[quote=briansd1]
People who drive Prius, eat organic food, tend veggie garden, people who value science and education should be admired, not denigrated.[/quote]
The Efficiency Paradox: Drving a Prius is wrong, and other inconvenient truths:
It doesn’t take long for him to establish the Prius Fallacy: “a belief that switching to an ostensibly more efficient travel mode turns mobility itself into an environmental positive.” Owen cites statistics showing that as government officials have moved to increase automobile fuel efficiency, our gas consumption has gone up, not down. We simply drive more miles as a species. He also disses HOV lanes, traffic-control systems, and even smartphone apps for finding a parking spot as “counterproductive from an environmental point of view because they make drivers even happier with cars than they were already.”
I think we proved earlier in this thread that Prius driver *do* drive more…by about 40 miles/week.
This same phenomena can be seen in Christmas lights. A few decades ago when huge, power hungry bulbs were strung along the fronts of houses, people only put up 100 or so lights. Now, with ultra efficient LEDs, people have switched to icycle lights and now string up 1000 more more on a regular basis![/quote]
You know svelte, I’ve been saying this all along. The key to saving gas that automakers will need to do, is (a) improve the efficiency of the current engines, which they can do and are proving can be done… and (b) reduce weight of the vehicles without compromising on safety (which they are doing)….
Auto companies simply weren’t motivated to do this before when gas was cheaper because consumers wouldn’t have paid for the extra dollars spent for efficiency and consumers didn’t care so much about spending more money at the pump… It’s a completely different set of rules now…
The fact that automakers can put a 4 cylinder forced induction engine recently that outputs as much power or even more power than 2-3 year old 6 cylinders is just one example. Looking around, the latest offers from german big three have 4 cylinder forced induction engines in there lower trim cars…. (Audi A4’s,A5’s, BMW 128,328,x3-xDrive28)..Other automakers have done similiar Ford’s Ecoboost 4 cylinder, Hyundai’s 4 turbo offering.. I have a lot of respect for Hyundai in particular because they caught up and even surpassed some of their japanese competitors and did so in much less time than the japanese competitors did)… Some of these 4 bangers are putting out 250hp some up to more…Hyundai’s got one at 278 hp…
Meanwhile 6 cylinder FI engines are made tremendous progress as the upgraded engine offering…Never would think that an F-150 would ever be powered by a 6 cylinder eco-boost engine…Nor did I think a I-6 turbo charge would ever make it into a BMW
The next step where it makes sense for automakers is to seriously put offerings with aluminum and/or composite material to save on weight….Audi’s have been doing this already in their higher end offers with aluminum offer. Ditto with BMW’s…
Remember when folks use to laugh at Saturns for their dent resistant doors? I thought those things were the coolest inventions of the time…Because not only were they more or less dent resistent, they were corrosion resistent and weighed less… BMW took one of the playbook… The X5 front fenders are all plastic composites….As well as the 3series….
