Yesterday, the engineer in chief issued new regulations mandating a fuel efficiency hockey stick.
Average mileage of the fleet has to go up to 54.5 mpg by the year 2025. Over the last 25 years, it has gone up from 18 MPG to 25 MPG, so it should be no problem accelerating the slope by an order of magnitude.
CAFE was a stupid idea anyway. Mandating anything just adds to the end cost while not actually doing anything but creating sharper pencils. Adding in the FF* you get any results you want! Statistics is a wonderful toy to play with!
* Fudge Factor!
http://cbullitt.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/picture-14.png
Sorry, Here’s one without that annoying arrow. Delete the last one.
http://cbullitt.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/dilbert32911.png
I loved that one!!! Dilbert is the funniest damned cartoon evuh!!!
I once spent a month at work going through the Dilbert archives one by one until I read every strip he’d done!!
This nonsense will stop once we (realists) take over the Senate and Presidency in Jan. ’13.
The Republicans aren’t any better than the Democrats. But if you mean more of the Marco Rubio, and Michele Bachmann ilk then halleluiah!
I think it’s doable……
As long as no one goes over walking speed and there are no hills…………………..
Come on Lat, it’s all downhill with Barack Obama as President!
A 54.5 MPG car will be pretty pathetic. Even electric cars will be more desirable.
You have a choice, sacrifice power and reduce weight or make more power and move more weight, for the amount of power produced.
I can’t believe any of the car makers will take 54.5 MPG seriously.
That is average. Most of the cars will have to be over 60 MPG
The problem with so much of USA is altitude. My (UK) car is similar to an Altima and gets 40 m.p.g. with good speed and acceleration. But we’re at low altitude here. I would not want to take my UK car over the Loveland Summit (12,000-ish ft). Would more use of turbo-chargers in the USA help get the m.p.g up?
lol, naw, we’ve got those…..narrow roads are the key!! If we were to narrow our roads to the size often found in Europe, then our cars would be much smaller…..but we won’t….nor do I desire them to do so. At some point, the law of diminishing returns will tell us when we’ve peaked the internal combustion engine’s efficiency and we’ll move to something else. We could get more mileage if we went to standard transmissions for our lager vehicles.
We end up with rolling coffins on skeeler wheels and a paddle for propulsion.
Local news said the automaker will still be able to build “profitable” SUVs and trucks.
Rolling coffin meets SUV. Sounds like a match made for heaven.
So, Obama reads Alex Jones and thinks that the evil car makers are hiding a 100MPG carburettor?
Nice.
In the 1980s you could buy a light weight Dodge Omni or Plymouth Horizon with a small motor that was rated at 38 mpg on the highway. Then ever increasing safety standards kicked in and cars had to get bigger and heavier in order to meet those standards. And because of the weight the engines had to get more powerful to move the mass. So today almost 30 years later there is advertising talking about the wonderful news of cars that get 40 mpg.
Put today’s small cleaner burning more efficient engines in a light weight Omni or Horizon and we might get close to that 54 mpg.
I won’t drive it…………..
Ford Pintos got over 30, too!! Heck, AMC made the Metropolitan back in the 50s! It got almost 40 mpg then. Can one imagine how much it could get with the engines of today?
You can hardly find a motorcycle that gets mileage that good, much less a car.
Engineers are planning to use the Oz/Kansas transport methodology to solve the complex engineering involved — 3 clicks of the ruby slippers while wishing in the presence of the good witch waving her wand. Agents for the good witch expect negotiations to be long and difficult, likely extending right up to the deadline.
Your brand new 1917 Enger with a twin-unit twelve cylinder engine is certified to obtain 35 mpg.
The conventional gasoline powered internal combustion engined car gets about as much MPG as it is going to get. The Obamites plan on getting major strides in fleet MPG by replacing a high percentage of gasoline cars with electrics and hybrids, and getting Americans out of the cars preferd by Americans and into compacts/sub-compacts.
The very first thing that the Car manufacturers do to get their fleet compliance average MPG up is discontinue all of the enthusiast cars. Say goodbaye to Mustang Shelby Cobras, LSX powered Camaros, Vipers, Hemi powered Challengers, and ZR1 & Z06 Corvettes. The Democrats already placed “gas guzzler” taxes of a couple thousand dollars on these vehicles when they’re purchased new.
Camaros don’t get the tax. Even the LS3 gets a rating of 16/25 mpg with the auto. and 16/24 mpg with the manual.
Huh, funny, I don’t remember hearing the House and Senate had approved this before it was enacted.
Amino, when you are King you don’t need no stinking Congress to make laws; you appoint cronies and govern by fiat .
I’m not sure if Congress considered Kings when creating the EPA.