anybody driving 45mph on the freeway should be pulled over by highway patrol for obstructing traffic
As long as weather conditions are clear and it’s not rush hour, there’s no excuse whatsoever to be driving 45mph on the freeway . . . unless you enjoy everybody passing you, honking at you, flashing their high beams, and throwing eye daggers your way
The MD State Police don’t seem to mind drivers going 45 MPH on I-95. I see people going 45 in. The morning rush. It’s typically a specialty truck like a mobile crane or street sweeper. But sometimes it is some great-great grandmother in a car.
Mike, the car market changed dramatically during the gas shortage of the '70s. After standing in long lines fighting to get gas, drivers did want more efficient cars. And they still do.
I agree they do…I know I do…So why aren’t they producing them? Sure there are some vehicles like the hybrids…but in general…the cafe’ numbers have gone unchanged for over 20 years. Seems like we should be doing a lot better then that by now.
I think people expect a certain level of efficiency but at the same time want a vehicle that has other features like style, room, comfort, and general utility. The 70’s gave us FWD, unibody, computers, fuel injection, and a general down-sizing of the cars. SUVs took off because the small cars weren’t utilitarian enough and because they were trucks and not bound by the CAFE standards. To me that was the public talking.
Everytime there is a gas price spike, people go nuts over fuel efficiency again. Of course there are buyers for high efficiency little boxes with no features but there are also buyers for Escalades. So its manufacturers that can’t just re-tool at the whim of the public and a public that is fickle due to gas price changes. Hard to win at that game but I think if you have an SUV that gets around 25 mpg and a car that gets around 30 mpg, that’s a pretty good general average. Now if you want to pull a boat or a little trailer, you almost need a tuck or SUV. In the past you could do it with a car. I shudder to see the kind of little boxes with 3 cylinders and 10 speed transmissions that will result from the new artificial standards. Maybe we’ll just import Yugos instead and give the auto industry to the Russians this time.
I think internal combustion engine designers have extracted about as much of the energy out of gasoline as is possible, at least in the reciprocating ICE form. Better mileage from here involves tradeoffs that would raise the cost of cars too high, such as extensive use of carbon fiber materials and aluminum to reduce weight, and tires that would ride hard and be terrible in bad weather. Remember too that while engine designers are trying to squeeze more mileage out of the engines, safety guys are adding more and more safety devices to meet new mandates. The new “partial front” head on crash test (or whatever it’s called) will require even more weight to be added.
I’m not advocating it, but of you removed all the weight that’s been added due to safety mandates since 1970, todays cars probably would get much better mileage. Advances in engine design have been offset by the added weight of adding safety systems. Said differently, if engines had not become more efficient cars would probably get less mileage than they did 40 years ago due to the added weight of the safety systems.
IMHO engines have definitely become more efficient. But there is a limit without adding expensive additional systems. And I think we’re about there. I think expensive additional systems, hybrid systems, will become normal in all cars in very few years. It’ll be the only way to meet new mandates.
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I don’t think most people want efficient cars, around here all you see is big jacked up pickups, tahoes, trailblazers and other gas guzzlers. I often wonder how some of these folks afford to fuel such beasts when some of them are driven on 20-30 mile commutes.
I often wonder how many of these folks actually do afford these vehicles, I seen one guy several years ago in a nice chevy avalanche at the gas pump playing credit card roulette trying to find a card that had enough on it to fuel the beast up. I wondered how long until the truck got repossessed…
IMHO engines have definitely become more efficient. But there is a limit without adding expensive additional systems. And I think we're about there. I think expensive additional systems, hybrid systems, will become normal in all cars in very few years. It'll be the only way to meet new mandates.
A lot of these new systems are expensive NOW. But when you start mass-producing them (especially in large numbers) the cost drops precipitously. Electronic ignition systems when they first came out were very expensive to make for manufacturers. Yet within just a few years…they were actually CHEAPER to make then the standard points ignition systems.
I think you may be right about how much we can get out of an ICE engine. But I’m not so sure. Necessity is the mother of invention. You’d be amazed what ideas man-kind has come up with when certain events forced them to come up with a solution.
Points well made, my friend.