Anyone else notice that the stage is being set for a second Malaise Era?

Malaise era cars (1972-1983) were a very unique set of circumstances starting with a major worldwide fuel crisis. American manufacturers were not prepared for the market changes. 

Yes, 1980 vehicles are crappy compared to modern vehicles. All brands. 

But there was a discrepancy between US and foreign manufacturers at that time. Foreign manufacturers were smaller, lighter, unibody, mostly FWD, and much more fuel efficient then there American counterparts. In 1972, American manufacturers had very few of these features.

American buyers had a choice- stick to their brand loyalty and patriotism and buy a crappy car, or buy foreign. 

Im glad the American manufacturers have closed that gap in production capabilities and quality (and that ALL manufacturers have vastly improved)

I agree with the original premise in this thread, but disagree with pointing the finger at trucks. 

Trucks are not going away. The regulations and manufacturing processes will have to accommodate the fact that people like trucks and want to buy them. 

I'm waiting for a good EV offering in a truck.  4 wheel independent drive motors, plenty of space and chassis capacity for the size and weight of the batteries, and all the torque you want!

also, the heavy duty trucks that are doing a bulk of the polluting (on an individual level) are exempt from CAFE and all of the other regulations as well.  Granted, the big 5 (if you include nissan and toyota) are selling a whole heap more half tons than anything else, so on aggregate the half tons are responsible for a lot of pollution and inefficiency, but they are worlds better than even 10 years ago.

stylngle2003 said:

also, the heavy duty trucks that are doing a bulk of the polluting (on an individual level) are exempt from CAFE and all of the other regulations as well.  Granted, the big 5 (if you include nissan and toyota) are selling a whole heap more half tons than anything else, so on aggregate the half tons are responsible for a lot of pollution and inefficiency, but they are worlds better than even 10 years ago.

Uh, no they are not exempt from the regulations.  They are different, sure.  But very far from exempt.  

Also, the change from light duty truck to medium duty trucks is 8500lb- which most light trucks are nowhere near- the F150, Titan, and 1500 are nowhere near MDVs.  

Medium duty and heavy duty trucks are cleaner than cars were 20 years ago.

DeadSkunk said:

Can someone in the industry explain to me why side impact standards have driven the belt line higher? I'm not convinced that this is true. Why? My head can impact that window sill or the window regardless of sill height. I don't get it. I still think a lot of it is just follow-the-leader styling rather than engineering.

I'm not in the industry but I'm pretty sure the intent is to:

1: Make the window opening smaller so that it can be fully covered by curtain airbags, and

2: Have your head hit the window sill instead of the other guy's hood, if it has to hit something other than the curtain airbag.

"Anyone else notice that the stage is being set for a second Malaise Era?"

Naw.

SVreX said:

I agree with the original premise in this thread, but disagree with pointing the finger at trucks. 

Trucks are not going away. The regulations and manufacturing processes will have to accommodate the fact that people like trucks and want to buy them. 

I'm waiting for a good EV offering in a truck.  4 wheel independent drive motors, plenty of space and chassis capacity for the size and weight of the batteries, and all the torque you want!

Yeah trucks aren't going away and aren't the core of the problem, but they are part of it, you can't put 5000lbs of vehicle with the frontal area of a small garage around your engine and expect good MPGs. And there definitely will be electric trucks once battery technology improves to the point that you can fit a reasonably affordable pack in such a vehicle that will still give it decent range. Right now most EVs rely on good aero, less than awful vehicle weights and low rolling resistance tires to get good range.

Per-wheel or per-axle drive motors will give huge advantages in offroading too (per wheel gives maneuverability and traction advantages, per axle allows for gearing advantages).

Honestly, the closest thing we've gotten so far to a good EV truck is that Bollinger thing we discussed a few months ago.  It's not quite truck-sized, but it's electric and has the payload capacity of a 1 ton dually pickup (with less towing capacity).  So something like that but scaled up into a truck chassis (with correspondingly more battery) would be a good start. 

Not enough range for long trips with a trailer in tow, but for someone who just needs a truck around town or a utility vehicle that can go off-road with lots of weight and doesn't have to venture too far from home, something like that starts to look pretty good.  As far as off-roading, it's really too bad the Bollinger is so expensive.  Because something the size of a lifted Grand Cherokee with a bit more cargo room due to its shape and almost 6 times the payload capacity sounds pretty darn useful to me for moving stuff around on a farm or wooded property with lots of trails, etc.  It's just too expensive to actually see that kind of use.  

Considering the size of the fuel tanks in pick up trucks, even small ones, forgive me for not holding my breath for a capable EV truck.

alfadriver said:

Considering the size of the fuel tanks in pick up trucks, even small ones, forgive me for not holding my breath for a capable EV truck.

Space isn't the problem, it's weight and cost. It's much easier to package battery packs than fuel tanks so there's no shortage of space. The rest of the powertrain is a lot more compact too. You could fill up a truck with batteries today and get more than enough range, but the weight and cost would be through the roof.

The Tesla Semi, from its specs, seems to be using next-gen solid-state lithium batteries, like the Roadster 2.0.

In reply to GameboyRMH :

I'm not talking about actual space, I'm talking about 30 gallons worth of gasoline energy needing electric storage space + charge time.  Neither are as trivial as you suggest.

Well first you only actually need about 10~15 gallons worth of storage energy since most of it won't be going out the radiator in an EV. That's if you want range parity which isn't really necessary if you leave with a "full tank" every morning. And if you consider that the amount of space used for just the drivetrain of a current pickup is enough for the entire powertrain of an EV, there's plenty of space to work in. Batteries are charging so fast now that the limit of charging speed is probably going to be human safety tolerance or insurance company policies rather than any actual technical limitation. Look at Tesla's Megacharger for example...and there's still room to send lots more power through the cables of that system.

GameboyRMH said:

SVreX said:

I agree with the original premise in this thread, but disagree with pointing the finger at trucks. 

Trucks are not going away. The regulations and manufacturing processes will have to accommodate the fact that people like trucks and want to buy them. 

I'm waiting for a good EV offering in a truck.  4 wheel independent drive motors, plenty of space and chassis capacity for the size and weight of the batteries, and all the torque you want!

Yeah trucks aren't going away and aren't the core of the problem, but they are part of it, you can't put 5000lbs of vehicle with the frontal area of a small garage around your engine and expect good MPGs. And there definitely will be electric trucks once battery technology improves to the point that you can fit a reasonably affordable pack in such a vehicle that will still give it decent range. Right now most EVs rely on good aero, less than awful vehicle weights and low rolling resistance tires to get good range.

Per-wheel or per-axle drive motors will give huge advantages in offroading too (per wheel gives maneuverability and traction advantages, per axle allows for gearing advantages).

1- Truck owners do not care about MPGs. Well maybe a little, but they care more about having a truck. 

2- Have you seen how much space is UNDER the bed in a modern truck?  Pretty much as much as on top. 

Workhorse W-15

460 hp

0-60 5.5 seconds

80 mile range all electric

75 MPGe

28/32 MPG hybrid

Payload 2200 lbs

Towing 5000 lbs

GVWR 7200 lbs

Composite/ carbon fiber body

7.2 Kw mobile plug-in power

$52,000 price point  

Workhorse.com

Tell me again why the big 4 can't build a better electric truck??

I agree they can...just not quite yet. I'm sure they're testing early prototypes right now, and you'll see them in showrooms in 2~3 years. Tesla is aiming to have their pickup out in 2020.

Just ran across a good article on this very topic:

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/5/3/17314000/trump-epa-cars-trucks-fuel-economy-cafe-standards

Given a long enough timeline, every thread is locked because of politics/hitler or turns into Alfa and Gameboy arguing about EVs.

In reply to GameboyRMH :

That article is a bit sensational isn't it? Freezing regulations @ 2020 levels isn't going to mean "more pollution". It might be more pollution than it could be if standards were allowed to continue tightening indefinitely, but it's still going to be less than what we currently have, and a lot less than what we had just 15 years ago. The low hanging fruit is pretty much gone by now. Sure, if you spend enough money and add enough gadgets, you can continue improving emissions and fuel economy but that enters the realm of diminishing returns, where you pay more and more to develop this tech for smaller and smaller gains. And that ends up pricing vehicles out of larger and larger parts of the population's budget, which means people keep their older, dirtier cars.

I like clean air and water as much as anybody.  Fuel economy is important to me, even as a gear head. There's a pretty strong chance that my next vehicle will be some form of hybrid, and preferably a PHEV. But I don't think it's necessarily evil to ask if there's a point where it no longer makes financial sense to continue further pursuit of cleaning up ICEs. I guess the alternative is electrification, which seems to be the direction everybody is heading in the industry (mostly because of the regulations). But consumer demand in electric vehicles doesn't seem to be particularly strong at this point, and infrastructure has quite a ways to go before widespread EV adoption is viable.

tuna55 said:

Given a long enough timeline, every thread is locked because of politics/hitler or turns into Alfa and Gameboy arguing about EVs.

This is the perfect GRM version of Godwin's law

There's no point where it stops making financial sense to continue cleaning up ICEs, even though we're "sightless creatures live here" deep in the diminishing returns on them, unless technological progress stops for some reason. Other jurisdictions are still pressing ahead and the cost of cars, adjusted for inflation, hasn't flown out of control. People are having a harder time affording them, but that's more of an income problem.

To get carbon emissions under control overall, they have to go negative, and considering that recent IPCC estimates are finding that all our best projected technologies may not be enough, it wouldn't be smart to just call today's cars clean enough.

Also the infrastructure problem of EVs is overblown. Increasing household efficiency is actually causing a problematic plateau in energy demand that EVs could make up for.

STM317 said:

In reply to GameboyRMH :

That article is a bit sensational isn't it? Freezing regulations @ 2020 levels isn't going to mean "more pollution". It might be more pollution than it could be if standards were allowed to continue tightening indefinitely, but it's still going to be less than what we currently have, and a lot less than what we had just 15 years ago. The low hanging fruit is pretty much gone by now. Sure, if you spend enough money and add enough gadgets, you can continue improving emissions and fuel economy but that enters the realm of diminishing returns, where you pay more and more to develop this tech for smaller and smaller gains. And that ends up pricing vehicles out of larger and larger parts of the population's budget, which means people keep their older, dirtier cars.

I like clean air and water as much as anybody.  Fuel economy is important to me, even as a gear head. There's a pretty strong chance that my next vehicle will be some form of hybrid, and preferably a PHEV. But I don't think it's necessarily evil to ask if there's a point where it no longer makes financial sense to continue further pursuit of cleaning up ICEs. I guess the alternative is electrification, which seems to be the direction everybody is heading in the industry (mostly because of the regulations). But consumer demand in electric vehicles doesn't seem to be particularly strong at this point, and infrastructure has quite a ways to go before widespread EV adoption is viable.

Of course. it's vox. "How to make propaganda look like a well researched long-form article." At least most of the tripe mostly-fake news looks like garbage.

Vox has some pretty clear biases, but I do like me some well-researched long-form articles that pass the fact checks. I often read WaPo articles for the same reasons.

Edit: Other sources for those who don't like Vox:

EVs making up for plateau in electricity demand:

https://qz.com/1230297/us-utilities-have-finally-realized-electric-cars-will-save-them-and-asked-congress-to-put-more-evs-on-the-road/

Another article on the EPA rollback, focusing more on science and policy issues rather than climate and industry:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/epa-to-roll-back-car-efficiency-rules-despite-science-that-supports-them/

SVreX said:

Workhorse W-15

460 hp

0-60 5.5 seconds

80 mile range all electric

75 MPGe

28/32 MPG hybrid

Payload 2200 lbs

Towing 5000 lbs

GVWR 7200 lbs

Composite/ carbon fiber body

7.2 Kw mobile plug-in power

$52,000 price point  

 

Workhorse.com

 

Tell me again why the big 4 can't build a better electric truck??

 

Because the market demand isn’t there for it to be viable to them. GM already tried Hybrid pickups and very few people bought them, they sold more Hybrid Tahoe’s. Electric pickups probably aren’t going to do much better, but in all honesty, the companies need to do what Ford did with the testing of the Aluminum body F150, which is that they need to go directly to Fleet sales to prove that they can work in the real world before they go to the general public. 

GameboyRMH said:

There's no point where it stops making financial sense to continue cleaning up ICEs, even though we're "sightless creatures live here" deep in the diminishing returns on them, unless technological progress stops for some reason. Other jurisdictions are still pressing ahead and the cost of cars, adjusted for inflation, hasn't flown out of control. People are having a harder time affording them, but that's more of an income problem.

To get carbon emissions under control overall, they have to go negative, and considering that recent IPCC estimates are finding that all our best projected technologies may not be enough, it wouldn't be smart to just call today's cars clean enough.

Also the infrastructure problem of EVs is overblown. Increasing household efficiency is actually causing a problematic plateau in energy demand that EVs could make up for.

So if you're an automaker with a large but pretty finite R&D budget and a responsibility to your shareholders, how much of that budget would you allocate towards further ICE development vs electrification? Is it better to freeze ICE emissions/fuel economy development @ 2020 levels until demand/ charging infrastructure for EVs catches up in 5 years, and instead invest all of that time/money into electrification that will have a much larger positive impact? Or do you take some of the resources from electrification development and continue chasing smaller and smaller gains in ICEs until the world is more ready for EVs? What amount of resources would you redirect to ICEs (the present/near term future) vs electrification (long term future)?

STM317 said:

So if you're an automaker with a large but pretty finite R&D budget and a responsibility to your shareholders, how much of that budget would you allocate towards further ICE development vs electrification? Is it better to freeze ICE emissions/fuel economy development @ 2020 levels until demand/ charging infrastructure for EVs catches up in 5 years, and instead invest all of that time/money into electrification that will have a much larger positive impact? Or do you take some of the resources from electrification development and continue chasing smaller and smaller gains in ICEs until the world is more ready for EVs? What amount of resources would you redirect to ICEs (the present/near term future) vs electrification (long term future)?

Well the regulatory environment affects that greatly, and the idea of legislating a level of performance rather than a technology is meant to be less intrusive and let the companies choose how they want to do it...personally, if I were a big automaker CEO, at this point I'd keep ICE R&D funded just enough to meet regulatory demands and develop one round of new engines, and put most of the R&D money on EVs.