Progressive Automotive X PRIZE

Not All That Guzzles is Olds

With apologies to Bill Shakespeare for mangling his prose, we'd like to point out to our readers that, just as not all that glitters is gold, not all that is Detroit guzzles gas.  Perhaps unduly dismayed by that icon of fuel profligacy, the Hummer, or perhaps too easily seduced by diesel-sipping Bluetecs from Europe, the greener portion of the American public seems to assume that Detroit must (almost by definition) be the biggest villain in the MPG saga.  Not quite so!  As shown in a recently released GAO report on fuel economy standards, most European OEMs who export to these shores regularly violate CAFE targets, choosing instead to ante up the civil penalties that result.  In fact, the Europeans have enriched the US Treasury by some $115 million between 2001 and 2005 (which are the newest figures GAO has), with BMW leading the way, at over $50 million in fines.  Even the People's Car maker, VW, ponies up a few million bucks every few years to cover its fuel-thirsty Audis (and of course those products of another VW subsidiary, Lamborghini).  One cannot tie the numbers easily to a given model or even to a given year, as Uncle Sam allows all sorts of averaging and carry-forwards and -backs, but over the long haul the biggest offender is Mercedes.  And these numbers don't even count the gas-guzzler tax tacked on at the point of sale: these are civil penalties paid by the OEM for violating the CAFE standards.  The Japanese and Koreans are notably absent from the list, as you might expect, but perhaps as you might not expect, so are the Detroit 3: GM, Ford, and Chrysler have never yet had to pay a CAFE fine.  (They may start having to, according to rumors that they have recently strayed out of compliance, but with the lags in these numbers it is hard to tell.)  So, while the Detroit side may be not be as green as we would like, at least the home team is not just paying off the referees.  As German diesels hit these shores the situation may change, but for now remember that while the Big Three may be making too many V-8s, for a big thirsty V-12 you have to go to Europe...

Of Turbochargers and Tinfoil Hats?

I am both impressed by and grateful to the individual inventor.  The would-be Thomas Edison toils away in lab or garage, working against the odds sometimes for money, but more often for glory and to make the world a better place.  Inventors' interests mirror the concerns of their times: in the Dark Ages the inventor was often an alchemist, seeking to turn lead into gold; in the frenzy of the Industrial Revolution the race was on for ever-more-exotic labor-saving devices, from the sewing machine to the self-propelled harvester combine.  Since the rise of the automobile, therefore, it is not surprising that inventors turn their attention to cars, specifically to the improved power plant.  And indeed, AXP hopes to encourage more and more of these thinkers and tinkerers to come forward and test their concepts on the road with us. 

However, there has always been a dark side to the automotive invention tradition, that of the more paranoid or isolated tinkerer, who is absolutely convinced, much like his (for they are mostly men) forebear the alchemist, that there is a Secret Formula out there which can overthrow the laws of nature and unleash a miraculously efficient new engine concept.  Most often there is an accompanying view that some evil force, most often referred to as "they," is already aware of the Formula, and has acted to suppress it.  (And sometimes this is true!)  Thus the inventor becomes a crusader as well. 

I am in no way poking fun at these engineers and theoreticians: without them we'd probably still be painting on cave walls.  And a misguided initial idea can lead to great things... there is a more than some serendipity and even a little alchemy in the history of inventions such as nylon, penicillin, and even aluminum.  On the other hand, their rate of success is disappointingly low: even in mainstream automotive powertrain development we can point to struggling concepts, such as the Wankel and the Orbital two-stroke, neither of which has lived up to expectations (yet).

Our readers may be unaware that the American government, specifically the EPA, dutifully attempts to test and evaluate the more promising of the MPG-enhancing concepts, although to date the success rate has been pretty close to zero.  For those interested, this page covers dozens of such EPA investigations over the years.  I was stunned to see all this: the breadth and depth of the ideas are staggering.  If AXP can harness even 10% of this energy, maybe brought to a higher level of technical sophistication, we should have no problem delivering to the American public a new range of green vehicle choices.

Report from NAIAS

I'm going to be lazy with my report from the 100th Detroit auto show. Why repeat what's been said so well by another? Joel Makower, one of our treasured advisors, whom we ran into briefly on Sunday, wrote a great wrap-up of the show.

While I think the Chevy Volt was the star of the show, judging by the fact that it was on everybody's lips for the three days we were there, the rest of the show was filled with muscle and the usual low fuel economy numbers. I do like the Honda FCX and may buy it if it's possible to fill it easily. It's, by far, the most appealing and most practical of the near term alternative cars (and I'm a toy junkie). While the BMW hydrogen car is even more attractive, for obvious reasons (no comment on its efficiency or the wisdom of one technology over another--that's not the point here), I don't rank on their list and sadly won't receive one...and Honda has committed to selling these cars in 2008. Maybe we'll get surprised and see other alternatives sooner, but I'm not hopeful.

That said, it was pretty cool to see people clustering around the Volt, with their backs to the Camaro, Corvette and Hummer immediately surrounding it...if only because it represents the large consumer interest in seeing technical and packaging advances towards desirable, super-efficient vehicles brought to market. Whether the Volt will, in fact, be brought to market is depressingly iffy, but I would love to see this car competing when we launch this competition.

Smeed's Law: fatalism and traffic death

I just read a great piece by Freeman Dyson in the most recent MIT Technology Review.

It recounts his WWII experience analyzing bombing data at the RAF Bomber Command. Aside from providing a compelling historical insight, which it most certainly does, in it, he recounts Smeed's Law (Reuben Smeed was his boss), which describes death rates due to traffic accidents in a manner divorced from national differences in safety regulation, road conditions, car design, or any of the other things one would imagine might make a difference in a matter like this.

The equation: the number of deaths equals .0003 times the 2/3 power of the number of people times the 1/3 power of the number of cars. He says it mostly holds true, to within a factor of two, for all countries and all time. After doing the calculation, using 300 million US citizens, 238 million registered vehicles, and some rusty math skills, Smeed's law does, indeed, hold to within a factor of two of American road fatalities. The Smeed equation gives 83,316 deaths and the real number is 43,443 for 2005.

Dyson posits that Smeed's law is saying that the national death rate from traffic accidents is dependent on the psychological constant that any population applies to accident death: above it, they drive more carefully; below it, they drive more recklessly...until they bump up against that psychological barrier and correct again by driving more carefully.

Fascinating.

Remembering Dave Hermance

Many of you will have noted, with great sadness I am sure, Dave's untimely death last week.  It may be some comfort to know that he passed away while doing something he loved, which was flying his Interavia aerobatics plane.  The personal tragedy this represents for his family and friends is grave, of course, and while I knew Dave I did not know him well enough to eulogize in general.  So I will restrict my remarks to what I think Dave meant to one member, at least, of the "green car community," if we can assert the existence of such a group. 

Dave's job in recent years was to assist his employer, Toyota, to adapt the Prius (and other Toyota hybrids) for the North American market, to launch them here, and to answer the numerous technical and commercial questions so many of us had about the cars.  His technical expertise was broad and deep, but what always stuck in my mind after speaking with Dave, or while hearing him talk at numerous industry meetings, was how patient and unflappable he was.  Critiques of the Prius have always included challenges to its MPG claims, its true environmental impact, the depth of its customer appeal, etc. -- and Dave handled these issues well.  But he also dealt stoically and diplomatically with assaults that I know would have driven me around the bend: that the whole thing was just cynical Toyota marketing, that the vehicle's high voltages would kill EMS workers responding to a crash, or that Toyota was duping drivers into buying the cars so they could "stick them" with a $6,000 replacement battery fee years later.

In response to all these arguments, Dave quietly and convincingly returned to the fact base, to what Toyota and its cars were actually achieving in the lab and in the real world, thus adroitly disarming the more zealous (and usually less informed) denizens of the blogosphere.  His achievements were many, but for this one alone, for his calm insistence on the facts, I will miss him greatly.  The "green car community" suffers from an excess of assertions and a shortage of reasoned opinions: in losing Dave we have lost one of our more reasonable, informed, consistent, and insightful voices.

Smaller is Getting Safer

In a post a few months ago (Is Bigger Really Safer?), I pointed out that drivers of lightweight racecars routinely walk away from 200 mph crashes, and that occupants of sport utilities and pickups actually have a higher death rate than car occupants. 

Today's New York Times has a special section on cars (registration required) that focuses on small cars, and it leads with an article (Small-Car Nation) that focuses on their growing popularity -- indeed, small cars this year are outselling SUV's. 

Another article addresses safety; although the physics of collisions does favor larger cars, smaller cars are getting safer because more design effort and more safety features are going into them.   A related development is an automaker initiative to reduce the dangers to small car occupants by making vehicles of different sizes more compatible in crashes (e.g., by making front-end heights more uniform so that large cars don't ride up and crush small cars). 

Obviously weight matters, but so does design.

Moreover, there's a larger perspective.  As our Advisor and guest blogger S.M. Shahed often points out to us (and I hope will soon detail in a blog post), it's not occupant safety that counts (or should count) -- it's total safety.  It's not car damage, it's total damage.  When a big SUV plows into a crowd or a store, the SUV and its occupants might be fine, but lots of people and things won't be.   So one can argue that small cars are not just getting safer for their occupants, they are in fact safer for all of us.   And that's just physics too. 

We'll Always Have Paris

Yr hmbl srvnt is just back from the Paris Auto Show (a nasty job but somebody etc. etc. ... I did buy a TerraPass at least!) and is happy to report on aspects of the Show that might be relevant to AXP. 

Paris is not a "major" show (those are Tokyo, Frankfurt, Detroit, and Geneva) so it tends not to get new product launches from makes other than home-town boys Renault and PSA, but it is always interesting and well-done.  The Paris theme I would say from an AXP angle is: schizophrenia.

On the one hand Europe is the epitome of automotive excess: ALL of the world's gas-gulping V-12s are made here.  European luxury brands such as Mercedes, BMW, and the ultra-ultra firms like Lamborghini and Ferrari have been in violation of the USA CAFE rules ever since they were put in place.  Collectively they have paid over half a billion dollars in fines to Uncle Sam over the years: so your S-Class purchase goes in part to paying down the national debt I guess. 

On the other hand, Europe produces some of the most fuel-frugal vehicles on the planet, from the tiny smart (remember, no capital "S") to the VW Lupo and other so-called A-class cars.  More intriguingly from an AXP perspective may be the European voiturette class.  This is a category of small car mostly derived from French rules but drivable across Europe, designed for short trips and non-highway local use.  Check out for example the Ligier ...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and (though it is technically not a voiturette) the 55-HP Fiat Panda.  These little beasts get excellent fuel economy (often well over 50 mpg), without the use of exotic technology, and at low cost, since they are not designed to take on the stresses of high speed and heavy payloads.  This concept is alien to the States, where while we allow small carlike vehicles (mostly upgraded golf carts: see GEM) to tootle around gated communities and other close-in neighborhoods, we really limit by keeping them away from main thoroughfares (admittedly for safety reasons).  It may very well be time for a change in this setup, however, and indeed the AXP City class is intended to stimulate experimentation in and experience with this segment.  The point is, one can save fuel not just by making a big car more efficient (e.g. Prius) but by making smaller cars.  An unsettling idea in the land of the Big Gulp and the Supersize, but maybe the time has come.

(PS: Japan has a similar category of car, the so-called kei class.  This includes one of my all-time favorite designs, the Daihatsu Copen, which makes a Miata look gargantuan, and which I'd buy in bulk at Costco if I could!)

Thoughts on a Google Car

According to recent activity over at Google.org, the philanthropic arm of most everyone's favorite search engine, the foundation may soon fund efforts to "develop an ultra-fuel-efficient plug-in hybrid car engine that runs on ethanol, electricity and gasoline."  I have no information that the resulting powertrain will then be used in a Google-branded car (as opposed to being inserted in other makers' vehicles: the nifty Th!nk would be a great candidate), but it is intriguing to speculate what the Google name would do for a car's image. 

One of the challenges car designers have today is how to telegraph to the outside world modern-day self-images of car owners.  We know how to do all the familiar old ones: to comunicate wealth we make the car longer and wider, round off the corners, and maybe darken the windows; to comunicate speed and power we lengthen the hood, lower the car, and flare the wheel arches; to indicate practicality we go for a boxy look and very large door apertures.  But how do we communicate "wired-ness" or technology savvy or -- especially pertinent to X -- environmental awareness?  A technophile can radiate his or her own brand of coolness through casual display of those white iPod earbuds, or by toting the latest style of messenger bag -- but what kind of car does she drive?  And while for the greener folks among us the Prius is an obvious choice (and outselling the Honda hybrids in part, I assert, just because it is a more visually distinctive "badge of honor"), we can't all drive Prii.  Back when environmental sensitivity and the hippie culture pretty much completely overlapped, the VW bus was probably the signifier of choice, but now that we all know that such elderly vehicles are equipped only with the most primitive of emissions controls, that's hardly an option.

Perhaps a GoogleCar can make great strides on both dimensions: visually distinctive on the outside, and inside, the first vehicle to not only sport an iPod dock, but also a mobile WiFi hotspot, a massive built-in hard drive, a prepaid NetFlix subscription, and of course a navigation system running Google Maps.  The possibilities are endless.  And then under the hood, a hyper-clean hyper-efficient powertrain.  Tweak the styling to make it distinctive (maybe steal a page from Scion's book here) and the possibilities are endless.  A new dialect in the design language of the car could be created.

Oh and by the way, what we do not have in mind is the Goggomobil:   just so there isn't any confusion! (grin)

Horses for Courses

As has been pointed out by various industry analysts, we could "cure" our automotive fuel consumption problem without the application of a single new type of powertrain or fuel, if we'd just change our behavior. 

The first pernicious habit we have is, of course, our dedication to driving thousands of miles per year per car.  This number persists in going up and up and up virtually every year since World War II.  Americans seem addicted to mobility. 

Our second behavioral problem relates to the mix of cars we buy and how we use them: we typically drive vehicles that are wildly inefficient for the purposes we ask them to serve.  As some have said, the real potential mpg of a mid-sized sedan that is labelled as getting 25 miles per gallon could be 100 mppg - miles per person per gallon - if it always carried 4 people.  But since that sedan typically has only 1 person in it, we say the car gets only 25 mpg.  The number of empty seats and unused trunk space in the American fleet is uncounted but is staggering to contemplate.

Since we're unlikely to move en masse to constant carpooling anytime soon (which would raise the numerator in the mppg ratio), then the next best solution is to shrink the denominator: move to smaller cars, and carry around a lot fewer empty seats and unutilized pounds of steel.  Thus if we all switched to Aveo's or Fit's tomorrow our problem might evaporate.

The favorite whipping boy in this particular struggle is the SUV, partly because such vehicles are inherently inefficient, but partly (I suspect) because energy-conscious drivers seethe in frustration when they see an 8-passenger sport-brute barrel by at 70 mph... with just one person on board!  This really has to stop.  Yet owners of trucks (pickups, SUVs, minivans) point out that they are not trying to waste gas, they are just buying "horses for courses:" the pickup bed may be empty much of the time, but when the need to haul firewood out to the country house emerges, well the Prius just won't cut it.  Or the SUV owner might point out that when all three kids load up their ski gear, even the Expedition is crowded.

How realistic is the "horses for courses" argument?  How often are all these seats and cubic feet fully utilized?  Accurate data are hard to come by, but the Polk company, respected automotive market researchers (Polk), have taken a shot at it, at least from the perspective of the pickup segment.  Here are the fun facts:

• 57% of pickup owners use the bed portion of the truck less than once a month (essentially they've bought a truck in order to haul ~10 loads a year!) 
• 27% of owners have never put anything in the bed (!!!) 
• 37% of owners have never used the truck to tow anything 
• and 62% of pickup owners in America have never gone off road

The message is pretty clear: just like your nutty old uncle who bought a big Lincoln "because you can put 7 sets of golf clubs in the trunk!" -- but who never golfed himself -- a lot of Americans are not quite matching their cars to their needs.  A lot of our horses are just not suited to their courses, I'm afraid.

Fuel-efficient cars and the ghost of Thorstein Veblen

Best known for his work on conspicuous consumption, Dr. Veblen (1857-1929) was also interested in economic anomalies such as one named after him, the Veblen Good.  A commodity is a Veblen good if people's preference for buying it increases as a direct function of its price -- contrary to all standard economic theory, which says we'd typically like more of something to the extent it costs less.  But in the case of high-efficiency (high MPG) cars, such as those the Automotive X Prize seeks to encourage, the Veblen effect may apply.  Why is this?  Well, as researchers at the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies and elsewhere point out, until roughly today if one wanted a more fuel-efficient car one spent less money.  Fuel-sippers of recent years have almost always been small, inexpensive, and typically stripped of luxury features.  Think Geo Metro, Toyota Echo, VW Fox.  Thus, in the public mind, efficiency became associated with "cheap," or tinny, or small, or worse.  Only now, with the advent of Prius, Hybrid Escape, Civic Hybrid, and new-generation VW and Mercedes diesels, etc., does the public have the option to pay more, for a well-equipped and/or spacious but still efficient vehicle.  Of course all of us want to see the cost of fuel-saving technologies come down, in order to make them more widely available.  But in the near term, it is crucial for the industry to keep launching these "upscale efficient" vehicles, as it gives the market more choices.  Hard-core fuel savers can still scour eBayMotors for an old Golf diesel, or buyers uninterested in interior space can pick up an Aerio -- but for the vast middle of the market pricier and more feature-laden cars may actually sell better.  And as these cars penetrate the market, any residual stigma against green cars as cheap or tinny erodes... and that's good for all of us.