Is that they don’t know what they are talking about the vast majority of the time. They may think they have the best of intentions, but their execution is horrible.
Take for instance this post over at the Washington State based Evergreen Politics Blog calling for leftists to call their representatives to get them to push to vote for getting California Emissions standards enacted in Washington.
One of the most important environmental bills in this year’s legislature is the Clean Cars Bill (ESHB1397), which will require all new cars sold in Washington after 2008 to emit less toxic air pollution, thus saving money on fuel costs [adds up pretty fast at $2.50 a gallon –Ed.] and reducing our dependence on foreign oil. Not to mention the health benefits of breathing cleaner air.
When I read things like this, the mechanic in me just comes unhinged. You don’t get better fuel mileage from the car having better emissions standards. In fact, you get worse mileage, as I explain in my comment at Evergreen’s site (which I have also posted below the fold here).
As for the point of reducing our dependence on foreign oil, better gas mileage has never been successful at that. In fact, even though we are getting 35% or better average mileage per vehicle, our dependence has skyrocketed.
Of course, when this guy thinks ‘foreign oil’ he thinks of countries in the middle east. But in reality, we get most of our imported oil from Canada.
Like I said, the environmentalist lobby can say the words, but they don’t know what they mean.
I’m sorry to have to inform you of this, John, but you are absolutely incorrect on your point about ‘Lower Emissions Meaning Better Gas Mileage’
I don’t know how much you may have studied about ‘Engine Theory’ in regards to the internal combustion piston engine, so let me make it really simple:
A car engine is a big air pump which uses gasoline for ignition so as to pump the air through the engine. The more air you can pump through, the more power you create. It is an inefficient design, but is still the most common of the power plants due to its low cost of manufacture.
Now, when you slap a bunch of add-ons to the air pump so as to control the dirt that comes out of the exhaust, you systematically make it harder for the engine to work, thereby using more gasoline in the process.
Catalytic converters, exhaust recirculation and vacuum systems bog an engine down in its efficiency, making it need more fuel to do the same job. Which is why, in the early 70’s when all the Muscle Cars sales figures started dropping like flies due to their horsepower decreases. Detroit could not make the engine create the power it used to and still meet the emissions standards, so they cut the output to meet the standards or switched to smaller engines (and millions of gearheads voided their warranties in removing all that crap to get their power back).
That was, until the invention of an electronic fuel injection design.
A conventional carburetor pumps in a stream of gasoline from the fuel lines. The fuel then rolls down the intake manifold chambers and gets sucked into the piston chambers via the vacuum power of the piston being pulled down in the cylinder as the intake valve opens. During the rest of the process the gasoline and air mix is ignited and the exhaust is pushed out of the cylinder through the exhaust valve, and the whole process starts over again.
With injector technology, a smaller amount of gasoline in mist form is shot into the cylinder at the appropriate time but makes the same amount of explosive power due to it being nearly a gas instead of a liquid.
This is what gives us the better gas mileage even with all of the added emissions equipment on the engine.
Also, the invention of better fuel refining methods as well as additives to make the fuel cleaner before it enters the gas tank have given us the better mileage and emissions output.
Not the other way around as you stated.
The problem of legislating increased vehicle emissions standards is that there is, so far as is stated in the legislation you are pushing, no actual method or listing of required technology for how the car maker is to get the cars to run at these standards.
The R&D could take weeks, months or years to develop, test and implement, but the environmentalist lobby doesn’t care, they want it. They also don’t care that it will raise the cost of the vehicle, making a new or newer vehicle harder for those on the lower end of the scale to buy.
It is basically like telling an eight year old to find the square root of 86 in the next 30 minutes or you are going to spank him/her. The knowledge is easy enough to find out if you left the child an internet connection, but he/she will have to find the knowledge, teach it to him/herself and then give you your answer.
If the environmentalist lobby wants better emission standards, maybe they should get off their asses and do the R&D themselves before demanding something that doesn’t exist.
And stop being ignorant of the item they are trying to legislate would be nice too. No more of this “We’re going to make cars run cleaner so that our gas mileage will go up� crap like what you posted.
‘Nother meck-a-neck reporting in here, AK. One minor technical correction, then some politics.
Technically, your statement about a carburetted engine is not quite right, it fits better on the early throttle-body injections. A carburettor is supposed to atomize or vaporize the fuel before it hits the manifold. Some did a better job of that than others, but the engine would run anyway due to the huge volume of air swirling inside the intake manifold. That swirling air would finish the job the carburettor had started and the fuel-air mixture would get to the cylinders in about the right mixture, so combustion would take place. It might be ineffecient combustion, though, and that’s why car engines up to the mid-’80’s did poorly.
Throttle-body injection was an early crude effort to better regulate the fuel-air mixture, but it was only marginally better than carburettors, so it didn’t last long. And when it’s one injector clogged up, or was sent the wrong signals and measured the wrong stream of gas, you were done for.
The engines were all re-designed in the ’90’s, and new designs keep coming out. All these new designs feature multi-port fuel injection and new types of valving (four valves per cylinder) that much more accurately control the combustion and scavenge the exhaust products from the cylinders. In addition, huge strides have been made in engine function control, by better sensors and computers, so much more of the function of the engine is controllable now than it used to be.
If my very-ordinary 2.3 liter Ford four-cylinder was in a car 30 or 40 years ago, that car would have been a race car, with the power-to-displacement ratio that little mill has.
So, some marketing and politics. When they knew that they could make these new engines to meet the CA standards, the manufacturers started on working to develop more power from them (and still stay within the standards). That’s called a “horsepower race”. We have doubled the horsepower available from a V-6 engine in just the last 15 years. We have re-introduced the V-8 engine, relegated to history just 25 years ago, because THAT design can be made highly efficient.
So, one of two things happened in the enviro mind. Not having that mindset puts me at a disadvantage here, but I’ll offer both theories.
The enviros either figured that all that successful design technology could be made even more successful, so they got greedy and decided to MAKE the industry go back to the drawing boards again, instead of letting them have the fruits of their labors for a few years with present technology.
OR, they are pissed off that the auto industry has managed to meet the last draconian set of standards, which they thought would end the production of gasoline-powered vehicles, and force the industry to market something from Star Wars that used antigravity or something like that. Instead, the industry not only met their standards, they did such a good job of it that they could have a horsepower race to sell cars with and STILL meet the standards. It insulted the enviros to think that the “Neanderthal” auto industry could do this. They want to get even.
There is evidence that the last set of standards was meant to force the industry to produce a lot of all-electric vehicles, but the clever industry saw that hybrids would fit the regs also, so they advertised and built them in droves, and THAT stumped the enviros.
What is the bottom line here: I’m afraid that the envoros will win again, and force all states to adopt their looney laws, which are designed to clean up the air in the Los Angeles airshed. Mind you, that air has been unhealthy from before there were cars. The INDIANS managed to have unhealthy air there even before the Conquistadors came and subjugated them. The air there can’t be cleaned up, really.
Of course, alternate fuels and vehicles to run on them aren’t the answer, because those fuels have to be made by using large amounts of energy in big energy parks, and THOSE also pollute the air. You’re just transfering the pollution from place to place when you do that.
No, enviros actually want cars to have tiny little engines, accelerate slowly, and have to be replaced every three years, so the owner of a car is always forced to buy the very latest enviro-driven technology.
That manifests their egos and power, dontcha know?
The environmentalists continually fail to recognize the collateral costs in requiring automobiles to be “cleaner”…
As illustrated by your article, cars which produce lower emissions are LESS fuel efficient. (Worse mileage).
Cars less fuel efficient require more fuel to go the same distance as the previously unregulated “dirty vehicles�.
Burning more fuel to go the same distance as a more fuel efficient auto causes more pollution to be emitted from the tailpipe of the “lower emission vehicle�.
Now I don’t know if the net pollution output between the two vehicles are the same, but for the environmentalists to think that lower emission autos pollute significantly less is an exercise in unreasoned thinking. The trade off has to come somewhere, and that trade off is lower emissions in the short run, with higher emissions in the long run due to burning more fuel.
Ultimately the consumer gets screwed by having to buy MORE fuel to go the same distance. That’s more money out of our pockets for very little effect on overall emissions…
Maybe that is their goal.