{"id":20,"date":"2009-03-02T20:24:48","date_gmt":"2009-03-03T04:24:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chien-noir.com\/blog\/?p=20"},"modified":"2010-11-14T08:04:27","modified_gmt":"2010-11-14T16:04:27","slug":"car-manufacturers-dont-get-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.chien-noir.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/02\/car-manufacturers-dont-get-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Car Manufacturers Don&#8217;t Get It"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over the past few months, I&#8217;ve been keeping an eye on the new car market with an eye to finding a car that gets better gas mileage than <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Toyota_Corolla\" target=\"_blank\">what I have now<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Also, I don&#8217;t want to get a car that&#8217;s too much smaller, and <a title=\"Consumer Reports\" href=\"http:\/\/www.consumerreports.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">proven reliability<\/a> is a requirement.\u00c2\u00a0 Suffice it to say that my current car gets a fairly impressive 30-33 MPG (US Gallons) on my commute, and 37-40 MPG on long haul freeway\/motorway trips.\u00c2\u00a0 Those numbers are <em>measured<\/em>, not EPA estimates.<\/p>\n<p>So, given the recent trends to &#8220;go green&#8221;, the burned-in memory of gasoline at over $4 a gallon in the US (yeah, I know, we have it easy compared to Europe!), and concerns over global warming and carbon emissions, you&#8217;d think it would be easy to find at least a dozen possible candidates, especially when considering hybrids or even all-electric vehicles.<\/p>\n<p>Nope.\u00c2\u00a0 Not even close.<\/p>\n<p>It seems that car manufacturers are stuck in the rut of making vehicles bigger, faster, and more powerful.\u00c2\u00a0 A catalog I received in the mail from Toyota a month or two ago was full of these, with only the Corolla, the Prius, and maybe one or two much smaller sub-compacts giving fuel efficiency that I found acceptable.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Even then, I got the impression that the <a title=\"See the comments of that blog for the skinny....\" href=\"http:\/\/www.autobloggreen.com\/2007\/11\/01\/does-the-2009-corolla-get-lower-mileage-than-2008-model\/\">mileage for the Corolla had gone <strong>down<\/strong><\/a>, not up, over the past 4 years.<\/p>\n<p>So I say this to the CEO&#8217;s of the major auto manufacturers:<em> Stop it!\u00c2\u00a0 You&#8217;re doing it wrong!!<\/em> Not that they&#8217;re likely to listen, but someone has to spell it out.\u00c2\u00a0 We need new thinking in Detroit and Tokyo:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Oil is a finite resource; it&#8217;ll eventually run out.\u00c2\u00a0 Stop depending on it for fuel!<\/li>\n<li>Aim for 60MPG in commuter cars.\u00c2\u00a0 Or better.<\/li>\n<li>Take air resistance seriously (see below).\u00c2\u00a0 Eliminate it as much as you can.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>For what it&#8217;s worth, there <em>are<\/em> smaller cars available\u00c2\u00a0 in Japan and Europe from some of the major auto makers; one does in fact get 60+ MPG (70+ in some consumer tests) but for some odd reason it doesn&#8217;t seem to be available in the US.\u00c2\u00a0 This makes no sense to me; I believe a car with that sort of killer fuel economy would be far more popular in the US than the auto industry executives seem to think.<\/p>\n<p>After much searching, I found <a title=\"Now THAT is a car!\" href=\"http:\/\/www.aptera.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">what I&#8217;d really like for my next car<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Unfortunately it&#8217;s not yet available, and when it does come out it&#8217;ll only be in California (for now).\u00c2\u00a0 You can&#8217;t argue with 100 MPG, a price tag in the $25-40k region, and an electric version that gets 100 miles on $0.50 worth of charging.\u00c2\u00a0 Not to mention aerodynamic drag that&#8217;s practically zero, and (to put it mildly) an appearance that is eye-catching and irresistably appealing to a geek \ud83d\ude42 .<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>Update 2010-11-14: Not long after this post, and realising that the Aptera&#8217;s availability around here is a long ways off, I gave in and got a Prius.\u00c2\u00a0 So now I&#8217;m pushing 50-52 MPG on my commute most of the time, slightly more than that on long haul trips.<br \/>\n<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over the past few months, I&#8217;ve been keeping an eye on the new car market with an eye to finding a car that gets better gas mileage than what I have now.\u00c2\u00a0 Also, I don&#8217;t want to get a car that&#8217;s too much smaller, and proven reliability is a requirement.\u00c2\u00a0 Suffice it to say that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[17,18,19],"class_list":["post-20","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-cars","tag-ecology","tag-fuel-efficiency"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chien-noir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chien-noir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chien-noir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chien-noir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chien-noir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.chien-noir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23,"href":"http:\/\/www.chien-noir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions\/23"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chien-noir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chien-noir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chien-noir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}