[Scotsman]

Best anti-CAFE argument I've read yet:

At Witz’ End: The 35-MPG Showroom
“Sorry, no vehicles meet your specifications.”
by Gary Witzenburg (2007-06-27)

Most of us know that the U.S. Senate has passed an energy bill that dictates a 35-mpg Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) for all vehicles, cars and trucks, by 2020, and the House will likely follow. But how many understand what that means?



I'll bet the technologically challenged lawmakers who voted for that standard, like their accomplices in the mainstream media and the vast majority of the public, believe it means the same kinds of cars and trucks they enjoy today will get much better mileage down the road. How hard could it be to move from today's long-established 27.5-mpg car CAFE to 35 miles per gallon, a mere 7.5-mpg (27-percent) increase?



Almost no one outside the fuel-economy business understands how incredibly tough, probably impossible, and enormously expensive that really would be. Even Toyota - whose hybrid-boosted 2006 car and truck CAFEs were 34.4 and 23.7 mpg, respectively - calls the 35-mpg standard "very aggressive" and "difficult to meet," adding that, "the time frame is too soon."



GM says that to bring all vehicles up to 35 mpg - a totally absurd 58-percent increase for light trucks, now at 22.2 mpg - represents a combined 40-percent boost that would cost more than $100 billion, "the greatest regulatory cost ever imposed on a single industry."



The only way it could come even close to happening would be to dieselize and hybridize virtually everything - at an incremental cost (not retail price) of $5000-$8000 per vehicle -and downsize trucks to where they could barely haul the content of a homeless auto worker's shopping cart. New emissions standards are making diesels way more expensive, and there's not enough battery raw material on the planet for an all-hybrid fleet.





Practical limits



CAFE standards haven't moved much for years because there is a practical limit to what can be achieved. The only way full-line automakers can comply with today's standards is to sell a lot of not-too-popular (and much less safe) little cars, flex-fuel (E85) vehicles, and small car-based crossovers to offset larger cars and trucks.



Every vehicle achieves the fuel efficiency it does because of what it is, what it can do and how it's used. It takes a finite amount of energy to accelerate a given mass at a given rate to a given speed…every time. Then it takes a finite amount of energy to maintain that speed against aerodynamic drag and rolling resistance…all day long. Drag is the product of how much air it must move out of the way and how much turbulence it creates in the process. Rolling resistance is a function of tire and driveline design.



Thus the most meaningful fuel economy factors for any vehicle are weight, frontal area (width times height) and sleekness of shape, followed by tire design, driveline, and how a vehicle is loaded and driven. Engine displacement and power are minor contributors because a large engine can loaf carrying the same size and weight that will overload a small one, which is why a working six-cylinder pickup is not very efficient, but a cruising 500-hp Corvette can be. Operator-added load (heavy cargo) and drag (stuff on the roof) are major fuel economy hits, while efficiency improving technologies can add a lot of cost in exchange for incremental gains.



The 35-mpg showroom



Almost incomprehensibly, CAFE calculations are based on "Raw Combined" fuel economy. "Raw" numbers are those generated by EPA's old original test procedures with no adjustments to make them more realistic. "Combined" is a "harmonic" average (whatever that means) weighted at 55 percent City and 45 percent Highway.



So, since "raw" numbers are higher than today's adjusted ratings, and EPA has already recalculated its 2007 numbers to make them comparable to lower ones generated by the new, more real-world test procedures required for 2008 models, I searched EPA's Web site www.fueleconomy.gov for 2007 vehicles with Combined economy of 30 mpg or better. Just five entries emerged from the "Small Car" class: Honda Civic Hybrid, Toyota Yaris and Corolla, Honda Fit and Mini Cooper. All except the four-speed automatic Yaris are manual-transmission base models. Only three "Family Sedans," all hybrids, made the 30-mpg cut: Toyota Prius and Camry Hybrid and Nissan Altima Hybrid.



Every other class of vehicle - Coupes, Hatchbacks, Sports and Sporty Cars, Large Cars, Luxury Cars, Minivans and all varieties of trucks - brought up the message: "Sorry, no vehicles meet your specifications. Please try again."



If 35 mpg were the law today, would those eight cars be all you could buy? No, because CAFE is an automaker's sales-weighted fleet average. But a great many expensive extremely high-economy diesel and hybrid small cars would have to be sold to enable automakers to sell any lower-mpg larger cars or trucks at all. How many American buyers would go for those?



One very knowledgeable engineer who has worked on CAFE for many years says that to meet a 35-mpg CAFE, cars will have to average 38-39 mpg and trucks 25-28 mpg, and achieving those levels will require virtually all of both to be either diesel or gas-electric hybrid. He also points out that EPA uses "harmonic" averaging to emphasize fuel consumption (gallons per mile) rather that fuel economy (mpg), which makes CAFE compliance near-impossible for most to understand. "In CAFE math," he says, "to offset a 25-mpg vehicle to get a 35-mpg average, believe it or not, you need a car at 58.3 mpg, not 45."





What will Americans accept?



If 35-mpg CAFE becomes law, it will arrive in increments over a decade beginning in 2010, just two years from now. For passenger cars alone, that may be attainable, though not without enormous cost and consumer adjustment.Europe's proposed future CO2 emission standard of 140 grams per kilometer equates to a very aggressive 37 mpg. But Europe's car fleet today - driven by heavily taxed, ultra-expensive fuel but no fuel economy law - runs about 84 percent four-cylinder, five percent three-cylinder and just one percent eight-cylinder engines, 51 percent of them diesel and 80 percent driving through manual transmissions.



No CAFE standard can force consumers to buy what they don't want. This one will make the vehicles they want extremely rare, or extinct, and everything a lot more expensive. Past CAFE requirements have been counterproductive: by making vehicles more efficient, they have encouraged larger vehicles, more driving and more wasteful driving. And, as we have seen in recent years, it takes high fuel prices to drive meaningful change in buyer behavior.



There's no question that we Americans need to consume less petroleum in everything we do (not just driving), for both balance of trade and energy security reasons, and higher fuel prices are already accelerating us down that path. But don't try to sell me the absurd notion that vehicle-emitted CO2, which is directly proportional to fuel consumption, is destroying the planet. Harmless CO2 gas amounts to just 38 of 100,000 molecules of the Earth's atmosphere and 5 percent of so-called "greenhouse" gases, just 3.3 percent of newly-generated CO2 is man-made, and only 14 percent of that comes from cars and trucks.



So let us all support improved fuel economy within the reasonable bounds of what is achievable and affordable. But let us not let auto-unfriendly, technologically ignorant politicians destroy what's left of America 's automotive industry through ridiculously expensive and probably unattainable CAFE requirements. Simply letting gas prices stay high will get it done.

http://www.thecarconnection.com/Auto...2523.html?pg=1