Is 54.5 mpg CAFE a Magic Number? Hardly
Tuesday, August 9, 2011 by admin
Turns out 54.5 mpg is the magic number for the EPA’s 2025 Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard. The Obama administration Friday announced the new standard, to ramp up beginning in 2017 from the 2016 35.5-mpg CAFE. The Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration plan to co-write details for the new standard by the end of September. Together, they’ll tackle such issues as what kinds of sport/utilities should be counted as trucks.
Such uncertainty may have played into reports of Toyota’s hesitation in supporting the 54.5 mpg standard as late as Thursday. Toyota, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Chrysler Group, BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Jaguar/Land Rover, Kia, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Toyota and Volvo all joined Obama for his announcement July 29. I have to single out Hyundai, whose North American chief, John Krafcik, said at the Chicago auto show more than two years ago his company would accept any new fuel economy or emissions standard without protest. Krafcik said a stiff standard would not necessarily cause Hyundai to stop production of its rear drive Genesis, because those cars would always account for a small portion of the brand’s sales.
The administration first floated a 56.2 mpg proposal for 2017-25. Environmentalists wanted 62 mpg. The new standard, the White House says, will save consumers $1.7 trillion at the pump and $8,200 in new vehicle fuel costs compared with a 2010 model, while saving 12 billion barrels of oil.
Of course, these numbers are pure bunk.
Same with any environmental group’s estimate of fuel cost savings, or, say, the Center for Automotive Research’s (CAR) carefully calculated estimate, released well before Obama’s announcement, that the 56.2 mpg standard, would add an average of $6,714 to the price of a new car or truck.
On that last point, I plead guilty of reporting CAR’s estimate in the September issue of Motor Trend, and at this website. As analyst Jim Hall says, “all these projections are B.S. They assume today’s costs of the technology we’ll be using in 15 years.”
Technology progresses independent of government regulation, but just like the way the Motion Picture Production Code produced some of the smartest, snappiest double-entendres in American cinema from 1930 to 1967, the CAFE standards coincide with more than 30 years of some pretty interesting breakthroughs. Cars, or at least, interesting cars, were supposed to be over with when I got my driver’s license in 1974, months before the first CAFE standards.
Thirty-seven years later, we’re enjoying the greatest performance renaissance in the history of the automobile. Many four-cylinder engines make better horsepower than the average V-8 built during the Ford and Carter administrations.
“Nobody can tell me what the incremental cost of electronic engine control technology will be in 2020,” Hall says. New technologies with different goals can offset each other, or aid each other, he notes. An autonomous car doesn’t need heavy 5 mph bumpers.
Even though we’re stuck with CAFE instead of the gas tax that most fans of the car prefer, there is a market demand for better fuel economy. Whether you believe in Peak Oil and global warming or not, the demand for whatever finite resources we have is growing quickly. China, the country that saved Buick, already has driven up oil prices. India is next.
That’s largely why automakers “caved” to the 54.5 mpg standard, which sounds sky high right now. Remember that 54.5 mpg is not, literally, 54.5 mpg, that each automaker will have its own standard to achieve. The 35.5 mpg standard for 2016 uses the arcane “S” curve to ensures that fuel economy improvements for Honda Civics, for example, are roughly the same proportion as improvements for Chrysler 300s.
The “S” curve is why we’ll see more large German sedans with six-cylinder engines and diesels instead of V-8s, why fewer midsize cars will come with V-6 options, why we’ll see more sub-2.0-liter fours and full-size pickups with turbocharged V-6s. The larger, RWD cars won’t have to go away.
It’s why GM is betting heavily on the Voltec platform. As engineers improve the Chevy Volt’s powertrain, the first goal is reduced cost. It’s why Ford engineers who work exclusively on EcoBoost or hybrid technology can count on good job security for the next 14+ years.
With most major automakers working on electrified powertrains, there’s an opportunity for the industry to shift the onus of oil independence and CO2 reduction to the electric power industry and government. The cars and trucks are on the way; now we need better infrastructure and alternatives to coal-fired powerplants, which are dirty whether we use them to power our cars or our laptops.
The aluminum industry sees opportunity, too. In his July 11 remarks on Alcoa’s second quarter earnings, chairman and CEO, Klaus Kleinfeld, was optimistic.
“So we’re talking about doubling off of fuel efficiency into 2025,” Kleinfeld said. “Now that’s a discussion that’s going on, but it clearly shows things are pointing in the right direction, and aluminum is the material of choice, light-weighting is the name of the game here.”
I don’t buy a press release I just received from Ceres, a “national coalition of investors and public-interest organizations,” that the new standard will create 484,000 jobs by 2030. How can Ceres account for 2030’s levels of job efficiency today?
So when someone tells you these stringent 2025 CAFE standards are designed to put an end to the automobile as we know it, don’t believe him. Don’t believe the dollar amounts, either, whether they come from environmentalists, automotive analysts or the White House. We simply don’t know.
And if such government intervention gets you mad, redirect your anger toward the people who want to foist autonomous, automatic pilot-controlled cars on us by the end of the decade. You can start with Google.
Such uncertainty may have played into reports of Toyota’s hesitation in supporting the 54.5 mpg standard as late as Thursday. Toyota, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Chrysler Group, BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Jaguar/Land Rover, Kia, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Toyota and Volvo all joined Obama for his announcement July 29. I have to single out Hyundai, whose North American chief, John Krafcik, said at the Chicago auto show more than two years ago his company would accept any new fuel economy or emissions standard without protest. Krafcik said a stiff standard would not necessarily cause Hyundai to stop production of its rear drive Genesis, because those cars would always account for a small portion of the brand’s sales.
The administration first floated a 56.2 mpg proposal for 2017-25. Environmentalists wanted 62 mpg. The new standard, the White House says, will save consumers $1.7 trillion at the pump and $8,200 in new vehicle fuel costs compared with a 2010 model, while saving 12 billion barrels of oil.
Of course, these numbers are pure bunk.
Same with any environmental group’s estimate of fuel cost savings, or, say, the Center for Automotive Research’s (CAR) carefully calculated estimate, released well before Obama’s announcement, that the 56.2 mpg standard, would add an average of $6,714 to the price of a new car or truck.
On that last point, I plead guilty of reporting CAR’s estimate in the September issue of Motor Trend, and at this website. As analyst Jim Hall says, “all these projections are B.S. They assume today’s costs of the technology we’ll be using in 15 years.”
Technology progresses independent of government regulation, but just like the way the Motion Picture Production Code produced some of the smartest, snappiest double-entendres in American cinema from 1930 to 1967, the CAFE standards coincide with more than 30 years of some pretty interesting breakthroughs. Cars, or at least, interesting cars, were supposed to be over with when I got my driver’s license in 1974, months before the first CAFE standards.
Thirty-seven years later, we’re enjoying the greatest performance renaissance in the history of the automobile. Many four-cylinder engines make better horsepower than the average V-8 built during the Ford and Carter administrations.
“Nobody can tell me what the incremental cost of electronic engine control technology will be in 2020,” Hall says. New technologies with different goals can offset each other, or aid each other, he notes. An autonomous car doesn’t need heavy 5 mph bumpers.
Even though we’re stuck with CAFE instead of the gas tax that most fans of the car prefer, there is a market demand for better fuel economy. Whether you believe in Peak Oil and global warming or not, the demand for whatever finite resources we have is growing quickly. China, the country that saved Buick, already has driven up oil prices. India is next.
That’s largely why automakers “caved” to the 54.5 mpg standard, which sounds sky high right now. Remember that 54.5 mpg is not, literally, 54.5 mpg, that each automaker will have its own standard to achieve. The 35.5 mpg standard for 2016 uses the arcane “S” curve to ensures that fuel economy improvements for Honda Civics, for example, are roughly the same proportion as improvements for Chrysler 300s.
The “S” curve is why we’ll see more large German sedans with six-cylinder engines and diesels instead of V-8s, why fewer midsize cars will come with V-6 options, why we’ll see more sub-2.0-liter fours and full-size pickups with turbocharged V-6s. The larger, RWD cars won’t have to go away.
It’s why GM is betting heavily on the Voltec platform. As engineers improve the Chevy Volt’s powertrain, the first goal is reduced cost. It’s why Ford engineers who work exclusively on EcoBoost or hybrid technology can count on good job security for the next 14+ years.
With most major automakers working on electrified powertrains, there’s an opportunity for the industry to shift the onus of oil independence and CO2 reduction to the electric power industry and government. The cars and trucks are on the way; now we need better infrastructure and alternatives to coal-fired powerplants, which are dirty whether we use them to power our cars or our laptops.
The aluminum industry sees opportunity, too. In his July 11 remarks on Alcoa’s second quarter earnings, chairman and CEO, Klaus Kleinfeld, was optimistic.
“So we’re talking about doubling off of fuel efficiency into 2025,” Kleinfeld said. “Now that’s a discussion that’s going on, but it clearly shows things are pointing in the right direction, and aluminum is the material of choice, light-weighting is the name of the game here.”
I don’t buy a press release I just received from Ceres, a “national coalition of investors and public-interest organizations,” that the new standard will create 484,000 jobs by 2030. How can Ceres account for 2030’s levels of job efficiency today?
So when someone tells you these stringent 2025 CAFE standards are designed to put an end to the automobile as we know it, don’t believe him. Don’t believe the dollar amounts, either, whether they come from environmentalists, automotive analysts or the White House. We simply don’t know.
And if such government intervention gets you mad, redirect your anger toward the people who want to foist autonomous, automatic pilot-controlled cars on us by the end of the decade. You can start with Google.
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