure... but per year? Nothing compared to the cost of car ownership. If big cars aren't false economy yet, then they will be once we start paying for our carbon. Most of us could get around 90% of the time in a coupe.
2020 Honda Accord: $28k total cost of ownership [1] 30/37 mpg 282 g/m emissions rating [3]
2020 Honda CR-V: $28k total cost of ownership [2] 28/34 mpg 294 g/m emissions rating [3]
[2] https://www.edmunds.com/honda/cr-v/2020/cost-to-own/?style=4...
[3] https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=sbs&id=42071&...
According to [3] the yearly fuel cost difference is $50. For reference on the emissions numbers a 2010 H3 Hummer is 555g/m.
We don't need all this crap, and we don't need SUVs to carry it around.
Wow, that's not good... A large Sedan from early 2000s driven well can easily beat that..
I regularly hear about small cars doing 70 mpg == 30km/L
My Toyota Yaris is not fuel efficient at 130 km/h on the highway, but it still manages 40mpg = 17 km/L
Of course, it's not SUV.. I basically decided against buy a big car until EVs are ready -- they are now, but that doesn't mean I should throw out my existing car :)
But maybe that's only downhill -- I'm certainly not reaching it :)
But other mini cars like: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Lupo
Or so I hear...
First off, if you're not in the US, make sure that you are converting from a US gallon, and not imperial gallon.
35 MPG (US gallons) = 6.72 Liters per 100 km
Any case, my car does roughly 17 megameters / meter^3 -- that's proper SI units :)
US cars are a bit bigger than european or asian models, so they are probably a bit heavier. Still, I think fuel efficiency is pretty optimized in all modern cars regardless of where you live.
SUVs existing _prevent_ me from buying a small to midsized truck so to me the view is "look at the efficiency gained compared to the Ranger or Tacoma" instead of "look at how inefficient the Outback or Escape is compared to a Civic".
I compared SUVs to sedans and trucks because those are more available by volume by a long shot when purchasing, and most wagons actually fail to meet most of the utility criteria I listed, and those that do are designed far more like a low-clearance SUVs than as a "wagonized" version of a base sedan model.
Enjoy your day and whatever agenda it is that you're pushing. Goodbye.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/25864/station-wagon-sales-are-...
Okay, and now go to each of these manufacturer's US websites and check how many are available in the US.
Also, consider that Mercedes and BMW only offer luxury models at luxury prices in the US.
Sure, however the F-150 was by far the biggest selling vehicle at least up until 2019. Over 3 times as many sold as the second most popular vehicle.
In order to get a meaningful reduction in consumption, you need to be driving a sedan or coupe.
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Many of the bigger vehicles have unnecessarily large engines. However, that's not necessarily true across the board.
With the Golf Sportwagen (EU name Golf Variant) off the market in North America now, it leaves Volvos and Subarus as the only option.
I predict that in the next decade, station wagons will get rediscovered as manufacturers try to maximize range and reduce battery volume as electrification marches on.
Edit: forgot about Subarus
Are they not the same class of car?
Outback "competes" with the crossovers which are usually shorter in length and have taller interior space.
I purchased a base Golf Sportwagen with 4Motion back in 2017 for around $29k which was surprisingly nicely equipped (DSG, tunable engine, decent soundsystem). A similarly equipped Suburu would have been mid-to-high $30s.
If I had freedom to "flex", I would have gone for the Volvo because of the safety street cred.
Certainly a lot of these lil crossovers with natural-aspirated 4-cylinder engines can really strain to heft a bigger vehicle up from a stop (I'm looking at you, Subaru!), but once one is driving hwy speeds they are really quite fuel-sipping.
One reason why SUVs are as popular as they are is that car manufacturers are allowed to produce less efficient cars if they are larger and with off-road capability. This allows bigger, less efficient cars compete with the more efficient ones because the sale price ends up being close enough to the more efficient counterparts for this to not matter.
This was true like in the 1990s. It hasn't been true in a very long time (almost 20 years now). The only limit at which these standards don't apply is truly heavy duty (5000 pounds) and not even a hummer is over that threshhold.
Edmunds has the 2004 H1 at 7,608 lbs. [0] and the 2009 H2 at 6,614 lbs. [1] 2004 and 2009 are the newest Edmunds has for those models. Looks like the new GMC Hummer EV is going to be over 9,000 lbs. [2] The lightest 2022 Chevrolet Tahoe that I could find on Edmunds was 5,473 lbs. [3]
[0] https://www.edmunds.com/hummer/h1/2004/features-specs/
[1] https://www.edmunds.com/hummer/h2/2009/features-specs/
[2] https://www.motortrend.com/news/2022-gmc-hummer-ev-pickup-ed...
[3] https://www.edmunds.com/chevrolet/tahoe/2022/features-specs/
https://www.motorbiscuit.com/why-dont-heavy-duty-trucks-have...
Now, keep in mind, I'm talking about actual fuel usage. Not "ideal testing conditions". For example, my Chevy Equinox is supposed to get 32 highway - but it really only gets 26 (cruising at 70mph with no traffic).
"Unnecessarily large engine" sure sounds like something that would have negative consequences, but Cylinder Deactivation (CDA) is a thing. Just like your CPU, your engine doesn't need to spin up every "core" if it's not loaded to 100%. And fewer concurrent explosions per second, means less gas needed to drive all those explosions. A V8 that's only driving 4 of its 8 cylinders in most situations, is likely going to be even less gas-guzzling than a V6 that always has to drive all 6 cylinders. (Well, other than the fact that the V8 has to work slightly harder to move a car that's heavier from the additional engine weight.)
Of course, not all vehicles have CDA. But more and more do.
And, relevant to the discussion — as of the 2021 model, the F-150 has CDA. (https://pickuptrucktalk.com/2020/10/2021-ford-f150-5-0l-v8-e...)
No wonder people feel the pain when they have to pay like $200 to fill up and be able to drive ~400miles. I don’t have sympathy except for the ones that legitimately use it for work. Otherwise it’s massively wasteful and all that’s different now is they can feel how wasteful their car is.
Which would make sense to me because there have been a ton of situations where some pandemic event has caused some previously generally stable thing to shift (up or down) to some new level, then we have chaos as other things try to adapt and find a new equilibrium. Then when the pandemic stops forcing that thing to an unusual level, it springs back toward its normal level, and again other things take time to adapt and find an equilibrium.
So actually we seem to get two edge-triggered periods of chaos where something shifts from value V1 to V2 (that's one edge trigger) and then shifts back from V2 to V1-ish (the other edge trigger).
And if you look at crude oil prices over the last few years, they were lower during 2020 than in previous years. Now they are higher. So that fits the pattern I'm describing.
There will be no stable equilibrium for a long time ahead. Governments around the world continue to introduce lockdowns on a short notice when cases rise and we are nowhere near COVID-restrictions free international travel. Any change in restrictions would change oil demand too.
We also had ten years worth of truck and SUV purchases prior to inauguration day early this year, and I recall everyone paying almost a dollar and a half less per gallon during that time period.
You don't want people to respond to economic incentives? That means there is no point to adding gas taxes to incentivize fuel efficiency - or do you believe that people only respond to increasing gas prices and not decreasing prices?
How, in your view, would such an asymmetric response function work?