In a supplemental memo related to forthcoming fuel economy standards for the years after 2017 [full doc in PDF here], the EPA has revealed the results of its consultations with stakeholders including the auto industry, and it seems that there are tradeoffs to high standards. The industry’s complaint seems to be that the government has underestimated the impact of higher fuel economy standards on such details as
vehicle performance, utility (e.g., towing capability), and comfort (e.g., noise, vibration, and harshness), the role of competing regulatory or technical requirements (e.g., criteria pollutant and/or safety standards), and assumptions regarding future gasoline fuel properties (e.g., octane levels).
All of which comes with a real price. The government is targeting a 2-6 percent increase in fuel economy standards between 2017 and 2025, which amounts to a range of 47-62 MPG. The NHTSA/EPA estimates show that this level of increase will cost automakers between $770 and $3,500 per vehicle to meet, but automakers insist that these estimates are too low. And apparently, the government takes these concerns seriously enough to blow its end-of-November deadline for narrowing the range of possible standards. At the top of the list of issues for study: the age-old trade-off between efficiency and safety.
The memo notes
NHTSA and EPA will conduct an analysis of the effects of the proposed standards on vehicle safety, including societal effects. CARB is undertaking and coordinating with EPA and NHTSA on a study of how a future vehicle design that incorporates high levels of mass reduction complies with vehicle safety standards and voluntary safety guidelines. NHTSA is also initiating a new study of the feasible amount of mass reduction based on a mid-size passenger car platform, and the effects of several advanced mass reduction design concepts on fleet safety. The NHTSA studies are being coordinated with EPA, DOE, and CARB.
This is a battle TTAC has longed to see for some time: the efficiency-first crusaders championing mass-reduction versus the safety-first crusaders championing the rolling bunker mentality. Both sides are equally self-righteous about their pet causes, and forcing the two to come to a compromise will be an important step. But the issue of cost will be one of the toughest points of contention in the whole post-2017 CAFE debate. Will the government be harassed into more giveaways to help automakers reach impossibly high standards, will consumer incentives help the CAFE medicine go down, will standards be moderated, or will the EPA and NHTSA simply defer to a proposed gas tax hike to take care of emissions? Either way, someone will have to pay the high price of fuel efficiency.
Someone remind me what mandates like this have to do with the sole Congressional privileged of regulating interstate commerce.
You aren’t going to win this one. Maybe try law school…
The industry cried about everything from disc brakes and seat belts to unleaded gas. I’ll take supposed self-righteousness over the obvious economic ‘sky is falling’ lie any day.
Agreed. Funny thing is the costs seem to work themselves out pretty well in reality. You get FAR more for your money today than ever in the past, especially when adjusted for inflation.
If you had told me 15 years ago (when I was happily driving around in my brand new 115hp VW Golf with a whopping 2 airbags, 32mpg (at best), no cruise control, no ABS, for $16k) that within 2 decades we’d have vehicles in that price range with almost double the power and safety features, plus an extra few mpg, I’d have called you crazy.
All those changes are results of market competition, not govt mandates. NHTSA/EPA do not require 300hp engines, cruise control, ABS or even 6 airbags.
The whole point of the article is that govt is realizing there are trade-offs. Obsessive concern with efficiency led to lighter cars and greater traffic deaths before other safety tech could catch up somewhat.
Vehicle weight is still a major factor and both IHS and NHTSA both stress you have to compare safety star ratings between same weight class vehicles.
Afterall, scooters and motorcycles would make excellent high mpg conveyances for the majority of solo commuters but at a huge safety risk.
All of which comes with a real price. The government is targeting a 2-6 percent increase in fuel economy standards between 2017 and 2025, which amounts to a range of 47-62 MPG. The NHTSA/EPA estimates show that this level of increase will cost automakers between $770 and $3,500 per vehicle to meet
Pay now, when you can, when it’s not too painful, and when you have time to plan, or pay later when oil spikes to the moon and the ripple effect causes all sorts of pain.
I suppose the automakers would prefer to keep things as they are and just build big, cheap and inefficienct vehicles because we all know that strategy worked so well during the last few oil spikes when the domestics’ sales crashed and one or more went into bankruptcy.
Regulating and legislating with an eye to sustainability is a good thing, generally speaking. What’s fascinating is how strategically blind these companies are: instead of planning for eventualities, they run right to wall and then (and this is the bit that gets me) cry and whine when they do crash.
Well, since your bad business decisions affect me, my family, my community and my future, I’m fully in support of a little regulatory slap upside the head to get you to be progressive and think beyond this quarter’s sales and margins.
Now that we know the government will really reach into our pockets and give the money to large companies, it’s gotten a little too real for me. I’ll take early intervention over bailouts, if those are the only options. However, I prefer my intervention via fuel prices (eg, gas tax) so consumers are at least able to choose what suits them.
@ash, but even if you’re willing to pay a high price to drive your V8 Monolith, it’ll still bother some puritanical greenies who don’t want you having that kind of choice and fun.
If the gas tax were raised to appropriate levels, the puritanical greenies would be happy enough to smugly watch you squirm as you fill up the tank of your V8 Monolith while calculating how quickly you can trade it in for the new GDI 4 cyl Monolith.
If that gas tax goes up, please let it start at the state level where we could really use the funds.
The automakers squandered their credibility fighting every safety and efficiency proposal for decades. This sounds like more of the same. Nonetheless I am concerned.
The politicians who would now design cars are cut from the same cloth as the geniuses who regulated the bank, insurance and mortgage cartels. We know how well that worked out! They gave us 5-mph bumpers that cost $3,000 to repair after a bird strike. They mandated low flush toilets that have to be flushed two or three times to get the job done. They made mandatory compact fluorescent light bulbs that cost several times more than standard bulbs, provide odd colored light, burn out in a fraction of their promised lifespan, require a hazmat suite to clean up if dropped and pollute landfill sites when thrown out. Way to go!
On a good day many politicians and civil servants can’t balance their own check book or find their way to washroom and their motives are highly suspect. Now they’re deeper into decreeing complex engineering and marketing decisions. Stop the madness!
GW:
1. 5 MPH bumpers may cost more to fix, but they protect the car way better. Just look at the useless bumpers that SUVs had for years. CR used a bumper basher to test cars and found that the higher standard protected vehicles MUCH better. Strike one.
2. Yup, first gen low flush toilets did suck. But the ones available for at least the last five years test just as well as the wasteful designs of yesteryear. A tip: When you take a big ugly growler and use a lot of paper, hold the handle down until the flush is finished. Your extra 4 seconds in the bathroom are well worth the tradoff of real water savings. Strike two.
3. Compact Fluorescent lamps are not “mandated”***; they just make excellent economic sense. At Home Depot you can buy a 60 watt equ. lamp for a buck. Standard lamps cost 50 cents. Educate yourself about lamp temperature and buy 27K lamps that offer color that is virtually indistinguishable from incandescent. Avoid the “daylight” or “cool white” lamps that do have odd colors. Life is usually not the 10,000 hours advertised, but 6,000 hours is not at all uncommon and still six times longer than incandesents. I deal with these lamps in a commercial setting and know that they can last that long, some times longer if they don’t get switched on/off frequently. They do contain mercury but so do many other items in your home. Any mercury lost from a broken lamp is more than offset by the mercury emissions not made by saving coal generated electricity.
So, on balance, all of those items you lament have real tangible benefits to individuals and society as a whole. i’d have to say that those lost politicians have done a damn good job in this regard and can only hope more progressive thinking is on the way.
***Upcoming lamp efficiency standards are technology neutral, just as they should be. Industry is free to produce a qualifying product using any means they wish.
@ golden2husky
Not sure how or if I should respond, but here goes.
1. The bumpers on 1980 model cars often required no repair after an 8 mph hit. The 5 mph bumpers typically require $1,000 to $3,000 in repairs after a 5-mph hit. The Soviet Canuckistan government made them mandatory!
2. Was involved in the management of thousands of residential apartment units. Salesmen came out of the woodwork with energy and water saving (read: money saving) devices. If they looked worthwhile we tested them by installing them in a building, keeping meticulous water consumption records and comparing their financial performance after a year with an identical control building. Very few devices made financial sense when initial cost, maintenance and actual savings were measured, including none of the low-flush toilets. They’re a disaster in commercial buildings. By 10:00 a.m. the maintenance crew is running around plunging crapped-up toilets and mopping up you know what. Used full-flush toilets from demolished buildings sell for more than new low-flush ones! They’re refurbished and returned to service. The Soviet Canuckistan government made the low-flush toilets mandatory!
3. Installed 11,000 3W CFL bulbs at $3.00 each in the decorative ceiling of a 800,000 sf regional shopping center replacing the 50¢ 15W 6,000 hour incandescent bulbs. The CFLs were supposed to be good for 20,000 hours. The real cost was renting a skyjack and putting a crew on nights to change them. It took two weeks. They were illuminated for an average 10-hours daily. I could stand in the mall and watch them burn out! Turned out they were very sensitive to voltage fluctuations. The supplier had guaranteed them including labor. Don’t think he’s in business anymore. The Soviet Canuckistan government has banned most common incandescent bulbs starting 2012!
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d8/Flag_of_Soviet_Canuckistan.svg/800px-Flag_of_Soviet_Canuckistan.svg.png
goldenhusky2: 1. 5 MPH bumpers may cost more to fix, but they protect the car way better. Just look at the useless bumpers that SUVs had for years. CR used a bumper basher to test cars and found that the higher standard protected vehicles MUCH better. Strike one.
Doesn’t change the fact that the, in crashes OVER 5 mph, they cost more to fix. Their benefit was limited, and outweighed by their disadvantages. So, no strike one.
golden2husky: 2. Yup, first gen low flush toilets did suck. But the ones available for at least the last five years test just as well as the wasteful designs of yesteryear. A tip: When you take a big ugly growler and use a lot of paper, hold the handle down until the flush is finished. Your extra 4 seconds in the bathroom are well worth the tradoff of real water savings. Strike two.
First, most of us can’t afford to replace a toilet every five years. The old ones last 20 or more, and they still work better than the new ones in the real world. Second, I’m not spending an extra time to flush the toilet (with no guarantee that it may not even be as effective as an “old” toilet). I’ll make the decision as to whether that trade-off is worth it, so, no strike two.
The farther from the equator you live, the more light bulbs help to heat your house. This effect increases during the part of the year when we heat our houses more and use lights more because there’s less sunlight.
Those promoting CFL’s etc. NEVER evaluate the lost heating value of incandescent light bulbs, “inefficient” appliances, standby power losses etc. While I was an early adopter of CFL’s etc. their value is far less than claimed due to the promoters ignoring NET vs GROSS energy savings.
As for car mileage, boosting taxes on fuel is the fundamental answer. Consumers could choose what they want to drive, and manufacturers would follow demand to more efficient cars. But, informed consumers need information. For instance, I pay a mileage premium for a Grand Vitara, which is always in AWD. What is the mileage-equivalent of the possibly reduced chances of being in a resource-wasting accident because of the presumably better control?
And if bicyclists and even pedestrians, with reasonable education etc. can operate reasonably safely on our roadways, then so can any smalller/lighter car. Somehow we have got to get away from the religion that you can’t travel in a reasonable fashion in anything less than a Camry-like vehicle.
GW: Yes you should respond. My opinion is worth no more or less than yours or anybody elses. i guess the bottom line for me is that the early adopters of anything usually come up short on performance…just ask anybody who bought the first generation of Plasma TVs. In all the buildings that I am responsible for (54) we have no choice but to use low flush toilets/urinals and have to say they rarely plug up. We tried as a test because we were suspcious that the bugs were not worked out. They worked really well. Now, those who push for the waterless urinals, well lets just say that wasn’t going to happen. Regarding the CFLs we find that “infant mortality” rate to be about 1% which is a pita when you need the lift, but even so we save so much on power that we still come out way ahead, even if we use OT to change them out. Didn’t know about the voltage variation being a problem for CFLs but it is a problem with LED traffic signals. For something that is supposed to last 50 years I sure see many traffic signals with partial failure to the LEDs. So, I guess the learning curve is still going on with them.
I guess the other problem is that regulations may force the use of a technology that isn’t quite ready for primetime. That is unfortunate but sometimes that is the only way to build demand to critical mass. Airbags were once used as a direct result of regulation, but buyers began to demand them.
Those promoting CFL’s etc. NEVER evaluate the lost heating value of incandescent light bulbs, “inefficient” appliances, standby power losses etc. While I was an early adopter of CFL’s etc. their value is far less than claimed due to the promoters ignoring NET vs GROSS energy savings.
For most commercial establishments, the cost of air conditioning greatly exceeds the cost saved by the heat output of light bulbs. Office space that has dumped old coil and core ballasts for electronic ones see a significant drop in AC demand, especially when the troffer type of office lights are in a drop ceiling where the ceiling space is the return plenum for the AC system. And yes, first gen electronic ballasts for T12 and T8 lamps sucked too. Again, the best bang for the buck is to let others do the beta testing. You will always get a better product at a lower cost!
Here’s a novel concept: Let the car manufacturers build whatever they want, and let the customer decide. Oh wait, I forgot…people are too stupid, and need the Government to tell them what to do.
Oh wait, I forgot…people are too stupid, and need the Government to tell them what to do.
This is going to sound elitist, but you are right. People are, en masse, stupid, shortsighted and very into immediate gratification and they do need a government to tell them what to do, or at least keep them from doing egregiously stupid things. The “entitlement culture” that sees even erstwhile conservatives unwilling to cut spending is evidence of that. Most people won’t give a damn about safety, efficiency or cleanliness until the problem is horribly severe and the market gets around to “correcting” it.
The point of government is to deal with those tendencies because, lord knows, the market only amplifies them into a big, nasty positive feedback loop that “self corrects” catastrophically. I apologize in advance if this offends people, but regulation is not a good/bad black-and-white issue.
Imagine, for a moment, what the automobile market in North America would look like if fuel was cheap: the automakers would have continued to make huge, heavy, inefficient vehicles. When fuel goes up in price, suddenly you have lots of cars that don’t sell, one or more bankrupt automakers, and foreign competition who were progressive enough to develop efficient products kicking ass and taking names while the domestics spend decades getting sorted out.
Oh, wait, I just described the last thirty years of the domestic auto industry and the fallout from their being wholly unprepared for the OPEC crisis.
+1 psarhjinian!
The government is going to tell us what to do whether we “need” it or not.
This should frighten and disturb you, even people like psarhjinian who no longer remember that the American government’s only actual “point” is to preserve liberty and protect us from foreign aggressors. Period.
“This should frighten and disturb you, even people like psarhjinian who no longer remember that the American government’s only actual “point” is to preserve liberty and protect us from foreign aggressors. Period.”
Remember this statement the next time you eat a hamburger and don’t get food poisoning, or drink from a water fountain and don’t end up with dysentery, or when you don’t have to send your child to work in a sweat shop, or any countless number of things that a little government intervention has helped with over the years. I consider myself a bit of a libertarian, but I understand that the government isn’t always the enemy.
Psarhjinian: Imagine, for a moment, what the automobile market in North America would look like if fuel was cheap: the automakers would have continued to make huge, heavy, inefficient vehicles.
One big problem with your scenario – Toyotas, Hondas, Nissans and Hyundais all got more powerful, bigger and plusher in that timeframe, too. Unless the new Accord, Toyota Tundra and Nissan Pathfinder only exist in my imagination. Compare a 1994 Accord to its 2010 counterpart. Today’s CIVIC is more like that 1994 Accord. The new Accord is almost in another category.
Looks like ALL automakers like to make larger, more powerful cars, and customers keep buying them.
Before the recent crash, the majority of Toyota’s sales came from LARGER vehicles (meaning, SUVs, trucks and vehicles bigger than the Corolla). All of its sales growth between 1996-2007 came from light trucks and larger vehicles.
Psarhjinian: When fuel goes up in price, suddenly you have lots of cars that don’t sell, one or more bankrupt automakers, and foreign competition who were progressive enough to develop efficient products kicking ass and taking names while the domestics spend decades getting sorted out.
Except that, Toyota sells lots of trucks, too, and it didn’t go bankrupt. Neither did Ford. BMW doesn’t sell many fuel sippers (Mini sales are low in the grand scheme of things), and it never went bankrupt.
The reason GM went bankrupt was because of its cost structure (uncompetitive labor agreements were a big part of this) and uncompetitive product planning (too many brands and too many models), and management unwilling to tackle those problems until it was too late. It had nothing to do with the failure to meet the challenge posed by the Honda Fit and Nissan Versa, which are low-profit vehicles that don’t sell in very large numbers. Chrysler was looted by Daimler and left for dead. That had nothing to do with the fuel economy of its line-up.
GM didn’t go bankrupt because it sold lots of Suburbans and Silverados – which, incidentally, are still selling well.
Most people won’t give a damn about safety, efficiency or cleanliness until the problem is horribly severe and the market gets around to “correcting” it.
Most of the people bitching are too young to remember what it was like when a traffic jam stunk with exhaust fumes, or a car sitting in the sun would reek from gas vapors, or the greasy streak down the center of each lane from open crankcase ventilation or guard rails would penetrate door panels or…
Higher standards on anything always comes with a cost. Nothing is free. But usually the cost is worth the price of admission. When you look at today’s cars, safety and emission standards were worth it even though there were some serious growing pains. Had economy requirements been allowed to incrementally increase, our fleet today could easily been more efficient by a few more mpg…
“This is a battle TTAC has longed to see for some time: the efficiency-first crusaders championing mass-reduction versus the safety-first crusaders championing the rolling bunker mentality.”
That battle has been going on for many decades already, nothing new about it.
Had fuel economy continued to make incremental progress in the 1990s and 2000s then we wouldn’t be facing such a steep climb now. But, we spent 20 years stuck in neutral (or going backwards) as far as automotive fuel efficiency goes. Now there is much ground to pick up.
The industry and auto enthusiasts always shout the sky is falling, the sky is falling when the topic of demanding improved fuel economy and safety comes up.
We spent 20 years focusing on the more important aspects of performance, safety and comfort and convenience because that is what people wanted.
Safety equipment and extra bracing for stronger bodies does improve safety. It also adds weight. Extra bracing also improves noise, vibration and harshness, which are more important that a few extra miles per gallon
The performance is needed, because we wisely abandoned the stupid 55 mph and 65 mph speed limits. Most people drive at least 75 mph on limited access highways these days, and out West it’s not uncommon for people to cruise along at 90+ mph. We aren’t going to putter along at 55 mph anymore, regardless of how much extra gas it uses. In the real world, people aren’t going to drive around in noisy, slow rattletraps to save a few gallons of gas. Automakers figured this out a long time ago.
The safety issue is such a red herring. It’s largely fueled by the desire of the auto industry to spend as little as possible on efficiency gains. As well described above, they got their reprieve and banked the extra money for a few decades. Now it’s time to do what could have been done in a much more gradual way.
It’s amazing how the American automakers in particular never learn from experience. They keep on treating efficiency gains as antithetical to their long-term success when the opposite has been true. For example, the only thing that saved the Big Three from being utterly destroyed by the imports in the early 1980s was the advent of CAFE standards. But you won’t hear many auto execs — or industry pundits — admit that. Magic of marketplace = always good; government = always bad
Big car sales were already bouncing back by 1982. Chevy Caprices were going for full sticker, while Celebritys and Cavaliers could barely be given away. CAFE, over the long haul, forced them to prematurely abandon their bigger cars (their real strength), even though customers still wanted them.
GM’s strongest sellers in the 1980s were the full-size, intermediate and E-body cars. When it downsized those cars, because of government pressure and management’s belief that gasoline would cost $3 a gallon by 1985, its sales tanked. Ford, meanwhile, rebounded on the sales strength of the cars based on the old Fox and Panther platforms. It was those cars, along with trucks, that saved Ford in the 1980s – not the Taurus. (The Taurus only recouped its development costs. Ford didn’t make much money on it.)
Re: the battle that TTAC has longed for.
I love it, but I’m not optimistic that it’ll ever be acknowledged. The people (broad strokes here) who in my experience are super dedicated to one thing or the other have blinders on regarding the compromises needed to engineer a whole vehicle. No one wants to hear that what they are demanding isn’t quite that simple, or that it isn’t done already for a good reason (lack of customers for one).
Most people’s tiny minds can’t get their head around the fact that wasting energy and killing each other on the roads is a HUGE cost to a nation.
In the USofA it’s a particularly difficult problem because pure selfishness (dressed up as “liberty”) is reversing the gains made in decades past to create a middle-class. A little more macro thinking needs to be explained to the micro-minded.
Otherwise, China wins (it has already, but hey…)
Actually, heavier vehicles have proven to be safer in crashes. And there is no proof that slower speeds on limited access highways result in fewer fatalities. The average speed on interstates has been creeping up for years, and the fatality rates are at record lows. The roads are safer than ever. Tiny minds fail to understand this.
Welcome back PeteMoran…I thought you were struck by the banhammer
heavier vehicles are not safer when it comes to single vehicle crashes…design is much more critical than dumb mass…
Thanks for those kinds words golden2husky. I’ve been sailing the Pacific, very happily away from work and out of internet range! It was glorious. Now I have to find some motivation from somewhere – it’s hard.
And projecting geeber’s logic would show that we’d be safer blasting around at 120mph in bus-sized cars. Taken the other way, being a pedestrian is obviously extremely unsafe. Tiny minds are always trying to repeal the laws of physics.
Apparently, you’ve never heard of the Autobahn, where large stretches have no speed limits, and large Mercedes, Audis, BMWs, Jaguars and Porsches blast along at 100+ mph, and the fatality rate is very low. Or that, when Montana repealed its limits completely, fatalities dropped to a record low (and rose when it reinstitued them).
We’ve already used your logic when we instituted the 55 mph speed limit. When we repealed it, fatalities dropped. Average speeds on most limited access highways are higher than ever; fatalities (as expressed in fatalities per 100 milllion miles driven) are at record lows. You might find a little knowledge of history helpful here.
I guess there are still people believe that slow is good, or that fast is more dangerous on limited access highways (and, if you do it too often, you’ll go blind or grow hair on your palms.) But then, I guess that fits right in with fundamentalist environmentalism, which prefers faith to facts.
Of course, if anyone is still clueless enough to get his or her panties in a twist about people driving 80+ mph on a limited access highway, that is his or her right, but they shouldn’t get all worked up that the better informed have moved on.
I’m going to take a guess that you’ve never actually been on an Autobahn geeber?
Why? Because they surprisingly aren’t filled with S-Class Mercs, 7-Series BMWs doing 160kmh plus. It’s a fairly boring array of Golf’s, small Audis, Opel, 3 series, C-Class and even then most of them diesels. Sure there are plently of Porsche, even a few Ferrari etc, but you’d see more of them in California or Florida.
So that presents a problem for your ‘argument’; I would guess that while speeds might be “high” in Europe, the average mass of the vehicle fleet is much lower than that of the US. They don’t crash into each other at the rate of the US, nor kill/maim each other at the same rate either.
Actually, Peter Moran, I have been on the Autobahn – both as a passenger and as a driver. And, yes, there are plenty of E-Class and S-Class Benzes, along with 3-, 5- and 7-Series BMWs on the road, along with lots of Mondeos, Passats and other cars we would consider to be “mid size.” (Whether they are equipped with diesel engines is irrelevant – the key is how fast they are going. Hint – it’s not 55 mph or even 65 mph. It’s faster. In many cases, MUCH faster.)
So, guess again…