[lorenzo]

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y90/hybriddiesel/comparisoncorrected.jpg

Given this MIT study, looking at potential technology developments in the medium term (2020), how efficient do you think the average new car for sale in the EU/US will be, compared to an average car today?

CAFE in the US today: 27.5 mpg
Average Fuel economy in the EU today: 40 mpg

Cars have become 100% more fuel efficient since 1974 in the US and the EU. Given our oil worries, and given globalisation, which means that millions of very smart Chinese and Indian engineers are added to our collective science and tech power - what will the next 10 years bring?

[TorrKing]

I don't even bother to answer to that poll, because I don't think that "the average car" will be a relevant size by then. By that time only a few will have (at least afford to use them) cars.

Some may use their cars for their once a month trip to the market or something. But that will be their old cars. The savings done by buying a new, more efficient one will by far be exceeded by the relatively high price that will be on a new car. Remember that metal, among other things, will become excessively expensive by then. The unemployment rate will probably be greater than 50%. That will not exactly improve sales of new cars.

I once thought mankind had a fate similar to the computer game "Alpha Centauri". It may still be, but not this civilisation.

Torjus Gaaren

[Aedo]

Where is the "no different from today" option?

[Spartan2]

I don't suppose this study took into account the energy used to produce biodiesel, hydrogen or advanced gasoline or diesel?

[ForeignObserver]

CAFE in the US today: 27.5 mpg
Average Fuel economy in the EU today: 40 mpg

Are these comparable gallons? US or Imperial?

2015 is under 8 years away. Any major shift in averages is not likely to happen without a significant change in buying patterns away from SUV's to more economical offerings. We're talking an overall average and this is more likely to be affected by fuel prices than by iimprovements in individual vehicle performance.

[NeoPeasant]

Most of the "average cars of 2015" have already been built. As we slide down the path towards a 3rd world subsistence economy the manufacture of new cars will shrivel to near nothing and the cars that are in use will be the ingeniously maintained and very sparingly used cars of today.
They won't be anywhere near 20% more efficient in mpg as today, but they will be used much more efficiently, so I didn't bother to vote.
Just as the population of cars makes Cuba look frozen in the 50's , America's car population will make it look frozen in the 00's .

Coincedentally, CNN.com has a front page story today on the subject of Cuba's car fleet..

[dub_scratch]

Most of the "average cars of 2015" have already been built.

Great way of putting it NeoPeasant

And I would like to add: if we do see a few more, they will not do much to raise the average MPG of the fleet. Eight years of even normal new car buying is not long enough to make any big change in the big picture.

But notice how so many alternative car fools cannot get a grasp of the timing issues

Cars have become 100% more fuel efficient since 1974 in the US and the EU. Given our oil worries, and given globalisation, which means that millions of very smart Chinese and Indian engineers are added to our collective science and tech power - what will the next 10 years bring?

Given that a 100% increase in MPG took 32 years to accomplish, we should not expect the next ten to raise average fuel economy much. A 20% MPG improvement seems reasonable as a best case scenario, but that is not nearly good enough. And that or any fleet turnover is dependent on VMT to remain constant, meaning considerable amounts of petrol will have to keep flowing into today's current inefficient fleet. If a oil supply crunch forces curtailment, then very few new high efficiency cars will get built.

The irony is that getting our fleet to improve in efficiency will require that we continue to burn up shitloads of petrol.

[dub_scratch]

I went ahead and voted for a 20% improvement. That is the best case scenerio and is dependant on oil decline being after 2016

[WisJim]

CAFE in the US today: 27.5 mpg
Average Fuel economy in the EU today: 40 mpg

Cars have become 100% more fuel efficient since 1974 in the US and the EU. Given our oil worries, and given globalisation, which means that millions of very smart Chinese and Indian engineers are added to our collective science and tech power - what will the next 10 years bring?

Wasn't this mentioned in another thread too? And cars have NOT become much more fuel efficient since 1974, at least not in the USA. Considering the political climate and the average stupidity of the USA citizens, it will take longer than another 9 years to get the average vehicle improved much. Since the "fuel crisis" of 1973, fuel economy improved some, then leveled off, and in recent years the fuel economy ratings of the more fuel efficient cars has actually dropped if you ignore the few hybrids that are out there. Even 10 years ago you could get a gas engined non-hybrid car that was EPA rated over 50 mpg, but today to get over 40mpg youhave to go to a hybrid--at least in the USA.

[dub_scratch]

I cannot believe that 54% or 13 people voted for a grater than 50% increase in fleet MPG in eight short years. There is nothing in current trends that tell me that we are even capable of making that adjustment in such a short period.

For any of you who voted 50% or greater, please explain.

[holmes]

I am having a sneaky suspician that the US will never reach efficiency of any kind. I am observing a statis quo right up to the end. Trains will be as is as well as the automobile. and when we do get to the point where we will want to begin changing the cult dream and addictions the energy will be just too expensive to do anything.
There is no plan B and zero damage control. Just a massive phantom CC of junkies. Gonna be weird!
The PONZI will not allow a deviation from the "norm".
Hope I ma wrong. Havent been so far.
Resource depletion is NOT part of a belief system.

[dub_scratch]

I am having a sneaky suspician that the US will never reach efficiency of any kind.

We can become more efficient by using the current energy inefficient items differently. A single-occupied Hummer is very inefficient, but if it were to pull a trailer that carried 20 people as a kind of mass transit, the thing would improve in energy efficiency greatly. If a 3,500 sf McMansion in suburbia is very energy inefficient to heat, dividing it up into 3 housing units would improve efficiency greatly. In other words, the US will get more energy efficient. But it will be from imploding urban densities from low to high. Much of sprawl will have to be laid to waste and will become the giant scrap yards of the future.

One way we will not become energy efficient is from going on some huge shopping spree for a whole shitload of new cars and equipment. That just takes too much resource to pull off.

[sch_peakoiler]

What do you understand by efficiency? Pure MPG??

[strider3700]

by 2015 the average car will be a rusting hulk having been stripped of any useable parts.

[dub_scratch]

What do you understand by efficiency? Pure MPG??

No. What I mean is Passenger Miles Per Gallon, as opposed to MPG. Currently, we tend to have only one person in each car that is driven, so PMPG is not far off from MPG. If we simply disassociate that relationship by reorganizing the system, we could get PMPG to go up while MPG remains constant. In the end that can mean that we travel just as much as we do today, but much fewer cars would have to be on the roads to do it. In other words, we get more people in an average auto and drive less.

This will take very little new equipment and investment.

[seldom_seen]

I am having a sneaky suspician that the US will never reach efficiency of any kind. I am observing a statis quo right up to the end.

Entirely likely holmes. On Easter Island, quarries were discovered with half built statues, tools scattered about their base.

Maybe a hundred years from, archaeologists (all seven of them) will discover a ford assembly plant with partially built 'Excursions' and 'Expeditions' partway down the assembly line. Frozen in time, never reaching the great interstate highway system.

[dub_scratch]

I am having a sneaky suspician that the US will never reach efficiency of any kind. I am observing a statis quo right up to the end.

Entirely likely holmes. On Easter Island, quarries were discovered with half built statues, tools scattered about their base.

Maybe a hundred years from, archaeologists (all seven of them) will discover a ford assembly plant with partially built 'Excursions' and 'Expeditions' partway down the assembly line. Frozen in time, never reaching the great interstate highway system.

Do you think those Excursions and Expeditions will be of the flex-fuel/E80/plug-in hybrid Eco-green sustainability model?

[NeoPeasant]

Instead of obsessing so much about what we'll be driving, we should think about why we built ourselves a world that requires us to move around so much. We travel an average 30 or so miles every day, and almost always end up exactly where we started the same night. 100 years ago 30 miles was a hell of a journey.

It used to be that wherever there was an economic reason for people to be somewhere,like a mine or a harbor, lots of houses and a marketplace would spring up in the immediate vicinity. Only traders, armies, and government officials would routinely travel.
This is the arrangement we will be struggling to re-create for the next hundred years.

It's time to declare the experiment of mass automobility a massive failure and begin the work of repairing the damage it caused.

[dub_scratch]

Well said Neopeasant. I just wish more people would see it that way.

Unfortunately the destructive American obsession with automobility is so persuasive that even people who should know better can't seem to let it go. Here in California we even have so-called environmentalist campaigning to get Americans to switch fuels from petrol to coal fired EVs before the oil crisis forces carbon-spewing motoring to stop (calcars.org, pluginamerica.org). We even have Robert Redford and many, many others advocating turning our food cropland over for motor fuel production. I think these people forget that we will not be able to drive those E85 flex-fuel cars if we are all dead from starvation. Or maybe they too are caught-up so far into the American obsession with automobility that they can't even see that we don't need risk everything for our stupid traffic jams.