4 ms·
> GM’s credit purchases illustrate how challenging the U.S. fuel efficiency requirements are getting, even for automakers that are adding more zero-emission veh
by zaroth 7y ago
> GM’s credit purchases illustrate how challenging the U.S. fuel efficiency requirements are getting, even for automakers that are adding more zero-emission vehicles to their lineup.
Hardly. It mostly illustrates how many trucks and SUVs they sell.
- village-idiot 7y agoIt’s not hard to make those fuel efficient, it’s hard to make them fuel efficient cheaply all while maintaining the performance that customers expect.
- 8draco8 7y agoIt's hard to convince customers that they don't need huge SUV or pickup truck to drive solo to work in the office. On top of that there is clear, design trend especially in pickup truck world to have biggest, most vertical grill that is possible. Moving such wall trough the air at highway speed is far from efficient. No matter how badly Fiat wants to sell cars like small and efficient Fiat 500, Tipo, Alfa Romeo Giulia etc. that can be sleek and good for environment, in USA they will mostly sell huge RAMs, Jeeps and muscle cars.
- Spooky23 7y agoWhen you sell a work truck for $25k and as much as $60k for a fully equipped fancypants truck, you aren't going to be very motivated to convince anyone of anything other than buying more fancy trucks.
- ajmarsh 7y agoSome of these trucks are being driven solo by people who live on an onion farm just FYI. Also, my truck gets better mileage than a Giulia. I live in the midwest and sure there are guys who don't need a truck but most of us do.
- 8draco8 7y agoThat's why I specifically said about office job. If you need your truck for work, haulin onions or for your hobby like mountain bike etc. then that's great, this is the actual truck for you but there is huge amount of people that are using them to get groceries at most. Another thing is, why you need to buy that, huge RAM, wouldn't just a normal height car like australian style pickups aka UTEs (kind of modern El Camino) be sufficient to get your onions/mountain bike to your destination? I don't know the truck you are driving but base model of F150 have a highway fuel consumption of 26 US mpg, base Gulia have 39 US mpg, that's a bit of a difference.
- saalweachter 7y agoMy metric is always, "Does your truck still look new after you've been driving it for awhile?" It fails for the towing use-case, but I feel like if your truck isn't being abused you probably aren't using its hauling or off-road capabilities to any significant degree.
- _s 7y agoI can pretty much guarantee a beat up old FWD car will tackle pretty much all towing and farm driving (having lived and worked on a farm). For the really gritty stuff on the farm you have your tractors and earth movers and whatnot. What makes the biggest difference is the tyres you have on a vehicle are suitable for the terrain you are using them in. In the US, Australia, Canada etc - pick up trucks or utes are just a symbol of working class just as much as Tesla and Prius's are for the green-friendly crowd.
- saalweachter 7y agoEh, there are applications. A pickup truck mostly becomes necessary when you need to do both "heavy" and "far", when your alternatives are a car and a tractor. There are some loads, eg, towing a livestock trailer to market, where it is too heavy for a car (or even too small of a truck) to tow, and a tractor would be infeasible from a "speed" perspective. (But yeah, you definitely don't need to be using your 4x4 pickup as a people-mover most of the time, and even most hauling applications a truck performs can be handled by a car with a rather modest trailer.)
- zaroth 7y agoThe Federal regulations are based on a fleet wide average emissions. Large trucks and SUVs will always, ipso facto, have higher average emissions than sedans and compact cars. If your product mix skews to SUVs and trucks — and they aren’t EV — then your fuel efficiency numbers will in aggregate be higher. Efficiency technology shifts the whole emissions curve down across the fleet. The curve invariably goes up and to the right when graphed against gross curb weight, regardless of emissions technology. The targets were set with the assumption of a shrinking truck and SUV market. When gas was pushing above $4/ga and everyone was saying it could hit $8 there was even a time when that started to happen. But at $3/ga the consumer preference is strongly skewed toward larger vehicles, higher off the ground.
- jiveturkey 7y agoHow much was it the assumption of a shrinking large vehicle market and how much was it a push for shrinkage?
- wcarron 7y agoDon't forget to take into account that fuel economy standards get more and more lax as GVW increases in a step-wise fashion (at least in the US). If you look at historical data, cars and trucks have been increasing in size and GVW at a rapid pace. Car companies are quite literally incentivized to make larger vehicles (and pass that materials cost onto us) while lowering R&D costs for their powertrains, and as a result, killing the environment even faster.
- zaroth 7y agoThanks, I wasn’t aware of the “footprint” based calculation in the 2012 CAFE standards. https://energyathaas.wordpress.com/2016/01/25/new-cafe-standards-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/ https://energyathaas.wordpress.com/2016/01/25/new-cafe-stand...