One Man's Car Shows Why Aid to the Automakers Must Include a Commitment to Fuel Efficiency
When I read that President Obama was taking a hard line with General Motors and Chrysler, I immediately thought of Daniel Glass.
A professional drummer and drum historian (and, in the interest of full disclosure, a fellow resident of Scheffres Hall at Brandeis University during our sophomore year of college), Daniel lives in car-crazy Los Angeles, where having an automobile is right up there with food, water and oxygen on the list of necessities. And yet, for the last two years, Daniel has hardly set foot in a gas station, but he nevertheless manages to get around town with no difficulties. How does he do it? His 1987 Mercedes station wagon's diesel engine has been adapted to run on vegetable oil.
What is so interesting about Daniel's driving habits is how uninteresting they are. His experience as a vehicle owner and driver is much the same as yours and mine, only while we go to gas stations to fill up our tanks with fossil fuel, Daniel goes to a supplier to fill up his five-gallon jugs with environmentally friendly vegetable oil. (To those who are concerned that using vegetable oil as fuel leads to higher food prices, lower food supplies in developing countries, and pollution from processing, relax. Daniel's supplier recycles used cooking oil from area restaurants.)
And while Daniel uses a mechanic familiar with his adapted fuel tank, any repair shop that can work on a Mercedes can fix any other problem with his vehicle. What if he goes on a long trip? He simply tosses some of the vegetable oil jugs into his trunk. What if he runs out of vegetable oil when he's on the road? Easy. If he can't get to a supermarket (yes, regular old vegetable oil works fine, it's just a bit expensive), then he can use conventional diesel fuel in the same tank.
If you think Daniel is some kind of bizarre one-off, he is actually one of thousands of Los Angeles drivers making use of diesel engines that burn vegetable oil. After all, his oil supplier isn't an environmental organization or hobbyist working out of his garage. Rather, he gets his fuel from a thriving business that supplies recycled cooking oil to drivers like Daniel.
In short, Daniel's car experience is just like ours, only he doesn't contribute to the fossil fuel economy.
Opponents of fuel-efficiency standards (and, of course, proponents of fossil fuels, who like to chant, "Drill, baby! Drill!") want you to think that powering vehicles with anything other than gasoline in engines that get low gas mileage is something for a distant future, completely unrelated to any modern experience. But Daniel proves that line of criticism to be total nonsense.
What does this all have to do with the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler? Simple. With all the talk of whether or not the government has the right to demand the resignation of a company's CEO, or whether the right wing is trying to bust the unions, or whether or not the administration should let the American automobile industry die out, there was precious little discussion of how a reorganized General Motors and Chrysler will fit into a more responsible national energy policy. Supporting the automakers without insisting that they fundamentally change their approach to making vehicles, namely that they commit to making fuel-efficient cars, is more than just a missed opportunity, it's flat-out wrong. And Daniel's experience shows that adjusting to this new reality can be a lot easier than people think.
The U.S. is being severely threatened on three fronts because of its addiction to oil: the environment, the economy and national security. Without reducing CO2 emissions, global warming threatens the habitability of the planet. We all remember how skyrocketing gas prices last summer severely impacted the budgets of American families, both at the pump and in the increased price of food and other necessities. (As President Obama has said, we can't keep going "from shock to trance" when gas prices go up and down.) And our dependence on oil from the Middle East has forced us to engage in the region in ways that have not served our national interests.
So if General Motors and Chrysler want billions of dollars from the American people, the money should come with a guarantee that the new General Motors and the new Chrysler will make fuel-efficient vehicles that help the country end its dependence on foreign oil.
Some have argued that Americans won't buy fuel-efficient vehicles when gas prices are low, and that forcing the automakers into such a business plan would be dooming them to failure. Even putting aside the success of the Toyota Prius (and the anticipation for Honda's 2010 Insight, which will offer a Prius-like vehicle at a lower cost, starting at just under $20,000), the government has the power to create a market for these cars by requiring that new vehicles meet stringent emissions standards. The government already prevents Americans from having unfettered access to dangerous substances, from heroin to dynamite. Acting to ensure that new cars don't add to the dangers of oil dependence would fall comfortably into the same vein (no pun intended).
If the Obama administration was to insist on General Motors and Chrysler adopting plans that would put them at the forefront of fuel-efficiency, and then was able to convince Congress to enact strict fuel-efficiency standards, the American automakers would be set up to be leaders in the new marketplace. But if General Motors and Chrysler want to continue on as they had been, with only minor adjustments, waiting for the recession to end and oil prices to stay low so that consumers will come back and buy their gas guzzlers, the U.S. government should not be enabling that plan. If that is the only choice, the better option might be to let the industry fall.
I understand the frustration of many Americans who think the government is being tougher on the auto industry than it was on the banks. I sincerely feel for the Midwest states, especially Michigan, that have seen massive job losses related to the failing auto industry, and who would be devastated by the industry's collapse. But the bottom line is that the automakers have failed to make decisions over the last 30 years that have allowed them to stay relevant in the marketplace. And now the companies are coming to the American people for a handout. As President Obama said back in November, shortly after he was elected, assistance to the automakers has to be a "bridge loan to somewhere as opposed to a bridge loan to nowhere." And that somewhere is for the companies to be leaders of a new era of green vehicles.
By forcing General Motors and Chrysler to shift focus to a future of fuel-efficient vehicles, all of the concerns can be addressed. The automakers can be saved. They can be profitable, acting as leaders rather than followers in their industry. And a thriving industry means jobs will come back.
The answer to saving the automakers is fuel-efficiency. Think I'm being overly ambitious? Well, tell me that the next time Daniel Glass speeds by you in his vegetable-oil powered Mercedes wagon. The future is now. At least for some forward-thinking Angelenos with diesel engines that run on recycled vegetable oil. It's time for the rest of us to catch up.
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General Motors Corp.’s top executive says the fuel economy of the new Chevrolet Camaro sports car is an example of how GM is paying closer attention to improving gas mileage.
Chief Executive Rick Wagoner says the V-6 version of the Camaro will get 29 miles per gallon on the highway, and a high performance SS model with a V-8 will get 25 miles per gallon.
Wagoner said during a speech Tuesday in Washington, D.C., that fuel economy numbers for the new car were released Tuesday by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The 2010 Camaro began arriving in dealer showrooms Monday. GM stopped making an earlier version of the iconic muscle car in 2002.
25-29 MPG, and you say it appeals to the young?
GM has to be stopped...
There is always the underlying assumption that automakers must make cars. During World War II automakers shifted production in months to produce tanks and landing craft etc. for warfare. Automobiles are the least efficient means of transportation in terms of energy resources consumed and pollution generated to move someone from point A to point B. Restructuring auto companies should include a massive shift to fuel efficient cars but equally to mass transit. In Europe few families need a car to get to work or school and get buy with one car per household. In the USA households are forced to buy, maintain, and fuel multiple cars. This a huge drain of people's resources that could be better spent for almost any other purpose. Over 50,000 people are killed each year in motor vehicle accidents. The odds of one dying while traveling in a car is 30 times as great as when using any other mode of transportation and that is despite railroads being allowed to drag their heels on implementing modern safety controls. It is fitting that GM is headed for bankruptcy. No other company has acted as aggressively to derail mass transit as when it funded a corporation after WW II to buy up the nation's light rail lines and convert them all to bus routes using GM coaches (and Standard Oil's gas and Firestone's tires, the other companies involved).
Hello, Mitchell Bard:
You are right on target, and I'd like to share a short experience that brings clearly into focus (at least to me) the disastrous approach Detroit has taken over the years to the American auto consumer:
I was at the Chicago Auto Show in February. I was at the Ford, GM and Chrysler displays. There were teenagers surrounding the new retro pony cars of the 60s (Mustangs, Camaros, Challengers, etc.). These kids were draped over these cars like melted butter over pancakes, taking photos and avidly discussing horsepower and 0-60 performance. They didn't have a dime in their pockets.
Over at the Honda, Toyota, Kia and VW displays, there was a much less animated group of "old-timers" asking questions of the hosts. It was pretty easy to tell this mature group of workers, professionals, and family oriented consumers had money to spend and were evaluating their next purchase based on long-term value and economy.
This was enough for me to ask, "What were they thinking when they built these vehicles in today's market?"
You're absolutely right: Someone must impose a new direction for American auto makers if they want to receive a bail-out from the taxpayers. They seem incapable of reading the marketplace themselves.
GM: BRING BACK THE EV!
OBAMA: We OWN the company now, tell them to make NOTHING but EV's until they are again profitable. Once they've met that incentive, allow them to expand that technology to light trucks and a larger passenger car. No SUV's. Is that socialism? NO, it's guiding the half blind through a mind field lest they blow us all up.
We don't own GM. We don't want to own GM. Why? Because then we would also own all of GMs future liabilities which probably add up to $100 billion or more.
The author of this article, while well-meaning, appears to be woefully ignorant of technologies that are well developed in OTHER COUNTRIES that run cars on non-fossil fuels. The USA has a lot to learn from Brasil on running cars on ethanol and methanol, both of which are being manufactured in vast scale, although not yet displacing fossil fuels on a nationwide basis -- only on a regional basis.
Approximately 30% of the cars in Argentina have been adapted to run on natural gas as well as on gasoline or diesel, including close to 100% of all taxis. This is a process that was begun well over twenty five years ago. And "natural" gas is methane which can be produced from agricultural waste or even from city trash in large scale.
Argentine farmers produce their own biodiesel, mostly from sunflower seeds, in enough quantities that they are independent of the oil companies, and there are many fueling stations ("gas stations") that sell this biodiesel for direct use in completely unmodified diesel vehicles.
I live in Argentina about six months out of the year -- and I know for SURE that the experience there is that there aren't any substantial mechanical problems or engine durability problems in cars that use the non fossil fuels. Detroit's "FEARS" are a manufactured excuse to cling to the status quo.
The problems with biofuels are not technical. They are biological. Plants have a very, very low thermodynamic efficiency (on the order of 0.1% to 1%). Add to that the conversion from plant material to biofuel and the losses in the conversion back to mechanical forms of energy (to drive, lift etc.) and your system efficiency (scaled to unit area) is on the order of 0.01-0.1%. That's in comparison to a solar panel efficiency of 20% and a solar-electric system efficiency of approx. 10%. So there is about a two order of magnitude difference between the area needed to be covered with solar panels (and much of that can be done on rooftops and already industrial area) vs. the need for pristine agricultural areas. 1:100 is the difference between making plenty of energy with a minimal effort vs. plowing under a continent without actually solving the problem.
I hope you post this comment wherever people suggest that running automobiles on vegetables is the solution to our ills. As you point out, solar electricity and solar heat require much smaller footprints than biofuels.
Punishing the car companies alone is not the answer. The oil companies must be also be forced to pay the TRUE cost of oil. This should include the cost of all wars related to oil such as Iraq, plus the cost of maitaining a military to ward off threats to oil. There are other costs as well e.g. the costs to environment of excess carbon-di-oxide etc. which must be imposed on oil. Oil companies will have no option but to pass that cost on to us, the consumers who will then behave in ways as to avoid those costs. These companies did get a taste of that recently when oil prices peaked. I am guessing that the cost of gasoline will go to about $4.00 per gallon or more. We are already paying that price except it is hidden in taxes, bail outs and budget deficits that we will eventually pay. WIth proper incentives, how long will it be that smart competing inventors of the world will come up with different sustainable non-militaristic scenarios. The current car industry will then be completely changed. What is wrong with that?
I think what you mean is that YOU and WE should be forced to pay the true cost of oil. The oil companies only make what we want to buy. Do you have such a distorted view of economics to think that the oil companies will simply absorb costs and not pass them right along to good old you? A carbon tax, or any other tax on oil, coal or natural gas will simply be paid by you, whether directly or indirectly. Pay up.
Please read my comments again. I said that the oil companies will "have no option but to pass these costs to us the consumers" and we will change our buying habbits. At this moment, I as a consumer, have no way to understand what these costs are. When gas is at $4 per gallon, I will feel it directly. Your last words "pay up." I already am. In Iraq war, in oil subsidies, in increasing insurance costs due to rising atmospheric disasters, in taxes to help victims of Katrina, in car company bail outs, in increased security on our airports to contain terrorism caused by our oil appetite. This is socialism for the big wigs gone amok because they profit enormously from this distored structure of cost accounting. I like to pay my costs directly and honestly so I can behave accordingly. Indirect and hidden costs, especailly through government subsidies, scare me out of my skin.
The auto companies should be forced to do one thing and one thing only. Survive in a tough, tough market without government subsidies. Otherwise they are not sustainable. These companies are not vessels for social engineering experiments. There focus must be on making a range of affordable cars of superior quality that customers actually want to buy.
If we want to get a European outcome on fuel efficiency then we should tax carbon the way the Europeans do and use the marketplace to drive for more fuel efficient vehicles. But very few of our elected representatives (and this includes President Obama, Speaker Pelosi and Harry Reid) have the political courage to say they are for a new tax to get gasoline and diesel (and we should be using far more diesel - many European cars that perform extremely well are diesels) that would get the gas price up to, say, the typical European $6+/gallon.
They are only for taxes that most of us think will be paid for by others or that can be disguised (cap and trade) on the assumption that we will be too stupid to figure out what is driving fuel and electricity costs through the roof.
My guess is we'll engage in a bunch more Rube Goldberg mechanisms that work poorly if at all (following on the CAFE standard model) rather than telling each other the truth.
Ev's can be done,
Baker Electric back in 1911 made 110 mile range 45mph, faster than roads then EV's and Jay Leno's still has some of the original batteries!! These got 100mpg energy equivalent back then!! Just making it more aero it would easily hit 80mph.
For more on making your own EV yahoo EV Clubs or EV racing for some cool stuff. The Killicycle drag bike does 7.9sec1/4 mile at 168mph!!
I drive my 3wh MC I built for $150 from scrap parts that goes 40 miles and recharges from a 120vac socket in 2 hrs. But I'm good. It gets 400mpg+ energy equivalent or $.003 /mile from electricity. I'm building a Rocky Mtn Inst./ Lovin's type Hypercar all composite 2 seat sportwagon EV with 100+ mile range and 80mph top speed that if mass produced would cost under $12k and $.01/mile electric cost.
Check out 100mpg X Prize for more high mileage vehicles.
Now make an EV for me that costs $23,000, can drive 480 miles on one charge and can be recharged in five minutes.
I am waiting.
The Europeans have been buying fuel efficent cars for decades. Why can't they sell them here?
Most are itsy bitsy. Europeans for the most part use rail to travel greater distances. For those who can afford to own cars, they are used sparingly.
Most Europeans own a car. They just don't drive them as much. Rail travel has very little to do with it. It's the zoning that reduces commutes. Europe does not have the area to allow for McMansion suburbs.
They have been doing that for decades. That’s one of the major reasons that the big three automakers are in trouble.
While I think highly of President Obama, I am concerned because this seems too much like the nineteen seventies and eighties. That was the beginning of CAFE standards. However, all automakers made some crappy deadly dangerous cars then and eventually the public caught on. If they didn't get killed by them, they stopped buying the crap.
There is a reason why Ford is not at the corporate welfare slop trough. That's because they make Mustangs as well as hybrids and SUV's. In other words, they make what sells and what people want to buy. If they want it b ad enough, they'll afford it.
I also notice that the Obama's personal vehicle is a Ford. Should that tell us something?
Not very good trolling. Too many words, too obvious.
We need to drive the price of gasoline up in order to create the market for efficient cars. Europeans and Canadians pay a lot of tax-per-gallon. A price that more closely resembles the real cost of gasoline (economic, environmental, security). Had the government started inserting tax hikes in gasoline as the price came back down from $4+/gal they'd have enough money to repair bridges and develop high speed rail and all sorts of great stimulus projects, and no one would be the wiser.
Auto makers must break their colluded bondage to Big Oil. The consequences of such an incestuous relationship is that US auto makers can only produce fossil fuel, internal combustion engines.
About 10 years ago I started to notice that university parking for students was full of $40,000 vehicles, no beaters. And it amazed me that most student cars were twice what I could afford working full time.
WTF! I expect changes over the next 4 years.
If you could only afford a $20,000 car four years ago I wouldn"t expect too much of an increase in your buying power within the next four years. Once 'cap and trade", higher gasoline taxes, and a whole host of additional 'sin taxes' kick in we'll all be living on less. ..........
Yeah, you’re right. The first thing we need to do is reinstate the perfectly useful anti trust and anti monopoly laws that those nasty union loving liberals put together in the nineteen thirties and restore a true Free Market Economy and competition.
Yes, that would require seizing the assets of Big Oil so they can't delay things forever with their frivolous lawsuits.
After all the neo-commie Nay saying Nattering Republicans have been doing that for decades against we the people. We should do the same to stop the Corpo-criminals right now.
Then we would have a choice to buy the most effective fuels and energy sources.
This is more than just creating better gas mileage...
its now about national security, the environment ( global warming) and phasing out planned obsolescence of the auto industry culture- the same reason they are currently in trouble- greed!
The making of a mediocre product that dishes the consumer, the environment and creates over consumption of petrol from the Middle East!
This must be a musician kind of thing - Willie Nelson is trying to sell franchises for this stuff. Here's a problem: how many restaurants frying fries and chicken will it take to provide enough veggie oil to make even the smallest dent in our gasoline usage?
You want to make us less dependent on foreign oil yet provide incentive to finance these kinds of schemes, along with nitrogen, natural gas, electric, etc? Slap a $3/gal tax on gasoline.
The car companies made a commitment to better fuel efficiency and reducing our dependency on foreign oil long ago. It takes time to develop a car and bring it to market.
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Wow. If you believe the car companies have made such a commitment, you have read no automotive history whatever. Major automakers have bought up, over decades, the patents for steam cars, electric cars, fuel-efficiency cars and more. They have been working hand-in-glove with major petroleum corporations to ensure that petroleum fuels are paramount, and that fuel-efficiency which would depress Big Oil profits is a losing concern. Automakers tout speed, virility, high performance, and are always encouraging buyers to size up (the Hummer was only the grossest example of such unnecessary size and inefficien
Please give us a list of all those patent numbers. You do know that all patents are public records, don't you?
yeah, and the more you really don't want to do it, the longer it will take. Take away the choices--force automakers to a higher fuel efficiency standard--something the Bush administration NEVER did. Larger, more powerful cars, (when fuel efficiency isn't even a consideration) simply contain more profit, which the grossly overpaid executives at the automakers simply take home. When GM was asked to "fix it", did they pick on Cadillac or Corvette or Camaro--nah, they picked on Saturn. What a bunch of ......
There is an alternate approach, make synthetic gasoline out of water, air (CO2) and electricity. If you follow the chemistry and energy through the math, penny a kWh electricity will make dollar a gallon fuel.
Penny a kWh looks to be possible from space based solar power *IF* you can get the cost of lifting power satellite parts to GEO down under $100/kg. The limit from physics is about 15 cents. A combination of a chemical rocket first stage and an ablation propulsion second stage looks like it will make the $100/kg point.
But it's a big and expensive project.
Keith Henson
rogers.comt)rogers.com
All I get from your post is that you did not do the calculation. Let me do it for you.
A gallon of gasoline has an energy content of 131MJ. So that's 131MJ/3.6M
The penny a kWh for space based solar is an idle speculation from the 1970s that was wrong when it was conceived. It's even more wrong now. The only difference between solar power in orbit and solar power on earth is a factor of 1.4 and that's without any transmission losses. So you have to lift the facility into orbit to get a meager 40% improvement, at best. It never made sense and still doesn't. You might want to look at the size of the solar panels on the space station to see what it costs to generate the electricity for no more than a dozen single family homes.
Your calculation and mine agree close enough. Going from electric power through hydrogen and carbon dioxide the thermodynamic lose to hydrocarbons is 44%. And carbon dioxide is the worst carbon source you can use to make gasoline. This is really a hydrogen economy where carbon is used to make hydrogen easy to handle. (There is more hydrogen in a gallon of gasoline than there is in a gallon of liquid hydrogen!) At a penny a kWh, there would be about $0.70 of electricity in a gallon of synthetic gasoline. The capital cost of making synthetic oil from carbon dioxide and hydrogen is scaled from Sasol's billion dollar plant in Qatar.
The space based solar in the 1970s was based on mining the moon for materials. I know, I was one of the founders of the L5 Society and deeply involved. This is a new proposal based on using a first stage conventional (but reusable) rocket and an ablation laser second stage with 12-17 km/sec exhaust velocity. Direct to GEO for less than $100/kg, about 5 times as much payload fraction as you can get with chemical rockets.
(continued perhaps)
You are right in that peak ground solar and average space solar sunlight flux is about 40%. But you missed the day night cycle and clouds. That can run it up to 8-10 times, even higher for cloudy parts of the world. On top of that you have the cost of storage. You do take a 50% hit in electricity to electricity through microwaves, but the receiving antennas can be placed relatively near the loads. It cost roughly a penny a kWh per thousand km to transport power on the ground.
Finally, it is not obvious that we could ramp up the production of solar panels enough to build power sats on the scale needed. We already build steam turbines and jet engines in close to the numbers needed. There is no reason power sats would not work just fine using rotating machinery.
If you want to really dig into this, there is a short and a long version here:
www.operat
The long version is a talk I gave about how to put the CO2 we have added since 1960 back in the ground as synthetic oil. Takes about 600 TW years. 60 TW is four times as much power as we now use worldwide, and it would take a decade.
Keith Henson
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