From the main article (the PDF): It's undated, so I don't know how old it is or how much regulations have changed since then.
From the main article (the PDF):
A key feature in the current U.S. fuel economy standards is its “footprint-based” fuel economy targets. Vehicle footprint is de!ned by the rectangle formed by a car’s wheelbase and track width. As shown in Figure 2, the CAFE standards allow larger cars to have lower fuel economy targets and require smaller cars to have more stringent fuel economy targets.
For example, to meet the 2012 targets, the smallest vehicles needed to achieve an average fuel economy of about 36 mpg, while the largest vehicles were required to average just 28 mpg. By 2025, the smallest vehicles would need to reach nearly 62 mpg. The largest cars, in contrast, would only need to reach 46 mpg.
Automakers need to meet the fuel economy targets by fleet average. Therefore, under this regulation, automakers that sell larger cars are faced with less stringent fuel economy targets, while automakers that sell smaller cars are faced with more stringent fuel economy targets.
This type of regulation is called “attribute-based regulation” because the stringency of the regulation (in this case, the fuel economy targets) depends on an attribute of products (in this case, the vehicle footprint of a car). These enormous differences in the fuel economy target create a perverse incentive for automakers, encouraging them to increase the manufacture and sales of larger vehicles in order to make the environmental regulation easier to meet. This is an unintended consequence for a policy designed to reduce fuel consumption because making cars bigger leads to poorer fuel economy.
It's undated, so I don't know how old it is or how much regulations have changed since then.
The web scraper says CAFE is essentially dead as of Trump's 2nd term, because violating it doesn't result in fines and thus there's no point in obeying it in for-profit car companies. They'll...
The web scraper says
Published May 14 2018
CAFE is essentially dead as of Trump's 2nd term, because violating it doesn't result in fines and thus there's no point in obeying it in for-profit car companies. They'll still obey some regulations though, because they need to obey California regs to sell in California, and making two versions of everything to skirt regs costs more money than it saves.
I'd argue this cart is leading the horse. US car companies were already failing at engineering competitive vehicles, both on weight and fuel economy fronts, and were having their lunch eaten by...
These enormous differences in the fuel economy target create a perverse incentive for automakers, encouraging them to increase the manufacture and sales of larger vehicles in order to make the environmental regulation easier to meet.
I'd argue this cart is leading the horse. US car companies were already failing at engineering competitive vehicles, both on weight and fuel economy fronts, and were having their lunch eaten by Japanese brands for decades. So they lobbied for a standard that would reward their heavy garbage and aggressively penalize Japanese and European vehicles. Then they manufacture consent with advertising, plastering SUVs everywhere in media.
I feel like changing the incentive structure to make it less desirable for consumers to even purchase large footprint vehicles would fix a lot of other issues. Large vehicles cause a lot of other...
I feel like changing the incentive structure to make it less desirable for consumers to even purchase large footprint vehicles would fix a lot of other issues. Large vehicles cause a lot of other issues with safety and road wear, so incentivizing smaller vehicle purchases and sales would lower fuel consumption and improve other safety metrics across the board.
Comment box Scope: comment response, information, opinion Tone: neutral Opinion: yes Sarcasm/humor: none Many states have a weight-based vehicle registration fee for at least some categories of...
Comment box
Scope: comment response, information, opinion
Tone: neutral
Opinion: yes
Sarcasm/humor: none
Many states have a weight-based vehicle registration fee for at least some categories of vehicles, but it does not scale proportionally with the overall damage to infrastructure, environment and society that large vehicles cause.
Proportionally scaled registration fees would functionally eliminate the sale of large vehicles, as long as the baseline fees were also raised. If not, they would help, but not eliminate the problem.
For example in PA a 6,000 lb truck has a $111 fee while a 60,000 lb truck has a $1,739.00 fee. The fee increases at a higher rate for even heavier vehicles. This is a very small incentive to own a lighter vehicle, and you occasionally see people trying to register their 7500 lb truck as 6500 lb to save $103. For this to be effective, the state would have to raise the fees on all truck registrations and make the slope of fee increases steeper than it already is. They might need to add additional weight registration fees for smaller vehicles too?
All of this would be politically unpopular in any municipality where a plurality of people drive light trucks or SUVs. Even with exemptions for commercial uses/people who actually 'need' trucks, it would still be unpopular. It would be more feasible in urban centers, but giving local municipalities the ability to levy their own fees on top of DOT fees would probably require legislation from the state government, which would be a challenge in most states.
I think one of the most important changes that doesn't require anything other than changing standards is moving from a "distance per volume" to a "volume per distance" standard for measuring fuel...
I think one of the most important changes that doesn't require anything other than changing standards is moving from a "distance per volume" to a "volume per distance" standard for measuring fuel economy stated to consumers.
That would change behavior and purchasing patterns significantly, which is why it's resisted in the US oil companies.
Yes, numbers in miles per gallon or kilometers per liters is easier for estimating the range of your vehicle. But your vehicle already does that and gives you that number constantly updated simply as "range: ____ km/miles". It's not a needed number.
For emissions tracking or comparing fuel consumption, galons per 100 miles or liters per 100 km is a much better measure:
It's trivial to recognize how a light truck's fuel consumption (say 5 gallons per 100 miles) compares to a heavy semi that averages 17 gallons per 100 miles. This number also reflects that we're talking averages based on varied driving conditions, speed, congestion etc. and that the values in a single moment aren't important other than seeing that yes, hitting the throttle or brake consumes way more fuels than not pedaling to change driver behavior to efficient, but still safe ways of driving economically.
I'm thoroughly confused as to how this would be helpful. People are already aware that 20mpg is better than 6mpg, so I'm not clear on how inverting the fraction and multiplying it by 100 really...
I'm thoroughly confused as to how this would be helpful. People are already aware that 20mpg is better than 6mpg, so I'm not clear on how inverting the fraction and multiplying it by 100 really does anything. If anything, as we saw with the 1/3 pound burger, lots of people don't really get fractions and just default to "bigger number = better" which is accurate in the current model but not in your suggestion. I'm sure there would be a non-zero amount of people that end up thinking that 5gp100m is better than 4gp100m.
It seems like it's based on the idea that companies would then give numbers based on the average over 100 miles, but I can't connect why that would be true. They'd just follow the current model that sounds better by saying "5 gallons per 100 miles highway". If you want the numbers stated to need to be averaged over some amount of mixed use that seems like a completely tangential requirement. Maybe a good one, but I don't follow how inverting the fraction makes that happen on it's own.
I'll also throw in that it reduces whole number granularity to a point that it completely breaks down looking nice at high fuel efficiency. Above 50mpg is what? 1? 2? How are we rounding it? Or we throwing decimals in to the fractions so we can actually see the difference between 52 and 72mpg. And above 100mpg we can't even use whole numbers to represent it all. People have enough trouble with fractions and decimals without mixing them like 0.6/100 gallons per mile. Whole numbers are already less granular even in your given example (is 5gp100m 19mpg? 22mpg?).
The idea is that smaller is better when we're talking about burning gas. You can get closer to zero gas used, but it gets harder. For example, 2 gallons per hundred miles is twice as good as 4...
The idea is that smaller is better when we're talking about burning gas. You can get closer to zero gas used, but it gets harder.
For example, 2 gallons per hundred miles is twice as good as 4 gallons per hundred (going from 25 mpg to 50). Going from 2 gallons to 1 gallon (from 50 to 100 mpg) is both very hard and would only save one more gallon. At that point, going electric is easier.
It also makes the gas guzzlers stand out more. Something like a Ford Mustang Shelby burns over 7 gallons per hundred miles.
I used round numbers, but yes, in practice there would be decimals. (Or make it per thousand miles to make all the numbers look bigger.)
I get the math, but how is any of that helpful? How is arbitrarily messing with the bases because the units are inherently confusing good? Is 2.36gp100m really a sane unit that will be meaningful...
I get the math, but how is any of that helpful?
How is arbitrarily messing with the bases because the units are inherently confusing good? Is 2.36gp100m really a sane unit that will be meaningful to people? Cars aren't rockets, we don't think about their usage in fixed increments because we don't use them like that. Sure we could even further change the base, but that'll only serve to confuse people even more. 0.0236gpm is both more reasonable and completely insane to look at. And that's still ignoring that there will be a group of people will think that 2.5 is better than 2.4 because higher is "better" on just about any other numbers they're going to be interested in comparing (ex. crash safety ratings, number of seats, towing capacity, total driving range, top speed, etc.).
For example, 2 gallons per hundred miles is twice as good as 4 gallons per hundred (going from 25 mpg to 50). Going from 2 gallons to 1 gallon (from 50 to 100 mpg) is both very hard and would only save one more gallon. At that point, going electric is easier.
This logic is very flawed. It's still halving it. Again, cars aren't rockets. That's halving continuous usage, not an independent event. That's because it's not saving one more gallon in general, it's saving one gallon per usage of an arbitrary unit that doesn't align with usage. Change the unit to some other arbitrarily selected thing, like gallons per 10 miles, and 2 -> 1 still "would only save one more gallon" but it's obviously very misleading to say that. Mess with the bases in the opposite direction, like gallons per million miles, and small changes can read like saving hundreds of thousands of gallons. What makes it sane to say that at 2->1 when using gp100m but not 2->1 when using gp50m? The fact that it even reads like this could be meaningful is just more evidence to me that this presentation creates confusion rather than solves it due to the real danger with introducing extra arbitrary units that interpreting them requires extra care taken.
And gas guzzlers already stand out in the current model: they have very low numbers. Using a reciprocal pulls most realistic numbers closer together. I guess it'll draw a larger line between like a hummer and a tank, but I can't say I think that's a range worth optimizing consumer messaging for.
As a random thought that's completely impractical but at least doesn't introduce something as arbitrary as 100 miles as a unit: cups or ounces per mile. Not necessity the ideal sizes, but cups and miles are at least normal units small enough that I can actually reason about them with thoughts like "1 cup is a lot of fuel to only go one mile". I realize that a similar thing is supposed to be the idea behind gallons per hundred miles, but 100 miles is so big that it's difficult to feel anything about it.
I'm doubtful that it would make all that much difference. But any ratio can be just as easily described either way (miles per gallon or gallons per mile) and multiplying by 100 or 1000 just moves...
I'm doubtful that it would make all that much difference. But any ratio can be just as easily described either way (miles per gallon or gallons per mile) and multiplying by 100 or 1000 just moves the decimal point. So I don't get the hate. You seem to think one way is more confusing than the other and I don't really see why, once people got used to it.
To be fair I do also think it's worse. To me it not only doesn't overcome the burden of being better, it is actually worse. There are a few reasons I think this: The bigger number being worse...
To be fair I do also think it's worse. To me it not only doesn't overcome the burden of being better, it is actually worse.
There are a few reasons I think this:
The bigger number being worse thing. We'd introduce the problem that 2 is better than 3. Not the end of the world, but we live on the same planet that https://eathealthy365.com/why-a-w-s-third-pound-burger-failed-a-deep-dive/ happened. People will deliberately choose the less efficient car because they don't understand the number.
Lines like the "would only save one more gallon" come from a trap in that representing it like that makes it look like it says things it doesn't. 100 miles was chosen arbitrarily and is a kind of nothing unit, so why is it okay to treat specific deltas to that any stronger than if the base was 50 miles? It isn't, it is just subtly an unintentionally deceptive unit that can even trip up the well educated among us.
This is one I didn't previously mention because it doesn't really matter that much, but since I don't think about driving in groups of 100 miles it simplifies the math I don't do while it makes the simple mental math I actually do do harder. To give an example of math I actually am interested in, let's say I want to estimate how much it'll cost me in gas to drive a 15 miles out of my way in a 40mpg car. I can look at that and easily go "around 1/3 gallon". Represent that same car as 2.5gp100m and the quick estimation math becomes that little bit harder. It's admittedly easier to get to the exact number with gpm, but since fuel usage isn't exact I'd rather the trivial approximation. And that isn't a contrived case, I do those exact problems with things like estimating my price delta of driving vs public transit or when it's worth it to drive further to get a better deal on something.
I think that mpg representation makes the reason for diminishing returns more obvious. Why 2->1 is harder than 3->2, even though they're both just a reduction of 1gp100m, could take some explaining depending on the audience. Same numbers though are +50mpg vs +17mpg. +50 is harder than +17 just seems like it would be immediately intuitive to more people.
Though I wouldn't call my feeling "hate". I've spent years with one of the most important parts of my job being reviewing designs and poking holes in them. I don't hate a design for not holding up to being poked at, but that doesn't mean I won't challenge it anyway.
From the main article (the PDF):
It's undated, so I don't know how old it is or how much regulations have changed since then.
The web scraper says
CAFE is essentially dead as of Trump's 2nd term, because violating it doesn't result in fines and thus there's no point in obeying it in for-profit car companies. They'll still obey some regulations though, because they need to obey California regs to sell in California, and making two versions of everything to skirt regs costs more money than it saves.
Isn’t there a push to strip California of its ability to set regulations like this?
A planned push, but it hasn't succeeded yet AFAIK.
Things like this are so two faced. Where are muh states rights that republicans say they want ?
I'd argue this cart is leading the horse. US car companies were already failing at engineering competitive vehicles, both on weight and fuel economy fronts, and were having their lunch eaten by Japanese brands for decades. So they lobbied for a standard that would reward their heavy garbage and aggressively penalize Japanese and European vehicles. Then they manufacture consent with advertising, plastering SUVs everywhere in media.
I feel like changing the incentive structure to make it less desirable for consumers to even purchase large footprint vehicles would fix a lot of other issues. Large vehicles cause a lot of other issues with safety and road wear, so incentivizing smaller vehicle purchases and sales would lower fuel consumption and improve other safety metrics across the board.
Comment box
Many states have a weight-based vehicle registration fee for at least some categories of vehicles, but it does not scale proportionally with the overall damage to infrastructure, environment and society that large vehicles cause.
Proportionally scaled registration fees would functionally eliminate the sale of large vehicles, as long as the baseline fees were also raised. If not, they would help, but not eliminate the problem.
For example in PA a 6,000 lb truck has a $111 fee while a 60,000 lb truck has a $1,739.00 fee. The fee increases at a higher rate for even heavier vehicles. This is a very small incentive to own a lighter vehicle, and you occasionally see people trying to register their 7500 lb truck as 6500 lb to save $103. For this to be effective, the state would have to raise the fees on all truck registrations and make the slope of fee increases steeper than it already is. They might need to add additional weight registration fees for smaller vehicles too?
All of this would be politically unpopular in any municipality where a plurality of people drive light trucks or SUVs. Even with exemptions for commercial uses/people who actually 'need' trucks, it would still be unpopular. It would be more feasible in urban centers, but giving local municipalities the ability to levy their own fees on top of DOT fees would probably require legislation from the state government, which would be a challenge in most states.
I think one of the most important changes that doesn't require anything other than changing standards is moving from a "distance per volume" to a "volume per distance" standard for measuring fuel economy stated to consumers.
That would change behavior and purchasing patterns significantly, which is why it's resisted in the US oil companies.
Yes, numbers in miles per gallon or kilometers per liters is easier for estimating the range of your vehicle. But your vehicle already does that and gives you that number constantly updated simply as "range: ____ km/miles". It's not a needed number.
For emissions tracking or comparing fuel consumption, galons per 100 miles or liters per 100 km is a much better measure:
It's trivial to recognize how a light truck's fuel consumption (say 5 gallons per 100 miles) compares to a heavy semi that averages 17 gallons per 100 miles. This number also reflects that we're talking averages based on varied driving conditions, speed, congestion etc. and that the values in a single moment aren't important other than seeing that yes, hitting the throttle or brake consumes way more fuels than not pedaling to change driver behavior to efficient, but still safe ways of driving economically.
I'm thoroughly confused as to how this would be helpful. People are already aware that 20mpg is better than 6mpg, so I'm not clear on how inverting the fraction and multiplying it by 100 really does anything. If anything, as we saw with the 1/3 pound burger, lots of people don't really get fractions and just default to "bigger number = better" which is accurate in the current model but not in your suggestion. I'm sure there would be a non-zero amount of people that end up thinking that 5gp100m is better than 4gp100m.
It seems like it's based on the idea that companies would then give numbers based on the average over 100 miles, but I can't connect why that would be true. They'd just follow the current model that sounds better by saying "5 gallons per 100 miles highway". If you want the numbers stated to need to be averaged over some amount of mixed use that seems like a completely tangential requirement. Maybe a good one, but I don't follow how inverting the fraction makes that happen on it's own.
I'll also throw in that it reduces whole number granularity to a point that it completely breaks down looking nice at high fuel efficiency. Above 50mpg is what? 1? 2? How are we rounding it? Or we throwing decimals in to the fractions so we can actually see the difference between 52 and 72mpg. And above 100mpg we can't even use whole numbers to represent it all. People have enough trouble with fractions and decimals without mixing them like 0.6/100 gallons per mile. Whole numbers are already less granular even in your given example (is 5gp100m 19mpg? 22mpg?).
The idea is that smaller is better when we're talking about burning gas. You can get closer to zero gas used, but it gets harder.
For example, 2 gallons per hundred miles is twice as good as 4 gallons per hundred (going from 25 mpg to 50). Going from 2 gallons to 1 gallon (from 50 to 100 mpg) is both very hard and would only save one more gallon. At that point, going electric is easier.
It also makes the gas guzzlers stand out more. Something like a Ford Mustang Shelby burns over 7 gallons per hundred miles.
I used round numbers, but yes, in practice there would be decimals. (Or make it per thousand miles to make all the numbers look bigger.)
I get the math, but how is any of that helpful?
How is arbitrarily messing with the bases because the units are inherently confusing good? Is 2.36gp100m really a sane unit that will be meaningful to people? Cars aren't rockets, we don't think about their usage in fixed increments because we don't use them like that. Sure we could even further change the base, but that'll only serve to confuse people even more. 0.0236gpm is both more reasonable and completely insane to look at. And that's still ignoring that there will be a group of people will think that 2.5 is better than 2.4 because higher is "better" on just about any other numbers they're going to be interested in comparing (ex. crash safety ratings, number of seats, towing capacity, total driving range, top speed, etc.).
This logic is very flawed. It's still halving it. Again, cars aren't rockets. That's halving continuous usage, not an independent event. That's because it's not saving one more gallon in general, it's saving one gallon per usage of an arbitrary unit that doesn't align with usage. Change the unit to some other arbitrarily selected thing, like gallons per 10 miles, and 2 -> 1 still "would only save one more gallon" but it's obviously very misleading to say that. Mess with the bases in the opposite direction, like gallons per million miles, and small changes can read like saving hundreds of thousands of gallons. What makes it sane to say that at 2->1 when using gp100m but not 2->1 when using gp50m? The fact that it even reads like this could be meaningful is just more evidence to me that this presentation creates confusion rather than solves it due to the real danger with introducing extra arbitrary units that interpreting them requires extra care taken.
And gas guzzlers already stand out in the current model: they have very low numbers. Using a reciprocal pulls most realistic numbers closer together. I guess it'll draw a larger line between like a hummer and a tank, but I can't say I think that's a range worth optimizing consumer messaging for.
As a random thought that's completely impractical but at least doesn't introduce something as arbitrary as 100 miles as a unit: cups or ounces per mile. Not necessity the ideal sizes, but cups and miles are at least normal units small enough that I can actually reason about them with thoughts like "1 cup is a lot of fuel to only go one mile". I realize that a similar thing is supposed to be the idea behind gallons per hundred miles, but 100 miles is so big that it's difficult to feel anything about it.
I'm doubtful that it would make all that much difference. But any ratio can be just as easily described either way (miles per gallon or gallons per mile) and multiplying by 100 or 1000 just moves the decimal point. So I don't get the hate. You seem to think one way is more confusing than the other and I don't really see why, once people got used to it.
To be fair I do also think it's worse. To me it not only doesn't overcome the burden of being better, it is actually worse.
There are a few reasons I think this:
Though I wouldn't call my feeling "hate". I've spent years with one of the most important parts of my job being reviewing designs and poking holes in them. I don't hate a design for not holding up to being poked at, but that doesn't mean I won't challenge it anyway.
I like L/100km better than the other way, but how would this actually make a difference? Is it just a consumer perception thing?
It's entirely about consumer perception.
Why are we still talking about cars which run on dinosaur poop in the first place?