A couple of things have happened recently that presage huge change for all of us. One of those things is that oil went briefly to $100 per barrel, and the price of gasoline has skyrocketed. I don’t know about you, but as a result of this, I’m driving a whole lot more carefully, and, when I can, I’m driving less.
A second thing is that the Congress passed, and the president signed, an energy bill that significantly increases the fuel economy that new-car fleets must deliver. This is called Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE, and the new standard requires that by 2020, each manufacturer’s fleet obtain 35 mpg. The previous requirement was 27.5 mpg.
CAFE seems a bass-ackwards way of achieving the goal of reducing petroleum usage and vehicle emissions. It asks the manufacturers to solve a problem that’s caused by the manufacturers’ customers. That’s us. Better to hold us all responsible for our actions and just tax fuel, I think. Use the proceeds to repair roads, educate kids, provide healthcare, whatever.
Anyway, this means that big engines are gone, or soon will be. Big vehicles
also eventually will be gone, most probably: big vehicles = big engines = lousy fuel economy. In fact, General Motors just announced cancellation of a new V-8 it had planned for its luxury cars. The planners there obviously understand the handwriting on the wall. (Cash and prizes if you can name the reference, and what that handwriting actually said. Well, imaginary cash, imaginary prizes.)
(Or maybe the planners at GM aren’t all that smart after all. A piece in today’s paper has Bob Lutz, GM’s vice chairman, saying that American consumers can still “have it all,” V-8 engines and huge pickups and SUVs. All we have to do is make more ethanol. Which of course takes huge amounts of water and electricity, and diverts corn from being used as food, thereby doing things like pricing tortillas out of reach for poor Mexican families. Sigh.)
Anyway: In the short term, the V-8 will be replaced by smaller gas engines with fewer cylinders. But in the longer term, gasoline probably will become all but obsolete.
So, how will we get around? The answer to that depends upon who you talk to, but in general, look for cars to get smaller and lighter.
Beyond that, the European manufacturers are betting on diesel.
That’s now more possible than ever, now that engineers have figured out how to scrub diesel exhaust so that it is very clean indeed. Diesel engines also get stellar fuel economy even as they deliver stunning horsepower and torque.
Of the domestics, General Motors is betting that vehicles will become electric. The largest Asian manufacturer is big on electricity too, having pioneered the hybrid vehicle and having said that every vehicle in its line eventually will be offered with a hybrid option. Part of this option involves so-called plug-in hybrids that could be charged from the existing electrical grid while they’re parked in your garage or your work parking lot.
But I'm just not so sure about plug-ins. No matter what anyone else says about the source of the gasses that are causing global warming, the fact is that coal is the biggest single source. It’s common, it’s cheap, it’s a gross polluter. Plug-in electrical vehicles just put a larger generating load on coal-fired generating plants, which will have to burn more coal to carry that load. They transfer the pollutant generation from the driver’s tailpipe to the plant that supplies the electricity. The green crazoids love these things, but they’re not a real solution.
There’s another option, though, that several companies are working on. It’s the hydrogen fuel cell. This is a very complex system that uses the reaction between hydrogen and oxygen in an onboard fuel stack to generate electricity, which then operates the vehicle. The only emission from this process is pure water.
This technology is advancing quickly and seems a promising approach. The problem, of course, is the lack of hydrogen fill-up spots.
What is the real solution? Most pundits seem to think that we’ll see a mix of all these technologies – electric plug-in, hybrid, diesel and hydrogen powering smaller, lighter cars. But how it all will eventually play out remains anyone’s guess. The only thing that’s sure is that change is upon us.
-JFT
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