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How cool: Washington has decided to save the planet by raising the nation’s fuel economy standards. By 2016, all new cars and trucks must average 35.5 miles per gallon.
After that announcement, I started getting e-mails and phone calls prophesying what it means — the end of large SUVs, trucks only for those with occupational licenses to prove they need one in their business. So just what does it mean?It means very little. This new plan stipulates that light trucks must get 30 miles per gallon in 2016, but we already have a Chevrolet Suburban that the government rates as doing that. More on that efficiency rating in just a moment."Can-Do" Just Didn’tBack in 1973 when I entered the auto business, if someone had suggested that one day automobiles would get 40 miles to the gallon I probably would have agreed. I might not have dismissed the idea as a utopian dream, even though an Oldsmobile Cutlass then averaged 8.9 miles per gallon and the V-8 engine put out a powerless 165 hp. No, massive leaps in automobile fuel economy seemed possible because America’s can-do spirit was strong: In 1960 we hadn’t even been able to get a man into space, but only nine years later Americans had walked on the moon. Today we have safer automobiles with improved quality, and they go two or three times as far on a gallon of gas. Nice progress. However, over the past 25 years we really haven’t done much in the way of fuel economy. Doubt that? Though both engines and transmissions have been increasingly computerized since the mid-80s, computers weren’t used much to give new vehicles better mileage. Computers did help control a vehicle’s emissions and certainly made our engines more powerful, but conserve oil by precisely doling out fuel for efficient combustion? They didn’t do that. Compare a 1985 Chevrolet Suburban to its 2009 counterpart and you’ll find a mere 2-mpg increase in fuel efficiency — and that’s mostly because it has a six-speed automatic instead of the four-speed version.OK, now you’re thinking that’s just one more reason why Detroit is being taken to task — for ignoring the will of the people for better automobile fuel mileage. But if we travel back to 1985 to look at one of the perennially popular Toyotas, the Corolla, we find that the 2009 Corolla actually gets one mile per gallon of gas less than the 1985 model did.We’re all driving 75 or 80 when we can anyway, and that costs you around 4 – 6 mpg no matter what you’re driving; obviously, few individuals care about fuel efficiency much if at all. Every one of us probably gets worse mileage in today’s high-tech automobiles than we did in 1985’s cars — because of our speed, not our cars.Oh, By the Way…I sure hate to spoil our little Sunday morning get-together with more bad news; but right now Congress may be selling us all down the river financially, so these other points might be moot anyhow. That’s because Global Warming has now morphed from a fringe threat into an apocalyptic religion based entirely on faith and not as much science.
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