I really find it suspicious that at a cost of $10 billion they can't figure out a way to improve their fleets.
I guess they'll just get disrupted by companies that can then.
If we want to play the game of mandating things that can't be done then why don't we demand EVs be 6% to 8% more efficient while we're at it?
Any auto maker could quite easily improve the efficiency of their fleets by reducing the size of their passenger vehicles (especially large SUVs and pickup trucks).
It's not a tech question. No R&D involved. They just need to market their smaller vehicles as cool and stop marketing their large vehicles so aggressively.
The reason they want to avoid this is that they currently make better margins on larger vehicles, so they just push the environmental costs of such inefficiency out to the rest of the public and call it a day.
In a sane regulatory framework those large vehicles would be taxed dramatically more due to the damage they cause to the environment, and the auto makers wouldn't be so addicted to them.
"keep your speed under 25 mph to reach your destination"
Or they'll make sure we never have more efficient cars, or cities designed around anything other than being in a car 24-7, like they have done quite successfully for the last 50 years.
Shocking. Motorists flock to areas designed for motorists, with free parking.
There are lots of walkable areas that have the same feel, and this new development are their lunch and tax revenue.
Ford has been aggressively rolling out massive fuel savings tech for years, decades. They are going strong toward what customers want and are willing to purchase...hybrid trucks. GM is always two steps behind trying to make fun of Ford trucks in theirs ads until they can half-heartedly roll out the same tech while somehow butchering it and alienating legacy customers.
Stallantis, just can't figure that company out. Their cars and trucks have had horrible quality and resale value and have now killed some of their strongest brands to all-in on electric vehicles. Their customer base is scowling and scrambling to snatch up what are becoming collectors cars.
Source?
> 80% of grid still runs on coal
30% globally [1], 11% in America [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_cons...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States
This is probably a better reference (the gist is the same of course, coal was 19.5%):
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
"In 2022, about 4,243 billion kilowatthours (kWh) (or about 4.24 trillion kWh) of electricity were generated at utility-scale electricity generation facilities in the United States.1 About 60% of this electricity generation was from fossil fuels—coal, natural gas, petroleum, and other gases. About 18% was from nuclear energy, and about 22% was from renewable energy sources."
Coal was about 10% of total US energy production in 2022, 27% of total US electricity production.
There is [1].
> I'll also head for heavy duty towing electric is not where's it at, and forget EV 18 wheelers.
Heavy duty, long distance hauling is something where trains excel at. It's one thing for short-distance distribution (i.e. in a city) where it's infeasible to serve industry and local distribution by rail, but everything else? We figured that stuff out almost a century ago.
[1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a42417327/li...
As for actual availability, it would take the world's entire supply of Lithium produced per year, just to allow for half of new cars sold in the US alone be electric. That's how far behind our Lithium mining is, and as your own article says, scaling that out without environmental disasters or human rights abuses will be a challenge (and, potentially, infeasible).
“It is estimated that the U.S. alone will need 500,000 metric tons per year of unrefined lithium by 2034 just to power EVs. The U.S. produces just a fraction of that today. The current global production of lithium in 2020 was about 440,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE, contains about 18% of pure lithium), and not all of that is in pure enough form for batteries, according to Chris Doornbos, president, and CEO of E3 Metals Corp, a lithium extraction firm located in Calgary, Canada, which plans to produce battery-grade lithium hydroxide.”
As he said, we are not just below the amount necessary, but much of what is produced can't meet spec.
https://www.onecharge.biz/blog/u-s-role-in-global-lithium-ba...
"it would take the <world's> entire supply of Lithium produced per year, just to allow for half of new cars <sold in the US> alone be electric"
"It is estimated that the <U.S. alone will need 500,000 metric tons per year> of unrefined lithium by 2034 just to power EVs... <current global production> of lithium in 2020 was about 440,000 metric tons..."
Transporting gasoline and diesel to stores perhaps...
We have the mystical 50mpg car everyone dreamed about thirty years ago. No one will buy them. They need a truck.
Side note, I wish I knew how to invest in these kinds of realizations so I could actually make money on them instead of just rambling on forums, lol!
Queue "it's already priced in" in 3, 2, 1...
We can eliminate safety features to make cars lighter. We can accept higher pollution levels. Those are both trade offs we are not willing to make.
We can make cars more aerodynamic, but style often gets in the way and consumers are not willing for that trade off. (or so it is claimed).
We can make cars smaller, but people often find large cars more useful. (even though a small car is good enough for 99% of all trips, that last 1% makes it worth having the larger car. Renting is so expensive that even for the 1% trip it may still be cheaper to have the large car for everything)
There are options of course. However car makers have been working on this problem for at least 50 years (energy crisis of the 1970s is obvious, even before that fuel mileage was a concern). All the easy solutions have been done already. What is left is often a lot more expensive than what was done before and also cannot possibly return a whole lot on investment.
The reality is gas and diesel engines investment is a dead end. They are not worth any more investment as everyone in the industry already knows electric cars are coming. While they probably will live on in a few niches, those niches are not large enough to support investment in making them better, today's engines are about as good as the future ever will see.
I find that incredibly hard to believe, unless you're renting a large truck once a month.
For me, it is absolutely worth saving 600-1200 bucks a year to not have to deal with the inconvenience of renting a vehicle to run an errand once a month. That price doesn’t include any insurance changes, getting to/from the rental place, and any additional costs I’m unaware of.
There are also times when you don't need a truck, just a larger car, renting that is $100/day. And again I've tried before and discovered the rental cars place was sold out when I needed one.
Partially. But CAFE standards are based on a footprint model which has kept light trucks and SUVs cheaper for a given fuel efficiency standard than smaller cars. If you close the gap, I'm pretty sure consumers would change their behavior, at least somewhat.
I'm driving an F-150 that gets 1989 Nissan Pulsar mpg in real world operation. It can carry my whole family plus 2000lbs extra in the bed. It can tow 10k lbs when I need it to, and I do often. Insane.
There is a heavy cost in extra maintenance however, and some people have really gotten screwed when the maintenance has not been followed or the newly designed transmissions and engines fail before 100k miles.
Point being, you go fucking with oil and gas markets and people will be suffering and dying in the real world as a result. For some reason this is being ignored. And no, no one is going to take one for the team so future generations can...blah blah blah. Ain't gonna happen.
One reason commuters don't want those cars is because they don't feel safe with behemoths on the road. Another approach companies could take is to raise the price of their larger vehicles, to reduce their number on the road and make the smaller cars feel safer. That would require federal coordination.
As you note, all of this is about fuel economy, and that's really a dead end. The switch to electric is an opportunity to reconsider what mix of vehicles we want to have on the road. We take a lot of things for granted and it didn't have to be this way.