Recent Comments:
First Drive: 2009 Chevrolet Traverse {Autoblog}
Jul 2nd 2008 6:35PM Disregarding the EPA window stickers, you need to review what the mileage of this vehicle by a constant standard, not something changing every year like the EPA does. Like the one that rated the VW Beetle in 1975 at 16 mpg with a 42hp flat four.
This Transverse appears to obtain 27.3 mpg by CAFE calculation. With the DI 3.6 engine raising Hp to 288, GM can downsize the 3.6l v6 to to about 250 hp or to about 3.1 liters. This would still be just about the non DI 3.6 performance. That would give the Transverse a 31.4 mpg CAFE.
That figure is TWICE the mileage of a '75 VW Beetle. Not bad. No one called the Beetle a guzzler back then, either.
Progress is steady, continuous and incremental. And its only 3.6 miles per gallon under the 2020 35 mpg CAFE standard. Add a T2B5 diesel option, add HCCI to the v6, and a few features like hybrid atributes, or even a mini-hybrid stop-start features, and the Transverse lambdas meets 2020 mileage targets at 35 mpg.
I'd guess the Transverse is about the largest, heaviest, vehicle that the auto makers will be building in 2020 that actually get 35 mpg. so 4900 # vehicles wil be about the largest we will see.
Standard pickups will be slightly downsized. The F100 Ford concept will probably forshadow where the regular pickup will go. More compact pickups will come too.
Anything bigger, F250, F350s, GMT 900 HD etc. will have to be achieved by raising equivalent auto mileage above 35 mpg, to pull up the fleet average.
More automakers make their true feelings known about CAFE {Autoblog Green}
Jul 2nd 2008 4:37PM Autos will easily meet the 35 mpg standards. The measuring standdards are no where near the ones published on the window stickers, by EPA.
Light trucks are quite another thing.
Trucks have certain properties that just prevent them from approaching much more than 28-30 mpgas CAFE measures mpg.
CAFE is adminisitered by NHTSA, not EPA, and they have administered the exactly same index ever since started in the '70s when cars averaged under 18 mpg for that auto model fleet. Even subcompacts like the VW beetle didn't get 18 mpg. It got 16% under the standard at 16 mpg. Today it tough to find even the largest SUVs that doesn't far surpass that . (don't forget they all get more than 22.7 mpg under the CAFE standards. The same Index today said the 2006 auto sales mix when we were pumping out SUVS, achieved a 30.7 mpg.
That's correct, four point three mpg, say it again 4.3 mpg, less than the standard to improve to in 2020. In this 2008 sales year, with more small cars, and lots fewer higher consumption vehicles, I don't doubt that the achieved CAFE for 2008 model cars will not meet the 35mpg CAFE target. Thats 12 years ahead of schedule.
But trucks will still not be much better than 23-24 mpg by CAFE measures. By 2010, truck CAFE should jump to about CAFE measured 27-28 mpg as clean diesels, T2B5 diesels, spread over the truck fleets. But then it will plateau. And it won't get much higher, except by downsizing and that won't go very far; perhaps 1 or 2 mpg.
The auto makers will be faced with fines for every truck sold, and you won't find any auto maker in the world making trucks getting 35 mpg, except for the tiny delivery wagons, like the Ford Transit imported in 2009 and sold in other parts of the world. GM, Toyota, Niissan, and others have these vehicles but no one saw a market, and just haven't imported them until now. But they aren't trucks. They are tall roof station wagons. Subcompacts with a truck high roof,
The only hope ithat they can drive their auto fleets up by an additional 10-15 mpg or so for each car to offset the 8 mpg truck shortfall.
Its no wonder the auto makers are trying to draw the line in the sand, now.
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VW decision on U.S. plant in July, sorry Michigan {Autoblog}
Jun 30th 2008 5:39PM The democrat governor campaigned to raise taxes during hard times.
The taxes were to be spent attracting new business. Typical Democrat double talk.
So tell me how many VW or any other factories have the bureaucrats attracted. While living on their civil service, unfirable sinecures.
1000s? 100s? 10? or any at all? What do the taxpyers have to show for that tax increase, or the constant stream of others over the years?
Left wing Democrats are in charge of States where the the people are feeling so blue, Its perfect to call them the Blue States.
American biofuel plants filing for bankruptcy protection {Autoblog Green}
Jun 30th 2008 4:44PM My feelings are captured by exactly your comments.
ROTFLOL !
BTW, When do the subsidies expire?
Veteran journalist John McElroy calls for EV1 revival; too bad it's not that simple {Autoblog Green}
Jun 28th 2008 6:30PM Ah Reality returns! Thank You.
A new BEV from the ground up would cost less than resurrecting the EV1.
If you wanted to "retro" it I suppose you could model the body for the new tooling from the EV1, but that would not be a genuine revived EV-1 anymore, than the Challeger is a copy of the '71.
No, the EV1 has entered the hallowed Valhalla, where all good conspiracy theory products go. Into myth and fables.
Obama to Detroit: What do you need? Detroit to Obama: Money. {Autoblog Green}
Jun 27th 2008 3:50PM Typical stupid politician.
Raise FICA Taxes, Raise income Taxes; Raise Cap Gains Taxes; Raise Corporate Taxes.
Now that possible customer's disposable incomes after taxes, are slashed; and can't afford to buy a new car.
Go to Detroit and ask "How can I help?"
How about deciding not to run, after all?
Dodge increases '09 Ram power and efficiency {Autoblog Green}
Jun 27th 2008 3:35PM A better truck over what it replaces, but it needs coming changes ASAP. It needs the small Cummins diesel sooner, that is coming. It also needs the two-mode hybrid, that is coming too.
The best thing that could happen though is to scrap the 3.7 v6.
A full size proper pickup needs, a small v-8. They could produce the improved 4.7 v8, de-stroked to 4.0 or 4.2, that gets better mileage, at minimal expense; hopefully over say 18 city and 20 on the highway.
I don't know if the 4.7 v8 has MDS, but that seems a logical and easy mod that wouldn't be expensive either.
California unveils major plan to cut emissions {Autoblog Green}
Jun 27th 2008 3:11PM I don't know where you get your figures, but California already uses no California coal generated electricity. It may still have some antique standby plants that are seldom available, though.
California doesn't care how dirty the electricity it imports, is generated though.
Nor is it allowing the building of any nuclear or coal plants, and has had that effective moratorium position for ten years or more.
This is nothing but another bureaucratic stupid job expansion proposal. It exists to provide sinecures for CARB bureaucrats. The self-same CARBites, who have not finished the job that they were charted to do.
But is so mundane and passe` to actually clean the air of toxic pollutants, like SOx, NOx, HVOCs, PM 10 and PM2.5.
California is not trendy anymore, in cleaning its air of these genuine toxic pollutants. Every other state in the Union has measurably better air, now.
The federal standards with a slower implementation schedule, have caught up, and now meet and in some significant cases exceed, the California standards.
What a great job they are doing, living off their once leading edge contributions, as they regulate the dirtiest air in all 50 states.
California is falling behind. It can only generate between 80-90% of its electricity today, due to the stupid policies of the California greens and their elected fools.
If it were not for imported power from Nevada, Arizona, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Utah, and even third world Mexico, California would suffer daily blackouts and brownouts.
Unlike normal exporters, the other State regulated Utilities can ONLY legally export surplus electricity,regaerdless of prioce. California's stupid policies are now drawing down reserve margins in all these states.
Overnight, as soon as ONE single state regulatory commission, says no more exports to California, to protect its own citizens needs, a cascade of similar injunctions will follow. An immediate California crissi will ensue. Since no single state can pick up the missing load for California, that gets larger and larger every year.
Have you forgotten the Gray Davis fiasco, started by an electricity generation deficit? California's position is ten times worse today.
Regarding the requirement of 20% renewables, where somehow hydro has been defined as not a renewable. Apparently rain no longer falls, and runs off into rivers and hydro reservoirs. There are stranded wind and solar plants built today, that can't get their power from the California deserts to the coastal users.
The NIMBY and eco-crazies, have just killed another project to build transmission lines to bring in the renewable wind and solar power. As they say, the transmission lines are unsightly; and they have re-dredged up bogus claims that electric high tension lines are inimical to the biota.
Already California's electricity brownouts are driving companies out of the State. California regulators are forcing companies to have to reduce load as soon as a brownout, now almost daily event, is imminent. California has already achieved the electricity reliability of a Third World country for its industrial customers.
The chickens are coming home to roost on the eco-crazies and the California voters who elect these know-nothings.
There is gathering scientific critiques of the supposed certainties of AGW. The current decade of cooling, was never predicted,and undermines their certainties.
Finally, the expanded atmospheric theory by Dr. Ferenc Mikolczi is now providing the theoretical foundation to question all GHG based AGW.
Dubai residents not in any rush to give up gas-guzzlers {Autoblog Green}
Jun 24th 2008 1:25PM I see that armmat, Our resident anti-American troll, once again, emerges from his underground cave in the bowels of Gotham city, to unleash his invective.
Unappreciative America refuses to recognize his genius, and following in the footsteps of Lex Luthor, and Penguin/Joker/TwoFace, he will make America pay... with bon mot strings of scatology learned at the knee of Markos Malitis.
German firms or Japanese firms building giant SUVs are spared, Amerika and Detroit are the sole recipient of his self-hating invective.
armmat feels that the human nature of Dubai's citizenry to utilize the largest, most comfortable, vehicles available, when cost or fuel efficiency is not a requirement, will somehow change under his withering misdirected fire.
Is John McCain's $300m battery prize a good idea? Pelosi chimes in {Autoblog Green}
Jun 24th 2008 12:51PM McCain has supported the Bush budgets including funding for the US ABC, which helped bring the Li-Ion battery to automotive applications.
McCain has voted for the Energy Bills of 2001 and 2005 that rationalized Nuclear Power licensing and plant construction. As a result Utilities have ordered 34 new Nuclear power plants in the last two years.
Where was Pelosi?
McCain voted for the enabling legislation and the supported the international negotiations to re-create ITER. Bush has worked to re-mobilize the international consortia to build and the fund the ITER Fusion Power experiment. Every large developed and developing country is aboard. The one that Mr. Clinton's own Democrats sabotaged for him in the 1990s, or it would be built andd functioing today. ITER is the LAST experiment before building clean, inexhaustible, non-polluting, no waste, Fusion power plants. Fusion Power solves the Energy problem; and probably AGW too. If such a thing really exists. Democrats speechify as if it did exist, to raise taxes; but don't vote to do anything about it when it interferes with their boodling.
Where was Pelosi ?
She led the opposition so as to preserve more fnding for "earmarks" in Democrats districts so they can reward politically connected friends.
Where was Pelosi's Democrats ?
She was politicing for the irrelevant Energy Act of 2007 that raised CAFE from an actual achieved 31 mpg, to 35 mpg, 15 years from now. BFD. CAFE achieved was 31 mpg,(2006) per the govenment's own EIA statistics before it passed, and with the decline, in 2008 of SUV sales, probably increases to 33-34 mpg, by itself, this automotive model year, as CAFE measures mileage.
Mandating a 1 mpg increase in mileage, in 15 years is the ultimate triumph of image over substance. Full of good political Sound and Fury signifying absolutely Nothing.
Meanwhile Obama is licking his lips at another tax to raise, and spend. Just imagine the opportunities for fresh graft and corruption that he learned so well in the Chicago machine, dispersing a fresh 1000 or 2000 billion dollars.
Obama never met a TAX that he voted against, and won't start now.
