Forget hybrids and EVs: Just make cars smaller and lighter?
Could it be this easy?According to an Oxford Study the best path to decreasing emissions in autos, in the short term, requires a serious decrease in weight and size.
Over the medium term, however, the study finds that hybrid cars, such as the Toyota Prius, offer "significant savings" while helping electric drive trains evolve.
While EVs, plug-in hybrids and fuel cell vehicles offer interesting potential long term, all have serious issues to overcome in the short to medium term, such as raw material availability.
Finally, first generation biofuels offer some localized uses. Second generation biofuels show more promise, but will still probably be constrained by land availability. Algae shows some probability of overcoming the land availability issue, but massive innovations and breakthroughs are still required.
Labels: biofuels, electric cars, Hybrid Vehicles, plug-in hybrid vehicles, toyota prius
posted by Dahcredyns at
10:00 AM
6 Comments:
yes.. for each car... just compute the cost per mile to operate it.... and go from there.
if not mistaken.. on the EPA stickers there is also a pollution index - right?
you're buying the whole car - it's design, it's total weight, it's "slickness" ...etc..
all those pieces and parts go together in a package that yields a cost per mile.
How much should it matter if under the hood is a low-polluting conventional ICE or a hybrid or a plug-in?
I think part of what bugs people is that they know that the car - as currently available - is not particularly "green" .. even if it bills itself as having "green" credentials.... it ends up being a little game .. "I'm not green but I'm greener than you".
Having said that.. Hybrids are, in my view, game changing, technology... that got all of us thinking about more changes... kinda wet our appetite!
You're absolutely right about this green game of perception, and about hybrids!
Don't forget hybrids... Celebrate them.
Why? Because now we have more choices than simply going smaller.
What's great about the Prius/Insight/Civic is that they are all full mid-size vehicles with room for 5 passengers, decent trunk space, and lots of features....yet they still get 40 mpg plus.
I never know for sure what people are talking about at these universities. When they say Green House Gases do they mean just CO2 or all green house gases?
Does any one know the OFFICIAL definition of the term? I copied the following from the EPA website.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change includes the following gasses; carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFC), perfluorochemicals (PFC), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), as well as other fluorinated gases (e.g., nitrogen trifluoride and hydrofluorinated ethers). These gases are often expressed in metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (mtCO2e).
Are there any more? Now don't forget guys and gals, we are all polluters according to the EPA since we breath out CO2 and pass, dare I mention, methane LOL
Oh and of course there is one of my favorites things missing; aerodynamics.
Tom G.
had a 1985 renault encore 3 door ran it for over 150000 miles. factory said it would get 38 city 52 hwy 43 comb. which i did . would get 52+ hwy if you drove it at 55mph. would buy one again if i could. by the way it was the lowest priced car in the usa at the time. galv.-body and electronic ign. car listed at $5500.00 i now have a 2010 civic gets 38 hwy but cost $21000.00 so much for high tech!
tom-
and what is interesting is that they keep finding non-CO2 global warming issues. yet, if it's not related to CO2, nobody really seems to care.
d hepp-
you hear that kind of story a lot. fricken safety standards, etc.
makes you wonder. maybe we should just put a weight limit on all vehicles. make it light enough where so much safety equipment isn't needed.
thus, if you want to produce SUVs, you'll have to use exoctic materials like carbon fiber. you can still give consumers choice, but make them pay for the affect their choice has on the rest of society.
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