The Car You Won’t Own

A group called the X Foundation is planning to award $10 million to anyone who can design a commercially viable car that can get 100 miles per gallon.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/02/business/02xprize.html

I don’t know exactly what “commercially viable” means in this context. I haven’t seen the rules. But something tells me that the winning car will weigh six pounds and seat one anorexic dwarf. If you put a grape in the trunk, the front wheels will come off the ground. And I have a bad feeling that there will be leg holes in the bottom of the car so you can hike the entire chassis up to your crotch and run.

Don’t get me wrong. I hope the contest is a big success, and I hope the winning auto is the size of a Suburban while still getting 100 mpg. But it won’t happen. Contestants will game the system. I predict that the winning car will eventually be totaled by a front-end collision with a bumble bee. The bee will suffer a sprain.

Every time I see a hybrid car on the road I experience a weird mixture of love and hate. I love the concept and how it’s good for the environment. I hate that the car company is punishing the well-meaning customer by making him ride in a car that shouts to the world “I HAVE NEVER HAD SEX AND I NEVER WILL!”

I realize that the shapes of hybrid car are based on aerodynamic efficiency. But I have to ask myself what percentage of the improved gas mileage is directly due to the car being shaped like a whale’s penis? Wouldn’t it make more sense to design the car to be 2% less energy efficient, 100% more attractive, and thereby sell 300% more of them? Are these car makers even trying?

I don’t know if economists have ever calculated the extra gas savings from hybrid cars that accrue from making it impossible for their owners to procreate, but the savings have to be huge. There’s no need for hybrid car owners to drive to dates, or to drive kids to soccer games. If you drive a hybrid, my friend, your genes are waving the white flag.

Yeah, yeah, I know that Leonardo DiCaprio drives a hybrid, and he’s sleeping with supermodels. But I guarantee that they make him wear condoms. Probably two or three at a time. And I’ve yet to see a paparazzi get a picture of both Leonardo AND a supermodel going on a date in a Prius. If a supermodel gets photographed in a Prius, her next assignment is pointing at rugs in the JC Penney catalog.

I’m generally not one to subscribe to conspiracy theories. But I think it’s obvious that if the oil companies wanted the car companies to make fuel-efficient cars that also looked good, it would have happened by now. If the X Foundation contest ends up designing a car that gets 100 mpg, the car company that buys the patents will produce a car that looks like a cancerous spleen. And they’ll name it something like the Toyota Nonads.

God, I hope I’m wrong about this.

Comments

[prefabrik yapı]

Funny thing - I wrote about this in my blog... A guy in Connecticut wrote about the Prius being less environmentally friendly than a Hummer recently.

http://www.aryol.com.tr

[Alvaro]

You don't have any idea of what you are talking about. So cheap to have a blog and say bullshit...

[Eric Boyd]

Ignore Scott and go check out the X Prize Cars http://xprizecars.com/ yourself.

[Mike]

stereotyping and group generalizations and make for good comics, not so good for blog posts. you have become the pointy-haired boss.

[iknowall]

Search for in all major search engines simultaneously on the site http://www.iknowall.com.
Simultaneous search on Google, Yahoo and MSN Live Search.

Try http://www.iknowall.com

[Doug]

"People fear what they don't understand, hate what they can't conquer." - NAS

[vuxan]

Sorry to say this, but I don't have a car at all (I'm 29) and have sex all the time, in 90% of the cases BECAUSE I don't have a car. Alcohol can do miracles to one's social life.

[Jim Gordon]

The 3 cylinder Chevrolet Geo Metro (now discontinued aka Suzuki Swift) stock from the factory achieves nearly 60 mpg using regular gasoline and a carburated engine with little special in the way of parts (steel wheels, regular tires, etc but using synthetic motor oil). The engine could be tweaked for efficiency and the car could be scaled down a bit from 5 seater hatch-back to a two-seater commuter vehicle. Lighter wheels, lighter weight interior materials, higher air pressure tires and maybe fuel injection instead of carburation might make this vehicle achieve the 100 mpg goal without sacrificing performance or needing heavy batteries.

[Mark Chambers]

Petrol (sorry, gas)! Why not resurrect the EV1? That's gotta be worth ten million.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1

if Carlsberg made cars.....

[Armand Ramirez]

I, for one, drive a 2007 Prius AND have a beautiful girlfriend...thank you very much.

[Josh]

Phil -

I have 57 data points (as in 57 tank fill-ups). I think that is more than enough to establish a meaningful trend in what my fuel effeciency is. The EPA rating on diesels is low/incorrect by as much as the EPA rating on gas is high/incorrect. Most EPA ratings on gas powered vehicles are so high as to be laughable. When was the last time you saw gas milage from your car that was what the EPA stickers claimed it was?

The correct answer is "never", since the way they calculate gas consumption has no bearing on real world use of a vehicle. However, the way the EPA calculates diesel usage is again out of sync with real world usage, however in this case, it yields numbers lower (in some cases FAR, FAR lower) than actual real world examples.

Ask any TDI owner what fuel milage they get... every one of them is 40+, with very few execptions. The fuel effeciency kings are clocking 61+ regularly. I get such "poor" fuel effeciency because my car is optimized for power, and like I said, I still get 41+ in the city and 51+ on the highway. My tank holds just under 15 gallons, I refuel when I reach the 700 mile mark per tank. If I'm on the highway, I can go more than 800 miles on a tank.

Another consideration is the fact that the ECU in North American TDI's is tuned for poor efficiency, due to illogical emission requirements for diesel (look it up, I won't go into them here). If you retune your ECU for the correct efficiency parameters, your fuel milage automatically goes up from stock. That's why Euro TDI's get better efficiency out of the box than the NA counterparts.

A stock TDI will get 45+ on the highway at 70mph with no problems, this exceeds the EPA by a substantial margin.

[Richard (UK)]

Doesn't seem hugely unlikely. My diesel Vauxhall Astra could happily do 60MPG combined, 70MPG on the motorway. My petrol Megane Coupe Cabrio routinely does 46MPG over normal driving and it weighs far too much.

[Neil]

well theres always this to http://www.gizmag.com/go/7000/
of course, it looks a little stupid too... :p
BTW: www.lost.eu/3ad3d

[Neil]

well theres always this to http://www.gizmag.com/go/7000/
of course, it looks a little stupid too... :p
BTW: www.lost.eu/3ad3d

[alan]

Missed this blog, so maybe this post will get lost in the big byte bucket,

Here's a thing, in UK we saintly drivers already get about 40 miles to the gallon, personally even with the efficiency unfriendly roof bars / cycle carrier on the top of my Honda Civic I get 45 mpg; get the diesel Civic and you are in the 55 mpg range.

Here's the great idea, how to get 110 mpg from your Honda Civic Diesel - share the drive with another Honda Civic (or any other car) driver.

How so, here's the science
average town has 5 housing estates, 5 factory estates, therefore 1 in 25 people make the same commute, assuming drive time lasts an hour, and its OK to be early at work by no more than 15 minutes, then 1 in 100 people can, on average share cars, and be at work at about the right time.

How to meet the drivers...
We set up a website where people post their lifts, do some matching so that smokers, axe-murderers, Leeds fans, or other like minded people get to share. Then hey presto

- two drivers save half their fuel costs
- halve the number of cars on the road in drive time
- meet strangers who live nearby, and have interests in common with you
- don't have to wait ten years to save the planet.

[PeterS]

One note for those of you who have never driven a Prius.
It has no transmission. You accelerate very quickly with no "jumps". This also means you are not losing energy to the automatic transmission - think about how much that is when checking out the differences between manual and automatic transmission gas mileages on other cars.
In the Summer my Prius gets close to 60mpg; in the Winter the 45-50mpg. And these numbers are calculated on screen while you drive, not just pulled out of someone's ass like many of the other posts (e.g. "I get 60mpg while driving at 80 MPH" How in the heck would you calculate that?)

[Phil]

Josh, it's more likely that you calculated your mileage based on too few sample points, than that your VW Jetta TDI gets 60mpg at 65mph. It's rated at 40mpg at 55mph.

[P Newt]

Well, I'm a 62 year old grey-headed lady who drives a Highlander SUV and wouldn't trade for anything because it's what I use to haul my horses around and get through the snow in the winter. Course, I could use my horses and get better mileage, but then I'd be using more corn to feed them and so many are bent on burning the corn in their automobiles I'm not sure there will be enough left for the horses. Or people. I also have to agree that too many cars on the road today are UGLY. And finally, I'd like to know why there are so many out there who think they know what everyone else should drive.

[Leopold]

100mpg X 15 gal. tank = 1500 mile range

Hmmnnn...the police slow speed pursuit is in for a new twist.

[Josh]

100MPG is not going to be hard. My 200HP, 300 lb/ft torque VW Jetta TDI gets 51MPG on the highway at 80 MPH. If I slow that down to 65MPH, it climbs to a tad over 60 MPG.

My car weighs 3888 lbs unloaded. It's a stupid heavy car. If the car was lightened by 1/2 (totally doable for a production car) that would increase the MPG considerably. If I optimized the car for effeciency, instead of power, that also would increase my MPG. I suspect if you took a stock Jetta or Golf/Rabbit TDI, cut it's weight as much as practical for a production car and optimized the ECU for fuel effeciency, you could get pretty close to 100MPG on normal highway driving. Maybe not quite there, but dang close.

If you started from scratch on a car, I have no doubt what so ever that a 100MPG production car that is drivable would be possible.

So to reiterate, at 65 MPH in my car weighing 3888 lbs, I already get over 60 MPG. I drive this car every day and it has 115,000 miles on it at the moment. Adding another 40 MPG to that isn't that great of a stretch of the imagination.

[Andrey Fedorov]

I hate that the car company is punishing the well-meaning customer by making him ride in a car that shouts to the world "I HAVE NEVER HAD SEX AND I NEVER WILL!"

Is having a nice car really all that impressive to girls after high school? Not in my experience, it isn't...

[Dylan]

I think the Prius looks nice.

Though if I had $100,000 laying around, I would certainly buy the Tesla Roadster.

http://www.teslamotors.com/

Dylan.

[John Stone]

Refrigerators are one of the least efficient modern devices and in 1992 a consortium of energy companies offered a $30 million prize for a refrigerator that would be significantly less wasteful of energy.

They were hoping for a technological breakthrough but Whirlpool won the prize by putting more insulation in one their existing models.

Everyone tried to pretend that this was a great accomplishment. See: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/e/energy_efficiency/index.html?query=NEW%20MODELS,%20DESIGN%20AND%20PRODUCTS&field=des&match=exact

[tom]

Toyota looses $2000 on every Prius.
The batteries leave toxins worse than gasoline does.
The cars look like a whale penis, without the whale sex appeal.
Meanwhile, diesels get more mpg, with new mercedes technology can produce less emissions per gallon, and offer substantial performance advantages, even over gas (the 24 hours of Le Mans was won by an audi diesel). They look normal and even stylish.
But diesels are not "in", especially with Hollywood hypocrites.

[Xo W.]

According to these Stanford slides, a truck outfitted with base flaps and skirts got an decrease in Cd (coefficient of drag, basically a number that sums up stuff you can't put into numbers so you can use it in equations, like shape) of 0.13-0.15, a change of 22% assuming the beginning Cd was 0.6, which is more or less right for a truck. This equated to a 7% increase in fuel effiency. They calculated this to be a savings of $13500 over 250000 miles, but that's with a grossly exaggerated value of $3/gal for diesel.
This is a page about aerodynamic drag vs. fuel efficiency, with listings of Cd for some of the more efficient cars.