Note To Washington, Not Only Will the Cars Suck, They’ll Cost More Money Under the New CAFE

  •  January 15, 2008

Those in Washington aren’t smart enough to change a light bulb but they have the power to limit our choices.

GM’s outspoken Vice Chairman Bob Lutz told reporters today at the Detroit Auto Show the U.S. government’s 35 mpg CAFE standard will push car prices up by $4,000 to $10,000 per vehicle, or an average $6,000. Lutz has been a vocal opponent of the regulations, which he believes will harm the U.S. auto industry.
“This is going to be a net average of cost of $6,000 per vehicle which will have to be passed onto the consumer,” he said. “The good news is it won’t come all at once, because 35 mpg doesn’t kick in all at once.”
The new standards were approved by the House of Representatives in December. The new CAFE standards will be phased in beginning in 2011. The new law calls for automakers to achieve an average of 35 mpg across their fleets by 2020.

If the public wanted this they’d be buying smaller more efficient cars today. But Washington doesn’t care what you want, they only care about pushing us around.

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  • http://proof-proofpositive.blogspot.com/ proof_positive

    Does ANYONE actually think that cars will STILL run on gasoline by 2020?

    Yes. If this is sarcasm, you may wish to use the /sarcasm tag in the future.

    laughably useless

    Bill’s autobiography in two words! :)

  • http://northerngleaner.blogspot.com/ Gene

    BILL,

    Does ANYONE actually think that cars will STILL run on gasoline by 2020?

    NO, I don’t think it will be gasoline (only).

    IT WILL BE (you can write this on the wall):
    Liquid
    Sold by the Gallon or Liter
    Dispensed at stations for money
    Work in an internal combustion engine.
    Your 2007 auto will work with this stuff (may be some timing modifications)

    Consider how many 1994 cars and pickups are on the road today. That’s what 2007 vehicles will be like then.

    Do you think we will throw over a whole generation of vehicles?

    NO, despite all the big talk about electric vehicles (and there will be some), Hybrids (ditto), Fuel Cells (Doubtful), Hydrogen cars (nope), we are going to burn liquid fuel in our cars.

    There will be transition but 13 years is way to short a time to transit. (I love making verbs from nouns, German does that all the time, it makes sense).

    Not until a new technology is embraced universally because of market forces will there be a change. Government has no place trying to pick the technology or impose change. DUMB

    How will it happen? Let’s suppose You, BILL, came up with a fuel pellet, sold it for $5. Place ONE in a container under your hood and the car runs for a thousand miles. If that worked I would quickly do the math and replace the power plant under the hood of the Buick with this new and better form of power.

    So would everyone. If I then went to buy a new car and the offer was fuel cells, or Hydrogen at about the same cost per mile as gasoline is today or the BILL PILL, $5 1000 miles, what will I buy?

    All the gas stations would be ghost towns or converted to conversion to the BILL PILL garages installing the BILL PILL engine.

    And that my friend is how it is really going to go down. I’m rooting for Bill.

  • http://proof-proofpositive.blogspot.com/ proof_positive

    Thank you for the first laugh of my morning.

    #s 1 & 6 are contractions of two words each. But, thanks for playing! Come back when you have substantive commentary! :)

  • http://northerngleaner.blogspot.com/ Gene

    Carrik, I don’t know this word. I’m German.

    But, at first glance, it seems to be a word having to do the the regulation of beef gut usage (probably for use in summersausage). I won’t dissect it but, thats how it reads? I’ll bet some of you thought that could not have been a real word.

    I’ll look it up.

  • http://SayAnythingBlog.com The_Whistler_ofnd

    Golfman I had to delete your video as comments don’t support video. Go ahead and resubmit it as a link.

  • carrick

    Gene, it’s the German Language Society (Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache) 1999 word of the year, meaning “beef labeling oversight transfer law”.

    I’ve got a bit of German ancestry in me, unfortunately language isn’t an inheritable trait (otherwise my Swedish would be very good as well). My only real claim to fame with German, other than taking two-years of college credits in a 10-month period, is I once translated a 100+ page journal article (with the help of a number of German-speaking students) written by a Hungarian in baroque German.

    If it’s not too nosey, are you Lutheran per chance?

  • carrick

    HG, he’s probably thinking of the Aptera, which is a plug-in diesel hybrid. They are accepting pre-orders with (I think) $500 down and it lists at $29,900.

    I believe the 300 mpg number applies to a fully charged battery, so there’s a bit of hype there.

  • http://2mdh.blogspot.com/ C. Y.

    I feel your pain – I drive a GMC Suburban because I need the room to carry search dogs and the 4×4 to get places where (and when) we are needed. I challenge any “Greenie” to find something that will replace it with the same features.

  • http://SayAnythingBlog.com The_Whistler_ofnd

    He also talked about a Chevy Tahoe Hybrid that was getting 21mpg in the city they were testing.

    21 isn’t anywhere close to 35 mpg.

    Jim Bohlhanen had someone from GM on his radio program tonight who said that 35 MPG is workable.

    In the old days when you had a product idea, you’d make the product and the consumers would decide whether or not it was the product they wanted.

    Nowdays companies like GM encourage the politicians to force the consumers to buy what they want to sell by making what the consumers want to buy impossible to get.

    I for one used to be strictly a USA brand guy. Next car I buy I’m leaving my options open strictly because of Ford/GM going to bed with the environuts.

    Of course we can build 35 mpg cars, in fact we already do. But most people don’t like them.

  • LoadTheMule

    CAFE standards raised. Incandescent light bulbs gone. No border security. 10,000+ pork barrel projects.

    The 12 most feared words in America: I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.

    Assholes.

  • http://www.dartemis.net/blog/ sayanything-42

    Bill Mitchell,

    Hydrogen is NOT a fuel source, it is a method of energy transfer. Much more energy goes in to making hydrogen than goes into the production of hydrocarbon fuels. So where is the energy for hydrogen production going to come from?

  • carrick

    2H9, the number one thing you could do to improve mpg is to reduce the aerodynamic drag of the vehicle. Weight is important, especially in stop-and-start traffic, but on the highway most of the fuel is eaten up combating vehicle drag.

    Improved body design would go a long way in this regard. People would have to get used to streamlined vehicles instead of the (what I regard as pedestrian and ugly as sin in any case) current boxy models. Here’s what I mean by “streamlined”:

    The second thing you could do is store kinetic energy from stopping then use it to start the vehicle moving again (regenerative braking). For example, going from disk brakes to electric motors (with disk brakes still there as fail safes) would be another).

    The third is to switch from a variable rpm gasoline engine to a constant rpm diesel (use as a generator to power an electric motor, diesel hybrids have been around for 50+ years, e.g used in locomotives).

    and the list goes on.

    I would be more sympathetic to the auto industry, but they’ve shown exactly zero adaptability in the past, and little ability to truly innovate. To give them credit transmission design has vastly improved in 20 years and the electronic control of vehicle ignition is a big step forward, but for the most part, very little new has come from the auto giants.

    To me this just illustrates the weakness of mega-corporation. The economy of scale allows them to manufacture new products cheaply, but their size proves to be a burden when it comes to innovation.

    I think this is why we are seeing a wave of new car manufacturers making sleek looking “environmentally friendly” specialized vehicles, for example Fisker Automotive and others.

    Oddly, feature for feature, most are very $$$ competitive with the big giants’ selections.

  • carrick

    Just for the record, a contraction is a new word formed by from two or more other words. Examples including “isn’t” and “goodbye” by not “ain’t” or “shain’t”

    Better than German though, where you can from new words by concatenating multiple others. For example:

    Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz

  • http://sayanythingblog.com/readers/author/realitybasedbob/ realitybasedbob

    The 12 most feared words in America:

    1. I’m
    2. from
    3. the
    4. government
    5. and
    6. I’m
    7. here
    8. to
    9. help
    10. you

    Thank you for the first laugh of my morning.
    BTW Raygun’s quote only had nine.

  • Bill Mitchell

    Does ANYONE actually think that cars will STILL run on gasoline by 2020?

    This legislation is laughably useless.

  • http://SayAnythingBlog.com The_Whistler_ofnd

    They were really worried about the politicians that thought that 35mpg wasn’t enough and thought that 40 to 45 mpg would be better.

    Isn’t that too bad. You go to bed with the devil and don’t like it when they start taking more than they said they would.

    GM should have stood with the consumers.

    Rush was talking about this yesterday. He said that someone up high (maybe even Lutz) said that their customers wanted smaller cars.

    Um, what is it that sells for GM?

  • carrick

    Good points about infrastructure, Proof. Noway without some major crisis (like total foreign oil disruption) are we going to see a major transition to unconventional power sources. Ethanol-gasoline works of course because you don’t have to upgrade the existing transportation infrastructure for it to work.

  • carrick

    I though it was “I’m only 15″.

  • Bill Mitchell

    Proof,

    Consider changing your name to “Useless Commentary” as you never produce “proof” of anything other than the fact you are a complete idiot.

    Anyway, try Googling the following:

    “Hydrogen Fuel Cell”
    “Nanophosphate Battery”

    And you will see that not only will cars NOT run on gasoline by the year 2020, they won’t run on gasoline in 5 years.

    Right, a new car is being sold in California that gets 300 MPG. There is also a retrofit-type kit which will be coming out that can make the average gas powered car of today into a hybrid that get 150 MPG.

    Although I don’t know why I am wasting my time trying to educate someone who is obviously severely retarded.

  • 2Hotel9

    Guys, I checked out both of bill’s suggested googles, and I don’t see either supplanting petroleum based hydrocarbon fuel systems anytime soon. And damn well not in the next 5 years.

  • http://proof-proofpositive.blogspot.com/ proof_positive

    And you will see that not only will cars NOT run on gasoline by the year 2020

    Bill: Can I take that to the bank,like your prediction on Iowa & NH?

    HERE IS MY PREDICTION:
    Romney will carry Iowa by at atleast 12 points and probably 15 or more. He will carry NH by the same.

    Although I don’t know why I am wasting my time trying to educate someone who is obviously severely retarded, here goes. The year is 2008. Are there any cars on the road that were built before 1996? Oh, really? Then, if we have cars on the road today that are twelve years old and older, do you think that any retarded child would say that cars will not run on gasoline in twelve years? Are all those cars magically going to disappear? Is the government going to buy them all back? Didn’t think so!
    You? You just didn’t think at all! :)

  • LoadTheMule

    Carrick–Thanks. I was about to give rbb a grammar lesson, but you saved me the trouble. Must be that liberal education of his (thanks again to the NEA for all their hard work).

  • http://www.bikebubba.blogspot.com/ Bike Bubba

    The Aptera brilliantly illustrates the difficulties with higher mileage. $29k for a two-seater with minimal storage, and you’ve got to plug it in every night?

    And exactly how do you define “mileage” for a plug in car? Ahem. At best, only one fuel source is liquid at all–it’s called “bait & switch” in the lexicon of informal logic, and this tactic used by engineers ought to give us pause about the other claims they’re making about this vehicle.

  • http://northerngleaner.blogspot.com/ Gene

    YES (but Pentecostal) which isn’t that unusual.

    LCMS Charismatic. Look it up.

  • http://www.wethepeopleforum.com/forum/forums.asp golfmann

    Ok here is the link:
    this is a BIG deal in my opinion and I remind everyone to never forget “inspiration”… in the human spirit and the “problems” we face.

    (Some call it Divine inspiration.)
    Here we have the basics of a cheaper, BETTER and SAFER fuel delivery system, all the while being cleaner as well.

    look:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJIO-n3_Tvc&eurl=http://www.wethepeopleforum.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=8215&SearchTerms=big

  • Chaz Everest

    I just read the piece about Obama’s 35mpg requirement meaning we would have to drive smaller, lighter more dangerous cars.

    What utter nonsense this piece is. Of course smaller cars are not as safe as larger ones. You do not however have to have a small car in order to get 35mpg.

    The Europeans drive a lot of turbo diesels. You can have a minivan, a full size or a mid size car with a clean burning turbo diesel engine that will cruise happily in excess of legal highway speed, be just as safe as anything else on the road and return over 50mpg highway.

    Examples are Ford S Max (a Europe only Ford minivan that gets 58mpg)

    VW Passat TDI again 55mpg (A nice big comfortable and very safe car)

    VW Jetta TDI 58mpg

    Volvo 1.8TDI 54mpg

    Honda Accord diesel 52mpg

    AUDI A4 2.0 TDI 51.4mpg

    BMW 5 Series E60/E61 520d 55.4mpg

    None of these are small cars. They are all the same size as 95% of cars on American roads today.
    They are all very safe and are very clean burning cars, which would easily pass even the stringent CA CARB requirements.
    They are all capable of over 100mph, making them more than freeway friendly. It is at the very least ill informed to say that we all have to drive Smart Cars or Microcars to get 35mpg, at worst it is a downright lie. I find it hard to believe that you are that ill informed, which only leaves one option.

    The micro cars you are talking about such as Smart cars are for use in town at relatively low speeds. They suit narrow European streets, which is the main reason people in Europe buy them.

    You don need a Smart to get 35mpg a Smart Diesel 84mpg and is also capable of 84mph. It is however built as a city car.

    To suggest that under Obama’s new requirements we would all be forced to drive microcars is just plain misleading at best. Now if he were requiring 70+ mpg then you might have a point, but he’s not. 35mpg is very very easily achieved without any sacrifice to safety at all.

    Charles Everest

  • HG

    Bill,

    Could you provide links to the 300mpg car and 150mpg kit?

  • Chas Everest

    I just read the piece about Obama’s 35mpg requirement meaning we would have to drive smaller, lighter more dangerous cars.

    What utter nonsense this piece is. Of course smaller cars are not as safe as larger ones. You do not however have to have a small car in order to get 35mpg.

    The Europeans drive a lot of turbo diesels. You can have a minivan, a full size or a mid size car with a clean burning turbo diesel engine that will cruise happily in excess of legal highway speed, be just as safe as anything else on the road and return over 50mpg highway.

    Examples are Ford S Max (a Europe only Ford minivan that gets 58mpg)

    VW Passat TDI again 55mpg (A nice big comfortable and very safe car)

    VW Jetta TDI 58mpg

    Volvo 1.8TDI 54mpg

    Honda Accord diesel 52mpg

    AUDI A4 2.0 TDI 51.4mpg

    BMW 5 Series E60/E61 520d 55.4mpg

    None of these are small cars. They are all the same size as 95% of cars on American roads today.
    They are all very safe and are very clean burning cars, which would easily pass even the stringent CA CARB requirements.
    They are all capable of over 100mph, making them more than freeway friendly. It is at the very least ill informed to say that we all have to drive Smart Cars or Microcars to get 35mpg, at worst it is a downright lie. I find it hard to believe that you are that ill informed, which only leaves one option.

    The micro cars you are talking about such as Smart cars are for use in town at relatively low speeds. They suit narrow European streets, which is the main reason people in Europe buy them.

    You don need a Smart to get 35mpg a Smart Diesel 84mpg and is also capable of 84mph. It is however built as a city car.

    To suggest that under Obama’s new requirements we would all be forced to drive microcars is just plain misleading at best. Now if he were requiring 70+ mpg then you might have a point, but he’s not. 35mpg is very very easily achieved without any sacrifice to safety at all.

    Charles Everest

  • 2Hotel9

    Yep, there is a whole bunch-0-snakeoil salesmen scurrying around the envirocrap movement.

  • http://2mdh.blogspot.com/ C. Y.

    Jim Bohlhanen had someone from GM on his radio program tonight who said that 35 MPG is workable. They were really worried about the politicians that thought that 35mpg wasn’t enough and thought that 40 to 45 mpg would be better. He also talked about a Chevy Tahoe Hybrid that was getting 21mpg in the city they were testing.

  • http://www.bikebubba.blogspot.com/ Bike Bubba

    It’s worth noting that the hybrid Tahoe has seriously degraded performance in at least one area compared to the standard; towing. You lose a full ton in towing ability.

    Not a huge deal for most of us, but for those who DO need to tow 4 tons on occasion, it is a deal-breaker. Just a reminder that “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” We don’t do well to assume that the engineers at car companies are doing their jobs so poorly that we can arbitrarily increase mileage by about 60% without reducing something else we like, like horsepower, towing, and so on.

  • robert108

    You do not however have to have a small car in order to get 35mpg.

    Wrong! The 35mpg mandate is an industry average. Since the American public largely prefers real cars and needs trucks for both business and pleasure purposes, most of which cannot get 35mpg, in order to maintain the mandated average, a great many pregnant rollerskates will have to be produced that make much higher mileage. This will be necessary to achieve the average mandated, and will result in many small, light and flimsily constructed death traps.
    The article is true; you just didn’t think it through before you reacted.

  • http://proof-proofpositive.blogspot.com/ proof_positive

    Unfortunately, someone needs to break the news to Bill that watching reruns of The Jetsons doesn’t make you an authority on cars of the future!
    Or worse yet, economics! The main issue Bill so naïvely overlooks is infrastructure! Whether your car is powered by compressed air, as we discussed here, or runs on electricity or fuel cells or used vegetable oil (handy for Bill, he could fill up at work! ), before the American public (other than Ed Begley Jr) would buy an alternative fuel car, there would need to be the same kind of infrastructure in place that allows Americans freedom of choice in where they drive.
    If you buy an air powered car that needs a 10,000psi compressor for a timely fill up, and there is only one in a 1000 mile radius of where you live, you might not use that car the way you’d like to.
    To build that infrastructure, you’d need to convince entrepreneurs that there was money to be made in providing those goods and services.
    But if you’re in Olathe Kansas and you have to determine what the Return On Investment is on the capital expenditure you need to make in that compressor, and the costs of keeping the doors of your business open, there’d better be a pretty damn long stream of cars needing your services before you make that investment. And until hundreds of thousands of people make that investment, you won’t see that long stream of cars! Get it?

    And what does the “gas” station of the future have to charge to stay in business? To use our example of compressed air again (Bill: I’m trying use something you can relate to:air and nothing but air!): Air at $3.00/liter? Energy isn’t free, Bill! The capital investment on the equipment, the energy required to run a compressor, the maintenance required to keep it up…all adds up!

    It is not enough to simply invent the “car of the future”, you need to build the infrastructure of the future, and I don’t think it is reasonable (look that word up, Bill) to expect to see that in twelve years or less.

    Especially, when you consider another inconvenient truth glossed over by many advocates of “new” technologies: Climate.
    That compressed air powered car might go over great in Miami or Mexico City, but the good citizens of North Dakota are mighty fond of one of the waste byproducts of internal combustion engines: heat.
    When it’s 10° or colder, how long do you have to run your compressed air engine before you can turn the heat on? Trick question. Now, in order to provide year round comfort for the people in the car, in every climate zone in the country, you need to add an electric(?) heater which consumes power and possibly limits your range of use. For small, electric cars, this is a big problem. For the Indian, compressed air cars, this may not even be a consideration. But, here in the good, old U S of A, I think your marketing people are going to want some say in whether or not a heater/defroster is included in the final blueprints!

  • 2Hotel9

    The only way to meet this goal is to gut the safety standards. Cut 3/4 of the weight of a vehicle and the mileage will accordingly rise. Along with injuries and deaths.

    billie, what do you suggest we use?

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