The road ahead: How we’ll get to 54.5 mpg by 2025 | Hacker News Reader

The road ahead: How we’ll get to 54.5 mpg by 2025

arstechnica.com

21 pointsiProject13 comments

We are facing 2 problems:

1.) To much fossil energy consumption 2.) disease and overweight because of lack of exercise

well, there is a very old and simple invention solving both problems:

>>> the bicycle <<<

Europe has been moving in that direction, with an increase in biking, and improvements in biking infrastructure even in countries that weren't traditionally very bike-friendly (like Spain). But it's hard to replicate that in the U.S. because the cities are so much less compact. You would need more than just improvement in roads, but shorter distances, and better transit for the places where you do have longer distances. In the suburb I grew up in, my dad drove 50 miles roundtrip to get to work, the nearest grocery store was 3 miles away, the nearest restaurants/bars were 5 miles away, and there was no transit system at all. So biking tended not to be too popular, except among kids going to friends' houses within the same neighborhood.

You forget the new electric motor assist bikes.

I had a 55mpg Geo Metro back in '92, 20 years later we have a Prius C with about the same mileage (although the Prius is much better around town.)

But we also have a station wagon and an old pickup. I think one thing that makes it hard for the average US car owner to go for very efficient vehicles is that at least some trips will require more passenger and/or cargo space. Given that gas is still relatively cheap there's not enough incentive to buy an efficient car if it's the only car you buy.

Seems like it would be pretty easy these days to insure/register/tax a fleet of cars for a household and encourage the cheapest alternative. Soccer mom could still use the minivan a couple times a week but use the Prius for shopping trips. You could meter each car and then pay a usage-based fee at the end of the month.

There are already many vehicles that will do far over 55mpg on a "fossil fuel" powered engine. Unfortunately, higher mpg = higher carbon emissions. As long as the Govt and Oil industries control environmental regulations, they can easily control maximum mpg by regulating how much emission can come from the engine (and thus, how efficiently the engine can burn gas).

Simple logic, theyre just hoping everybody keeps buying the environmentalism sales tactic so they can continue to force us to buy electric cars or low mpg cars. You are either buying their lithium, or overpaying for their gas...

I'm finding it a bit hard to make sense of your comment.

I don't know of that "many vehicles that will do far over 55mpg on a fossil fuel powered engine."

And how is "higher mpg = higher carbon emissions"? Higher mpg means less gas per mile, leading to less emissions per mile. As for the claim that government "can easily control maximum mpg", really?

So either I'm not seeing it properly, or the comment is anything but "simple logic".

Slight nitpick: higher MPG does not necessarily mean less emissions per mile; car engines do differ in the amount of emissions they produce per gallon of gas consumed.

For example, adding a catalytic converter to a car may decrease both MPG and emissions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalytic_converter#Environment...), so removing it may increase both MPG and emissions. And that is even disregarding the fact that adding that converter increases the weight of the car.

Also the fuel has a large impact on the MPG since fuels differ in energy content per volume.

I like how the first picture is of a Ferrari engine. I don't think high fuel mileage is Ferrari's main selling point, is it? :)

The article (which I mostly just skimmed) seem to center on technological solutions. But since CAFE is a fleet average, I wonder if makers won't just throw an EV or two in their lineup. With an EPA rating of 99mpg or more for EVs, that ought to bring the average right up. I guess that means people still have to buy them, though.

They're working on a hybrid.

I believe it was in the article as an example of an engine using Direct Fuel Injection which the article examines as one possible way to improve fuel efficiency.

I was a bit disappointed in the direct injection portion of the article. I'm not sure why the author chose high-performance vehicles as the poster child for direct injection, because they definitely weren't the first to use it, and definitely not the ones to use it in large numbers.

Some of the earliest uses of direct injection in production cars were Japanese makes in rather pedestrian sedans. VW went all out with direct injection around 2000 in their 2.0T engine, which is available in every car (except the Toureg) they sell in the US, ranging from the Golf, to the Tiguan, to the CC. I would not be surprised if VW sold the greatest number of direct injection engines in the world.

By contrast, Ferrari just started using direct injection in 2009. BMW just started using it in 2006. Despite the image we're sold by performance brands, they often lag behind in technology, simply because they don't have the budgets to do the R&D. They leave that to the big guys, then license the technology once it's been deployed in large numbers.

54.5 mpg using US gallons is 65.5 mpg using imperial gallons, so it is harder than it sounds for those of us more used to imperial gallons.

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