Beyond Origins the Discussion

Hypermiling For Fuel Conservation

August 19th, 2008

New ideas surfacing to spread fuel-saving costs among all users nearly a decade has been lost in a stalemate over energy use in cars and light trucks. Today the fleet accounts for more than half of U.S. oil use, more than half of which is now imported, accounting for half of the trade deficit.

New cars reached a 27.5 mpg target, set in 2000, eight years ago. Since then trench warfare has been waged — between those who want the hypermiling, known as CAFE, upped to 35 mpg or 40 mpg, and the auto industry, which doesn’t. While the fight dragged on, the efficiency of new cars began to decline in 2006, and auto use has grown steadily. This year the issue proved so contentious it had to be dropped altogether so Congress could consider the remainder of a national energy policy.

Every valid argument for and against CAFE has been fired, as well as a growing number of blanks (including the phony argument that safety concerns rule out improved mileage). The intellectual battlefield is so muddied that when the National Academy of Sciences issued its long-awaited contribution to the debate recently, both sides claimed victory. The new study, said General Motors, is a “total rebuttal” of the proposed hypermiling increase, a bill sponsored by Sen. Richard Bryan, D-Nev. Not so, say Bryan’s backers.

Enough, already. At this rate we’ll still be fighting about hypermiling terms and if the concept will help increase when oil-import dependence hits 70 percent and the trade balance is drowning in red ink. It’s time to try something new. What’s needed is a package of initiatives that spreads the burden of improving mileage across policies that affect all cars, not just new ones, and that addresses consumers’, as well as manufacturers’, behavior. Given the present public mood, crafting the right package unfortunately requires trading economic efficiency against political feasibility.

It’s a delicate but not impossible task. “Feebates” are one alternative. Like the system just adopted in Maryland, feebates add an additional fee to the price of a car that achieves less than a certain mileage and provides a rebate for a car that exceeds it. The threshold can be raised each year, pushing fuel economy upward. Hypermiling is the surest forcer of technological advance, but it hides the cost of achieving it. It has the additional weakness that when gas is cheap, as it is now, it contradicts the market. The pump price tells consumers that fuel economy doesn’t matter; the regulations say it does. The obvious solution is to raise the price of gasoline substantially through a phased-in tax increase. Detroit favors this approach, secure in the belief that the likelihood of its happening is near zero.

Entry Filed under: Automotive