President Obama recently proposed that we raise fuel economy average from around 25 MPG now to about 35 MPG in a few years. This post is not about raising CAFE standards.
I would like to start by saying that I really like the Atlantic. The biggest disappointment about it is that it has too much good content to make an RSS feed useful. I generally find the quality of writing to be excellent, the views well supported and in depth. Every now and then I find a poor article or post. The latest example of the latter description is this post about the new CAFE standards. I have decided to pick apart each point here, because that is what I did when I first saw the article. Finding unsupported statements masquerading as fact such as this is always annoying; when someone does it under the respectable branding of the Atlantic, it is disheartening. I have tried to assemble some evidence, and am going to squeeze some more scientific information out of official safety ratings and fuel economy information. In the meantime, articles which express concerns similar to the original can be found on the Atlantic and Christian Science Monitor.
Firstly, 35 MPG? How does that have people all in a fit? That isn’t radical! When driving a 1999 Toyota Camry I generally average 33 MPG combined driving. I can easily eke out over 35 MPG if i drive a bit more carefully. Driving a 3000+ pound 1980’s Volvo (It is a solid steel beast!) I have pulled over 28 MPG out of a tank. Even a simple engine tune up would give a power and efficiency boost. I am pretty sure that two decades of technological innovation and weight reduction strategies could be produce a similar car with far better mileage.
I will go through the four points in backwards order:
• If you want to cut down on the pollution from driving, this is about the worst possible way to do it. On the other hand, it may be the only politically feasible way to do it. If you take global warming seriously, as I do, it may be the best of a bad set of policy choices.
Is this really the worst possible way to cut down on pollution from driving? Really? You can’t think of a worse way? Is it worse than easing restrictions on pollutants in the hopes that the market sorts something out? This is heavily context dependent, and if you judge solutions in any part by feasibility, then you may find that this is the best solution.
• This will either help the Big Three compete, or seal their doom as the Japanese manufacturers continue to eat into their market share. If I had to bet, I’d wager this means big ongoing subsidies for our favorite three public charities.
This is a safe non-statement. “Maybe… but maybe not” is not an argument. It is not even a proposition. Yes, the new standards may help the Big Three. Yes, the new standards may hurt the big three. But there is a third way: it may have no real effect on the Big Three. They may adjust fine, just like the rest of the world probably will.
Also, apparently the automakers support the new standards. So at least they aren’t being coerced into it. Maybe their new cars will be more competitive around the world.
• It will reduce our carbon emissions, but not by as much as advertised, because more fuel efficient cars make driving cheaper, so people will do more of it. This “rebound” effect robs about 25% of gains, and also means more congestion, and more wear-and-tear on roads.
Even if it did make driving radically cheaper, and we only got 75% of the gains out of the improvement, how is that a counter argument? This has said “Yes, this will be an effective program, just not quite as effective as you say.” Its like winning the lottery and then complaining that you would rather have won more money.
• It will raise the prices of cars, and make them less safe.
This is a desperate shot. This is actually two separate assertions, each runs into contradictions with other points raised. These points are also not linked as the sentence format would suggest. It is misleading to put these together, safety and price do not go hand in hand.
If you assume that it will make vehicles more expensive, then surely the previous point about cost of driving makes no sense. The purchase price of a new car is the largest part of the cost of driving. Gasoline costs for a year at 25 MPG, 12000 miles a year and $3 gasoline would be about $1440 a year. Raise that to 35 MPG with the same price gas only $1028. Sure, its a savings, but is that really enough to make you get a new car just to drive a few more miles? More expensive gas in the future will close that gap more. Sources vary widely on how long people keep their cars for, but at a four year life span (this seemed to be a popular upper limit in my unscientific scouring of the internets), the gas savings only add up to about $1600. Clearly gas cost is not a major component of the vehicle cost. The argument that it will make cars more expensive and driving cheaper just don’t belong together.
But then, when you look at it, what they are all quoting a senior administration official who pointed to a $600 price rise over 10 years. Thats 60 dollars a year. If you are worried, put away twenty cents into a jar today. Put twenty cents in tomorrow. Put twenty cents in that jar every day. On Sundays, put that twenty cents in the offering plate. Take a two week holiday away from the jar every year. In ten years, that jar will cover the price rise. Painless, isn’t it? You don’t even have to sacrifice vacation time. So maybe it will lower the price of driving – but that would make cars more affordable.
The safety argument is completely unfounded and dangerous to make. The basic train of thought goes like this: to be more efficient, cars need to be lighter, if they are lighter, they are more dangerous. This is wrong. Making cars lighter is not the only way to make them more efficient (and indeed, since 1984 fuel economy has changed little as “cars have gotten bigger faster and uglier” as my grandfather observed). Lighter cars are also not necessarily more dangerous, in fact, the opposite may be true. This argument is dangerous to make as it ignores issues more important to safety and may give people the impression that there is nothing that they can do to make themselves safer on the road.
If one assumes that more efficient cars have to be lighter, they can contradict other arguments pushed in this article. One argument says lighter car has less energy and so will absorb more energy in a crash. This is true. So if we are to assume that making all cars more efficient will make them lighter, then we see that all of the cars involved in a crash will be lighter. There will actually be less energy banging about in future crashes. As it turns out, this is fairly unimportant. Car design and safety features are far more important than weight in a car crash. Driver ability, in turn, is far more important in having a safe car than anything. Cars are not dangerous without a bad or impaired driver lurking behind a wheel. Vehicle weight cannot cause an accident, but drivers can avoid accidents.
Many people site this report by the National Academy of Sciences which states that CAFE standards were “probably” responsible for a rise of 1300 to 2600 deaths on the road each year. The report notes that not everyone on the committee agreed with this, and some thought that CAFE was only responsible for 0 deaths. A few pages later it says that decreasing weight of heavier vehicles (the ones which have the most to lose) would actually make them safer and less damaging, potentially resulting in fewer deaths from traffic accidents. While the report is a cracking read, the issue is clearly undecided. Some sites such as one HotAir.com compare the 1300-2600 figure to the number of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afganistan, which is not really relevant at all. A generous rounding up gives about 300,000 soldiers in the two countries. A small rounding down gives about 300,000,000 people in the United States. The scale just doesn’t work for that argument. Overall, there were about 41,000 traffic fatalities in the US in 2007. Thats about 41 fatalities per 300,000 people, the high National Academy of Sciences estimate (which they aren’t even certain about) works out to 2 people per 300,000 in population. Besides, if those people were wearing helmets, flak jackets and had proper training on how to defend themselves on the road, there would probably be significantly fewer accidents and fatalities on the road. At this point it may be pointless to note that Americans aren’t the only ones to die in Iraq or Afghanistan. While our roads may be dangerous, they are not nearly as dangerous as active war zones. The comparison is silly, and the assertion is based on a report which admits that it could be completely wrong. It hasn’t even been demonstrated that the CAFE standards do lead to more deaths.
Better driver education and stricter driving tests may do more to improve safety than anything else. The only driver education i received was chauffeuring my grandfather around the countryside for a week. My written test was a ten question multiple choice test. The hardest question was “Up to what age should children be kept in child safety seats?” the easier questions were along the lines of “What color is a stop sign?” and “Which side of the road should you drive on if there are no lane markings?” I still don’t know how old kids need to be before they get out of a car seat. My driving test was going around a block in an empty neighborhood. Anyone who actually cares about improving vehicle safety should start with driver safety. As long as tests ignore real safety skills and insurance companies don’t bother with education, our roads will be full of idiot drivers. All the safety features in the world are useless if someone is barreling down an unknown road at night while on the phone and changing the radio station.
If you assume that cars will get lighter, then surely you must also recognize that the cars will cause less damage to our roads. Lighter cars means less wear and tear.
Reducing the weight of a car is not the only way to make it more efficient. Engine technology has not stopped evolving. According to http://www.fueleconomy.gov less than 15% of the energy in gasoline ends up getting the car from point a to the destination.
There is tremendous room for improving the efficiency of engines and drive systems of vehicles. It is not a big secret as to what can be done to improve efficiency, a link on the same page lists seven improvements which increase efficiency 5-13%. The forthcoming Aptera and Loremo tout their aerodynamic shape as the best way to reduce energy use at cruising speed. Yes, these are stereotypically small cars, but they are just extreme examples (getting 120-300 MPG). The faster a car goes, the more energy it loses to air resistance. More efficiently shaped cars could save fuel with no change to the inside or engine. To think that there are no technology improvements to be made, and only weight can cut down on fuel consumption is to be ignorant of innovation and scientific progress happening every day.
Performance does not need to be sacrificed for fuel economy. The report from the National Academy of Sciences observes that between 1975 and 1984 there was a 62% improvement in fuel economy without any loss in 0-60 performance. After that it says that “Fuel economy remained essentially unchanged while vehicles became 20 percent heavier and 0-60 mph acceleration times became, on average, 25 percent faster.” So the argument that performance or weight needs to suffer for fuel economy to improve simply fails here. The report goes on to detail technological improvements which would improve fuel economy without sacrificing performance.
The efficiency for safety tradeoff is a myth. You can speculate all you like as to who may benefit from perpetuating that myth, but the fact remains that the evidence does not wholly support that argument. The argument is not over, the debate has not been settled. Presenting this argument as a fact is irresponsible at best. Supporting this idea contradicts other arguments made. The safety argument is not only wrong, but it is dangerous. Larger cars are not inherently safer (am I the only person who remembers the SUV rollover epidemic about 8 years ago?). Car safety is determined far more by design and safety features than weight. This also glosses over the fact that far more can be done for safety by improving the drivers themselves.
So if I were to assemble some points to post about CAFE standards I would say:
Lighter vehicles, with more appropriate performance, with far better fuel economy may be safer than current vehicles.
Safety concerns are not valid as arguments against CAFE or lighter cars: the conclusion does not follow from the premises. They are not helpful either, as they ignore the importance of the driver in road safety.
Inflation happens, or so my economist friends tell me. But also, scientific progress makes technology cheaper (similar to Moore’s Law).
Innovation and technological advances will probably provide the greatest influence on fuel economy and safety in the future.
Calm down, CAFE is only an average: fuel chugging trucks and SUVs will still be on tap at your local dealership as long as people want to buy them. Even better: those vehicles will probably benefit from the performance upgrades that technology can bring. Performance and fuel economy can improve hand in hand.
I do not know if CAFE standards are the best way to improve things. The point of this post is not to glorify more stringent fuel economy standards. The point of this post is to point to more information on the matter. The debate about the effectiveness of rightness of CAFE is not over. I hope that I have brought a little debate to the original article. I want people to see that the original article (and so many others) may not have all of the answers, and are not be the final word on these matters. Hopefully people will find more objective reporting on the matter elsewhere. Hopefully this blog will not become a refuge of unsubstantiated claims and abuse of logic.
you wake up and you realize...
the rise and fall of standards
May 21, 2009President Obama recently proposed that we raise fuel economy average from around 25 MPG now to about 35 MPG in a few years. This post is not about raising CAFE standards.
I would like to start by saying that I really like the Atlantic. The biggest disappointment about it is that it has too much good content to make an RSS feed useful. I generally find the quality of writing to be excellent, the views well supported and in depth. Every now and then I find a poor article or post. The latest example of the latter description is this post about the new CAFE standards. I have decided to pick apart each point here, because that is what I did when I first saw the article. Finding unsupported statements masquerading as fact such as this is always annoying; when someone does it under the respectable branding of the Atlantic, it is disheartening. I have tried to assemble some evidence, and am going to squeeze some more scientific information out of official safety ratings and fuel economy information. In the meantime, articles which express concerns similar to the original can be found on the Atlantic and Christian Science Monitor.
Firstly, 35 MPG? How does that have people all in a fit? That isn’t radical! When driving a 1999 Toyota Camry I generally average 33 MPG combined driving. I can easily eke out over 35 MPG if i drive a bit more carefully. Driving a 3000+ pound 1980’s Volvo (It is a solid steel beast!) I have pulled over 28 MPG out of a tank. Even a simple engine tune up would give a power and efficiency boost. I am pretty sure that two decades of technological innovation and weight reduction strategies could be produce a similar car with far better mileage.
I will go through the four points in backwards order:
Is this really the worst possible way to cut down on pollution from driving? Really? You can’t think of a worse way? Is it worse than easing restrictions on pollutants in the hopes that the market sorts something out? This is heavily context dependent, and if you judge solutions in any part by feasibility, then you may find that this is the best solution.
This is a safe non-statement. “Maybe… but maybe not” is not an argument. It is not even a proposition. Yes, the new standards may help the Big Three. Yes, the new standards may hurt the big three. But there is a third way: it may have no real effect on the Big Three. They may adjust fine, just like the rest of the world probably will.
Also, apparently the automakers support the new standards. So at least they aren’t being coerced into it. Maybe their new cars will be more competitive around the world.
Even if it did make driving radically cheaper, and we only got 75% of the gains out of the improvement, how is that a counter argument? This has said “Yes, this will be an effective program, just not quite as effective as you say.” Its like winning the lottery and then complaining that you would rather have won more money.
This is a desperate shot. This is actually two separate assertions, each runs into contradictions with other points raised. These points are also not linked as the sentence format would suggest. It is misleading to put these together, safety and price do not go hand in hand.
If you assume that it will make vehicles more expensive, then surely the previous point about cost of driving makes no sense. The purchase price of a new car is the largest part of the cost of driving. Gasoline costs for a year at 25 MPG, 12000 miles a year and $3 gasoline would be about $1440 a year. Raise that to 35 MPG with the same price gas only $1028. Sure, its a savings, but is that really enough to make you get a new car just to drive a few more miles? More expensive gas in the future will close that gap more. Sources vary widely on how long people keep their cars for, but at a four year life span (this seemed to be a popular upper limit in my unscientific scouring of the internets), the gas savings only add up to about $1600. Clearly gas cost is not a major component of the vehicle cost. The argument that it will make cars more expensive and driving cheaper just don’t belong together.
But then, when you look at it, what they are all quoting a senior administration official who pointed to a $600 price rise over 10 years. Thats 60 dollars a year. If you are worried, put away twenty cents into a jar today. Put twenty cents in tomorrow. Put twenty cents in that jar every day. On Sundays, put that twenty cents in the offering plate. Take a two week holiday away from the jar every year. In ten years, that jar will cover the price rise. Painless, isn’t it? You don’t even have to sacrifice vacation time. So maybe it will lower the price of driving – but that would make cars more affordable.
The safety argument is completely unfounded and dangerous to make. The basic train of thought goes like this: to be more efficient, cars need to be lighter, if they are lighter, they are more dangerous. This is wrong. Making cars lighter is not the only way to make them more efficient (and indeed, since 1984 fuel economy has changed little as “cars have gotten bigger faster and uglier” as my grandfather observed). Lighter cars are also not necessarily more dangerous, in fact, the opposite may be true. This argument is dangerous to make as it ignores issues more important to safety and may give people the impression that there is nothing that they can do to make themselves safer on the road.
If one assumes that more efficient cars have to be lighter, they can contradict other arguments pushed in this article. One argument says lighter car has less energy and so will absorb more energy in a crash. This is true. So if we are to assume that making all cars more efficient will make them lighter, then we see that all of the cars involved in a crash will be lighter. There will actually be less energy banging about in future crashes. As it turns out, this is fairly unimportant. Car design and safety features are far more important than weight in a car crash. Driver ability, in turn, is far more important in having a safe car than anything. Cars are not dangerous without a bad or impaired driver lurking behind a wheel. Vehicle weight cannot cause an accident, but drivers can avoid accidents.
Many people site this report by the National Academy of Sciences which states that CAFE standards were “probably” responsible for a rise of 1300 to 2600 deaths on the road each year. The report notes that not everyone on the committee agreed with this, and some thought that CAFE was only responsible for 0 deaths. A few pages later it says that decreasing weight of heavier vehicles (the ones which have the most to lose) would actually make them safer and less damaging, potentially resulting in fewer deaths from traffic accidents. While the report is a cracking read, the issue is clearly undecided. Some sites such as one HotAir.com compare the 1300-2600 figure to the number of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afganistan, which is not really relevant at all. A generous rounding up gives about 300,000 soldiers in the two countries. A small rounding down gives about 300,000,000 people in the United States. The scale just doesn’t work for that argument. Overall, there were about 41,000 traffic fatalities in the US in 2007. Thats about 41 fatalities per 300,000 people, the high National Academy of Sciences estimate (which they aren’t even certain about) works out to 2 people per 300,000 in population. Besides, if those people were wearing helmets, flak jackets and had proper training on how to defend themselves on the road, there would probably be significantly fewer accidents and fatalities on the road. At this point it may be pointless to note that Americans aren’t the only ones to die in Iraq or Afghanistan. While our roads may be dangerous, they are not nearly as dangerous as active war zones. The comparison is silly, and the assertion is based on a report which admits that it could be completely wrong. It hasn’t even been demonstrated that the CAFE standards do lead to more deaths.
Better driver education and stricter driving tests may do more to improve safety than anything else. The only driver education i received was chauffeuring my grandfather around the countryside for a week. My written test was a ten question multiple choice test. The hardest question was “Up to what age should children be kept in child safety seats?” the easier questions were along the lines of “What color is a stop sign?” and “Which side of the road should you drive on if there are no lane markings?” I still don’t know how old kids need to be before they get out of a car seat. My driving test was going around a block in an empty neighborhood. Anyone who actually cares about improving vehicle safety should start with driver safety. As long as tests ignore real safety skills and insurance companies don’t bother with education, our roads will be full of idiot drivers. All the safety features in the world are useless if someone is barreling down an unknown road at night while on the phone and changing the radio station.
If you assume that cars will get lighter, then surely you must also recognize that the cars will cause less damage to our roads. Lighter cars means less wear and tear.
Reducing the weight of a car is not the only way to make it more efficient. Engine technology has not stopped evolving. According to http://www.fueleconomy.gov less than 15% of the energy in gasoline ends up getting the car from point a to the destination.
There is tremendous room for improving the efficiency of engines and drive systems of vehicles. It is not a big secret as to what can be done to improve efficiency, a link on the same page lists seven improvements which increase efficiency 5-13%. The forthcoming Aptera and Loremo tout their aerodynamic shape as the best way to reduce energy use at cruising speed. Yes, these are stereotypically small cars, but they are just extreme examples (getting 120-300 MPG). The faster a car goes, the more energy it loses to air resistance. More efficiently shaped cars could save fuel with no change to the inside or engine. To think that there are no technology improvements to be made, and only weight can cut down on fuel consumption is to be ignorant of innovation and scientific progress happening every day.
Performance does not need to be sacrificed for fuel economy. The report from the National Academy of Sciences observes that between 1975 and 1984 there was a 62% improvement in fuel economy without any loss in 0-60 performance. After that it says that “Fuel economy remained essentially unchanged while vehicles became 20 percent heavier and 0-60 mph acceleration times became, on average, 25 percent faster.” So the argument that performance or weight needs to suffer for fuel economy to improve simply fails here. The report goes on to detail technological improvements which would improve fuel economy without sacrificing performance.
The efficiency for safety tradeoff is a myth. You can speculate all you like as to who may benefit from perpetuating that myth, but the fact remains that the evidence does not wholly support that argument. The argument is not over, the debate has not been settled. Presenting this argument as a fact is irresponsible at best. Supporting this idea contradicts other arguments made. The safety argument is not only wrong, but it is dangerous. Larger cars are not inherently safer (am I the only person who remembers the SUV rollover epidemic about 8 years ago?). Car safety is determined far more by design and safety features than weight. This also glosses over the fact that far more can be done for safety by improving the drivers themselves.
So if I were to assemble some points to post about CAFE standards I would say:
I do not know if CAFE standards are the best way to improve things. The point of this post is not to glorify more stringent fuel economy standards. The point of this post is to point to more information on the matter. The debate about the effectiveness of rightness of CAFE is not over. I hope that I have brought a little debate to the original article. I want people to see that the original article (and so many others) may not have all of the answers, and are not be the final word on these matters. Hopefully people will find more objective reporting on the matter elsewhere. Hopefully this blog will not become a refuge of unsubstantiated claims and abuse of logic.