Editorial Comment

	Vol. 226 No. 4
PERRY A. FISCHER, EDITOR

What drives automotive drivel? I loved my old 1958 vomitorious lime green Buick Super. Got it from the tragedy of Uncle Fred. One day, he was driving down a dirt road in a pasture, drunk. He was turning it sharply to the left, spinning “doughnuts,” when a tree jumped out in front of him. The resulting collision didn’t even scratch the car. Destroyed the tree though. Killed Uncle Fred too. His head hit that beautiful, enameled-green 9-gauge steel dashboard. He must’ve sat unconscious in that pasture for two days before someone finally found him. The impact had cracked his head open. Didn’t even dent the dashboard. They just hosed it off and sold it to me. I called it the Lime Limo Super. It got 10 miles to the gallon, all tuned up with new spark plugs. Had a load of fun in that car; but an old adage comes to mind: all things must pass.

If automobiles still averaged 10 miles per gallon, the world oil picture would look very different, perhaps even in deep trouble. There are many ways to calculate the effect, but you don’t need calculus or even algebra, just elementary arithmetic. For example, the US consumes 20 million barrels of oil a day, of which 68%, or 13.6 million barrels, is used for transportation. Of that, 62%, or 8.4 million barrels, are used for light-duty vehicles. In the US, cars get about 20 miles per gallon on average. If we could instantly change that 20 mpg to 60 mpg, that 62% would drop to 21%, and US oil imports would be cut in half, from 11.2 million barrels a day to only 5.6 million, assuming everything else remains the same.

Of course, everything else would not remain the same. You could calculate this several other ways, add improvements in all of the other classes of transportation, extend these results worldwide, even use calculus to account for the rate of change of uptake and possible increase in miles driven per car. But it would not change the basic conclusion: A dramatic increase in transportation efficiency would have a profound effect on world oil supply.

And it would not result in increased deaths. Given the impressive improvement in air quality and the resulting fewer deaths, improvement in the economies of oil-importing nations, and mitigation of war as a means of securing energy supply (remember Japan in WWII? the first Gulf War? – and the second is undeniably an outgrowth of the first), it’s much more likely that there would be far fewer deaths than any possible increase in fatalities as a result of collisions between, say, cars and 18-wheel semis. Especially because much of the increased fuel efficiency would not be due to lighter, thinner steel – no “tin cans” – but rather, technology advances, such as hybrids, displacement on demand (automatically varies between 4, 6 or 8 cylinders on demand), composite materials, higher engine temperatures, and many other improvements.

The common-sense acceptance of fuel efficient vehicles by the Japanese is now being exported to the world, while everyone else plays catch-up. If the 1980s were any indication, Detroit automakers will whine to Congress that Japan is not playing fair, because, well, because they’re better at introducing new automotive technology than Detroit. The net result back then was that Japan had to move some of its manufacturing capacity to US soil. The whine of politics versus the whirr of technology often results in a lose-lose situation for nearly everyone.

Most folks mistakenly believe that the costs of a car and fuel are important. They are not. An automobile that costs $50,000 may well be affordable to as many, or even more, people than a $20,000 car. Whether fuel costs 10 cents a liter or $10 a gallon is similarly unimportant. All that matters is what it costs to drive a mile down the road. If the $50,000 automobile lasts, on average, a half-million miles, has low maintenance costs and goes 60 miles on a $4 gallon of fuel, then the cost per mile driven would actually be much less than a typical car driven today.

I’ve seen at least three pundits on TV saying how people are not willing to pay the extra $3,000 – $4,000 to own a hybrid vehicle such as the Toyota Prius. I do not know if they were ignorant or intentionally lying, but they certainly are not telling the truth. When you factor in the cost of fuel, the hybrid was actually cheaper to own and drive than a comparable conventional car, even after accounting for the initial price difference. Moreover, demand is soaring, with a wait of several months for the $22,000 (MSRP) car.

No matter what math or logic you use, high fuel efficiency has always been a mathematically and logically demonstrable goal to undertake, one that we could have started 20 or more years ago. I’m beginning to believe that it will never happen, at least not in my lifetime.

Truth be told, I’m not terribly interested in what the mathematical or political arguments are as to why we would so casually brush aside such enormous benefits, and for comparatively little effort. I suspect the reasons why we still won’t undertake the task with any sense of urgency are more human than logical; and it’s these that intrigue me. Paraphrasing Winston Churchill, “People always act wisely, once they’ve tried everything else.” 

Another Churchill-ism, “If you’re young and not a liberal, you have no heart; if you’re old and not a conservative, you have no brain.” That paraphrased sentiment has great appeal for conservatives and liberals alike, as they somehow forget that both heart and brain are essential organs for survival. But in the larger sense, age tends to strengthen tradition, the status quo, and most things conservative.

I recently asked a friend of mine, who is in his late 50s, what he thought the world energy picture would look like in 40 years. He answered quickly, “What do I care? I won’t be here!”

Maybe it’s due to a century of the tradition of internal combustion engines, of energy gluttony, of growing “psychology dollars” (for lack of a better term) spent on automotive design, combined with an aging world population, especially in the industrialized nations. The post-WWII baby boomers – who are increasingly ensconced in the curmudgeonous halls of power in the US, Canada, Europe and elsewhere – maybe we’re to blame. What do I care, indeed.

I’m not sure whether that’s what Churchill had in mind, but I can sense it, that subtle change brought on by age, as I march through my 50s, sticking with the proven, taking less risks, remembering more of the past, dreaming less of the future, and the nostalgia. And of course, that most excellent sedan, the Lime Limo Super. God, I miss that car.