Quote:
Originally Posted by Royal Tiger
My point is it has become so watered down and full of loopholes and money changing hands like everything else politicians touch. Bob Lutz is right. Very smart guy. I love his editorial in the one car mag every month. He doesn’t pull punches.
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No argument there. It is just my opinion that it is good for people who like to drive cars and people who want or need trucks that it is not a “one size fits all” set of regulations. It is far from perfect, but given where it started....
When laws are made governing technologies that the leaders who make the laws don’t understand and governing businesses the leaders don’t understand, bad things can happen.
On the surface, setting targets for average fuel economy makes sense. Until you start to realize that different vehicle types exist for a reason and the laws of physics don’t change and will always apply. The various credits have been added like a patchwork quilt to address over-reach in the laws as originally put in place.
For giggles and grins, let’s look at California....They had a very real smog problem. I get it. Something needed to be done. So California MANDATED that every automaker selling vehicles in California had to have 10% of their sales be electric vehicles. This was the original ZEV Mandate. ZEV is Zero Emissions Vehicle. One problem....nobody had developed or produced a commercially viable electric vehicle by the time of the first ZEV Mandate.
Ignore for a minute the fact that automakers can’t force consumers to BUY 10% EV, even if they could produce them and let’s just fast forward past the whole GM EV1 thing and land on some of the “adjustments” to the original ZEV Mandate.
Today we have classifications of vehicles from ZEV (EVs and Fuel Cells) to Partial Zero Emissions Vehicle’s (PZEV) which includes hybrids like Prius that can drive small parts of their drive cycle with the engine off and Advanced Technology PZEV (AT-PZEV) which includes Chevrolet Volt and some Plug-in Hybrids that can drive significant parts of their drive cycle with the engine off, thus partial zero. We also have Low Emissions Vehicles, Ultra Low Emissions Vehicles and Super Ultra Low Emissions Vehicles (LEV, ULEV, and SULEV if you’re keeping up).
Each one of these alphabet soup classifications are worth varying amounts of credit to the automakers. Some ZEV vehicles, Fuel Cells like the Honda Clarity FC, the Toyota Mirai, and the Hyundai Tucson FC count as much as 5 vehicles towards credits. So,
over-simplifying, for every Mirai Toyota leases (you can’t BUY one) Toyota could sell 5 more Tundras. For every Chevrolet Bolt EV GM sells in California or the 17 states that abide by California rules, they’d get credit for 3 vehicles and could sell 3 more Suburbans. Or Camaros. That credit ratio reduces over time to give automakers incentive to make fuel cells and EVs earlier more than later. Each of the other classifications would receive fewer credits than the ZEV or AT-PZEV vehicles, and all would ramp down over time. So that’s how the original “everybody has to sell 10% EVs, even though nobody knows how to make one yet” got morphed into something way more complicated, but that actually makes more sense and allows for automakers leeway to make vehicles people actually want to buy.
And yes, Bob is right. We’re restricting pants sizes. But at least now you can still get jeans, khakis, and pleats or no pleats.
