Lies, Damn Lies, Cash for Clunkers and the Volt
OK, in the How Stupid Do They Think We Are category, I'll beat this dead horse one more time.
Volt:
Chevy is claiming 230 mpg (city) for the Volt. That might be true for 52 mile trips. If you drive 40 miles on batteries, and 12 miles at 50 mpg recharge mode, your mileage will average out to 230 mpg, according to the EPA formula. If you drive to the beach, however, one would think your mileage should quickly approach that 50 mpg. Nevertheless Chevy is also predicting a triple-digit combined rating. We'll see.
BTW, Nissan claims that its all-electric Leaf will get 367 mpg (city).
Cash for Clunkers:
Initial reports showed that C4C buyers were trading in their clunkers for impressively thrifty new vehicles.
1. Ford Focus
2. Toyota Corolla
3. Honda Civic
4. Toyota Prius
5. Toyota Camry
6. Ford Escape
7. Hyundai Elantra
8. Dodge Caliber
9. Honda Fit
10. Chevy Cobalt
Buuut, Autosavant points out:
Using the more common make and model, we see:
1. Ford Escape
2. Ford Focus
3. Jeep Patriot
4. Dodge Caliber
5. Ford F-150
6. Honda Civic
7. Chevrolet Silverado
8. Chevrolet Cobalt
9. Toyota Corolla
10. Ford Fusion
Escape and Patriot are smallish SUVs; F-150 and Silverado are full-size trucks. Not a terrible list, but not as impressive as the one with Prius, Fit, Elantra and Camry. If I was pushing C4C, I'd certainly use the EPA list.
Volt:
Chevy is claiming 230 mpg (city) for the Volt. That might be true for 52 mile trips. If you drive 40 miles on batteries, and 12 miles at 50 mpg recharge mode, your mileage will average out to 230 mpg, according to the EPA formula. If you drive to the beach, however, one would think your mileage should quickly approach that 50 mpg. Nevertheless Chevy is also predicting a triple-digit combined rating. We'll see.
BTW, Nissan claims that its all-electric Leaf will get 367 mpg (city).
Cash for Clunkers:
Initial reports showed that C4C buyers were trading in their clunkers for impressively thrifty new vehicles.
1. Ford Focus
2. Toyota Corolla
3. Honda Civic
4. Toyota Prius
5. Toyota Camry
6. Ford Escape
7. Hyundai Elantra
8. Dodge Caliber
9. Honda Fit
10. Chevy Cobalt
Buuut, Autosavant points out:
Or do they? According to CNN, who got their data from the keen eyes at Edmunds-dot-com, the numbers of vehicles sold depends on how you look at the data. The above list, compiled by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), breaks down sales data by engine, transmission, drive wheels, and hybrid status. For example, the Ford Escape is number Six on the above list. It's available in six distinct versions (two- and four-wheel drive, hybrid, etc.). According to the methodology used by the EPA, each version of the Escape is counted as a different vehicle. Thus in the ubiquitous list above, the only version counted is the gas-powered front-driver.
Using the more common make and model, we see:
1. Ford Escape
2. Ford Focus
3. Jeep Patriot
4. Dodge Caliber
5. Ford F-150
6. Honda Civic
7. Chevrolet Silverado
8. Chevrolet Cobalt
9. Toyota Corolla
10. Ford Fusion
Escape and Patriot are smallish SUVs; F-150 and Silverado are full-size trucks. Not a terrible list, but not as impressive as the one with Prius, Fit, Elantra and Camry. If I was pushing C4C, I'd certainly use the EPA list.
Advertisement
Thanks for posting this, Donal.
This stuff confuses me. So the Volt gets 230 miles per gallon but only has a range of 40 miles?
What am I missing or not understanding here?
August 11, 2009 1:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
The Volt is supposed to travel about 40 miles being propelled by its electric motor, powered by batteries. After 40 miles, a gasoline engine will begin recharging the batteries. The electric motor will still propel the car, but GM estimates that the gasoline recharger will consume roughly a gallon of gasoline every 50 miles.
So the range will be determined by the fuel in the tank + the charge in the battery. GM predicts a 640 mile range.
August 11, 2009 2:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
Chevy's estimates are based on excrutiatingly detailed federal regulations that prescribe how city and highway milage are calculated, including the assumptions for how long the trip should be.
If they claimed city milage calculated in any way other than that prescribed by the relevant regulations, they'd get hit with a regulatory enforcement action from the government and a false advertising lawsuit (Lanham Act § 43(a), 15 U.S.C. § 1125, for those who give a damn) so fast it would make their heads spin.
Yes, they almost certainly gamed the system in the sense of designing the product's performance so as to maximize the city milage number. I can't really blame them for that, given that the result is exactly the kind of technology that the milage disclosure regulations are trying to force.
August 11, 2009 4:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
Things get complicated. But Donal, surely this better than older cars at 22mpg's is it not?
August 11, 2009 2:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Slightly better.
August 11, 2009 3:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think it has to be better than slightly Donal. Think about it. The newer cars run much cleaner and more efficiently than the older ones. Older cars are, by virtue of their age and wear and tear much dirtier than the car being replaced. I think it is an excellent program and points the way for really stimulating demand in our economy. Bailing out the wealthy with the trillions spent on their profligate get rich quick schemes has done nothing to stimulate the economy and the banks are using our money to hoard cash instead of lending to those who lent to them! In this case, offering a deal directly to the public has immediate and notable benefits to the economy, to the environment, and to a huge number of average Americans. If only they would start offering truly low interest mortgages directly to the public instead of hoping the terminally greedy bankers will do the right thing we would start seeing recovery coming our way much faster.
Sorry, I digressed and drifted from the original point.
August 11, 2009 8:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
There’s environmental benefit in driving clunkers into the ground instead of building new ones. I can forgive that because of the backlog of unsold new cars, but they set the mileage bar awfully low, and essentially rewarded people that owned low-mileage cars.
If I had designed the program, I would have provided incentive for people to trade in older, fuel-efficient cars that could be serviceable on the used car market.
August 11, 2009 8:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
What irks me is that my clunker - a 1990 minivan - is not eligible for C4C because when it was new, it got better than 20 mpg. All of the "clunkers" I see on TV being destroyed are in far better condition and get better mileage than my car, but I can't participate in the program. And I can't even go out and buy one of those used cars because they're being crushed. It pisses me off.
The asshats who bought big SUVs are being rewarded while someone like me, who bought a sensible vehicle, gets nothing.
August 12, 2009 2:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, yeah, absolutely there's a benefit to driving vehicles that input toxic chemicals into runoff and groundwater.
It keeps the evolutionary biologists busy trying to figure out what's causing the latest mutation or mass morbidity event.
C'mon.
August 12, 2009 12:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
As if the newer ones don't?
August 12, 2009 1:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
Uh, yeah.
That's one of the benefits of "new", all the seals are good, all the safety equipment is in perfect working order, many of the propellants and fluids have been "greened" to the extent they can be, with non-ozone depleting AC, brake fluid that doesn't seek and disperse into groundwater, and the like.
They don't leak brake fluid, antifreeze, motor oil, CFCs, gasoline, or transmission fluid.
All of which are persistent organic pollutants, all of which are toxic, and many of which are also carcinogenic.
There's still some folks who change their oil over storm drains, but a bigger source of motor oil finding its way into soil and groundwater is leaky vehicles.
Have you ever been slowing down as you approach a stop indicator, and noticed the spots on the ground, staining the asphalt? Seen the iridescent sheen on a puddle after a brief rain?
It's a tiny impact per vehicle, but 20 million cars leaking 1 quart of oil a month put 60 million gallons of used motor oil on the ground and roads. Bear in mind that quart a month is a fairly slow leak.
Call it an unintended benefit of the program, if you like.
Just don't pretend it's not a benefit.
Leaky vehicles are one of those externalities that the market approach is so good at not accounting for.
August 16, 2009 11:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
I meant to write "60 million gallons annually toward the end there.
It's a topic that's just a little more sexy than sewage treatment.
Next time there's any discussion of sewage treatment in your area, see if you can get an engineer or hydrologist to make a statement about levels of automotive chemicals they have to deal with in either sewage effluent, or to treat drinking water.
August 16, 2009 11:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
Three billion dollars "better"?
August 11, 2009 9:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
And Caroline Baum reminds us of the “broken window fallacy.”
August 11, 2009 10:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
I agree with the analysis as applied to Cash for Clunkers, but parts of the essay miss out on differences in how we plan and deal with issues for the common good, as outlined in The Tragedy of the Commons. Individuals acting as individuals decide things differently than individuals acting as companies and individuals acting as governments and other types of social organizing such as religions. Shared free resources with no ownership can easily be destroyed. Bastiat rightly notes that a government-sponsored solution displaces a non-government-sponsored solution, but the free hand of capitalism also means people choosing to shoot smack in a darkened alleyway rather than going to the opera. Our whole debate about socialized health care revolves around a Bastiat-type tradeoff between European- or Canadian-style health care/insurance and American-style. Bastiat seems to assume that this market will use the money more efficiently, "Our adversaries consider, that an activity which is neither aided by supplies, nor regulated by Government, is an activity destroyed. We think just the contrary. Their faith is in the legislator, not in mankind; ours is in mankind, not in the legislator." Aesop noted in the cricket and the ant that some people will gladly enjoy the fruit of labor without working for it, and some people will gladly acknowledge the worth of an existing comfort without taking the initiative and forethought to create that comfort. To some extent, government's job is to evaluate Bastiat's proposition and see where it's still worth losing the output of the unseen in order to promote a more valuable end, specifically comparing the seen and unseen costs and benefits of interference. John Dunning describes types of market failures, structural and endemic, and in evaluating the appropriate intervention level of governments, the endemic model is where tradeoffs between the seen and unseen effects happens in correcting market distortions (economic rents, oligopolies, etc.), while with remedying structural blocks is almost always desired to "help create and facilitate the efficient working of markets". Additionally, whole bodies of work around industry clustering and production ecosystems, symbiotic benefits of competitors, et al. have changed the way economists view the effects and behavior of corporates including what's actually taking place in much of our globalization. (His "The Globalization of Business" goes into that more. Krugman for one has done extensive work on clustering.)
August 12, 2009 5:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
Less Cash for Clunkers? More F-22s?
Bastiat did not object to Frenchmen "sacrificing" for their security, for better roads and canals -- today, he might have approved their "sacrificing" for their better health. He did not approve of the idea behind make work: "We must find work for the workmen."
He argued that it was based on a money illusion and on the failure to notice the unseen things not produced.
My view, often repeated, is to give the people money, fairly and equally across the entire society, and let them spend it as they see fit. Selecting winners and losers is a mug's game -- as Obama will sooner or later come to realize.
August 12, 2009 9:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
Please look a bit closer at Dunning. He's splitting the middle on the "picking winners" issue, figuring out where government intervention is likely a good idea (depending on evaluated costs, impact and likelihood of successful implementation), and where it's not. Building/unobstructing markets typically good. Favoring one industry over another, frequently bad, but occasionally worth it for specific cost-evaluated or socially-evaluated reasons.
By Bastiat's logic, India should have done nothing to develop an IT industry, just sat there waiting for enterprising lads and lassies to build from the boots up. The reality is that many of these environments/ecosystems will not self-create in any reasonable amount of time, and Dunning gives some idea how to evaluate the effort. Does it discriminate against all other possible activities? Sure. The same money as built the IT park could have built a convention center or schools or small businesses. But what the government should be doing is facilitating its selected market(s), not trying to run it.
August 12, 2009 11:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not so sure Bastiat would have disagreed with you.
He didn't seem to mind the government straightening roads or digging canals. Though I suspect he wouldn't have approved of Cash for Clunkers.
August 12, 2009 11:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's not that - it's that he wouldn't have assigned a dollar value to public works, but instead would have assumed we were doing it just out of goodness, whereas the others were economic decisions. But we know better that there's public infrastructure and public goods that can be justified as contributing to a useful commons that profits not just a few.
August 12, 2009 2:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for posting this Donal. I was intrigued by the story on the Volt and was even thinking about blogging about.
My main concern with the Volt and even other cars is will it be a Jolt to the wallet when you buy it. And will you get further Jolts a few years down the road when it needs maintenance. I am a fan of technology myself but also need to think in more pragmatic terms.
And any vehicle the requires thousands of dollars in maintenance every 3 or 4 years to keep it alive is no bargain regardless of it's gas mileage or ecological impact. It simply becomes another hole in the road to pour money.
C
August 11, 2009 3:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
August 11, 2009 4:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's certainly a possibility (the "lease the batteries" thing).
Tesla already offer a hybrid lease/buy of replacement batteries for the Roadster. Of course, if I'm going to drop $120k on a Roadster, I'm not sure I'd care that much about the cost of batteries. :-)
(One reason I am waiting for the Model S is that I just don't want to pay much more than $50k for a vehicle. But I also want more interior space than the Roadster provides, lower insurance costs, and a greater range: I need that 300 mile range to make it to southern Utah.)
August 11, 2009 4:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
Mining the salt flats v. Visiting the altiplano
Is the sacrifice of this beautiful, remote, and surreal place worth a new consumer technology that is supposed to solve many of our problems? Erik Loomis
Another "main concern"?
August 11, 2009 9:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
I like the idea but could never afford one at $40,000. The batteries I think are about $25k of that and I dont know their lifespan but they will eventually have to be replaced, and Walmart wont have them. Battery technology and cost are the hold ups right now.But we are moving forward and that is good. VCR,s and DVD players were $1200 when they first hit the market, now a DVD player can be bought for $39. If things go right in 10 years the Volt will be a clunker, maybe then I can buy one.
August 12, 2009 12:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
We'll have to see what the actual MSRP is when it comes out (and I will want to see some reliability numbers, which will take even more years, unfortunately). However, the battery pack should not be anywhere near $25k. The Tesla Roadster's is about $30k and is approximately six times bigger and liquid cooled, so the Volt's should cost less than one sixth of that, or under $5k.
August 12, 2009 2:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's true: a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV, to use the industry acronym) that runs first off batteries, then off fuel—let's call this a PHEV-BFTF, or pee-heev beef-teef :-) , for Batteries-First-Then-Fuel—creates all kinds of ways to game the measurements. In particular, with beefteef, your "fuel" mileage depends heavily on your total mileage. However, the EPA estimates are not completely unreasonable. It turns out that most people mostly drive short distances, commuting to work daily, with trips to the grocery store and so on.
My main complaint with GM's PHEV-BFTF design (and several others on the drawing board) at this point is not the marketeering, but rather that the fuel-based engine is still an internal combustion engine. Microturbines make far more sense here, as they can burn any liquid fuel (pour in any mix of gasoline, kerosene, diesel, biodiesel, ethanol, butanol, etc, and it just works), can be designed to run with astoundingly low emissions, and can use air bearings to avoid oil lubrication entirely. A properly designed microturbine has only a single moving part and is significantly lighter than an equivalent four-stroke piston engine. The turbine's drawbacks (relative to conventional IC engines)—the reasons turbine based cars never caught on before—all go away with the electric coupling replacing conventional transmissions.
There is a company (Velozzi) that claim they will have a microturbine based PHEV-BFTF out by 2012. Given that they do not even have a prototype yet, all I can say is "we'll see".
One way or another, I am hoping that by 2012, I can buy either a Tesla Model S or a microturbine-based beefteef. But ... "we'll see".
August 11, 2009 4:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
Could you explain the part about driving to the beach, Donal? How far is the beach from you? How many miles are you talking about?
In any case, I don't get your reasoning. No matter how long the trip is, if you switch back and forth from battery to recharge mode, then why won't you maintain the same average mpg over the extent of the long trip? I don't at all understand why the mileage would converge toward the recharge mode mileage. That makes no sense. You seem to be assuming that once you have depleted your first battery charge, then you have to run on internal combustion for the rest of the trip. But every time you recharge the battery you can then get another 40 miles in battery mode without using any gas.
Suppose we assume that a Volt-like car uses .5 gallons per ten miles of travel in recharge mode (20 mpg) and can recharge the battery in 10 miles of recharge mode driving. Then a 100 mile stretch of a long highway trip would then consist of a 40 mile battery leg, followed by a 10 mile recharge leg, followed by another 40 mile battery leg, followed by another 10 mile recharge leg. The gas consumed during these legs would be 0g + .5g + 0g + .5g, or one gallon - thus 100 miles per gallon.
Now in fact, Chevy seems to be assuming 50mpg for recharge mode driving, so apparently a longer time to do a full recharge - about 40 I think. Then a 160 mile stretch consists of 40 battery, 40 recharge, 40 battery, 40 recharge. At 50mpg, the 80 miles of recharge requires 8/5ths of a gallon of gas. So, you get 160 miles for the whole trip with 8/5ths of a gallon of gas, or 100mpg.
To derive the 230 average city mileage figure, GM is apparently using a more complicated estimate based on the varying lengths of daily urban diving trips between home recharges. Most urban drivers would drive under 40 miles in a day, and would do all their battery charging at home. But some would drive 45 miles, some would drive 50 miles, some would drive 55 miles, etc. These latter drivers would have to employ the gas recharge mode during their trip. Based on the 50mpg recharge mode gasoline usage number used above, and the estimate of 40 miles for a full recharge, you could take single 80 mile trip consisting of a 40mile battery leg, a 20 mile half-recharge leg and another 20 mile battery leg. That would get you 80 miles at 2/5ths of a gallon, or 200 mpg.
Or you could take a 60 mile trip consisting of a 40mile battery leg, a 10 mile quarter-recharge leg, followed by a 10 mile battery leg. That would get you 60 miles with 1/5th of a gallon of gas, or 300mpg.
By assigning reasonable probabilities to different urban round trip lengths, you can come up with the 230mpg figure for urban driving.
August 11, 2009 5:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
The actual recharge time is approximated by the following equation:
T = C / (Pg - Pm)
where T is time-to-recharge, C is battery capacity, and Pg and Pm are the power produced by the generator (in this case the gasoline engine) and consumed by the motor (in this case the electric motor driving the wheels). Pg must (of course) exceed Pm to get any current into the battery at all.
The main problem here is that while Pg is easy to compute, Pm depends on the driver, the load in the vehicle, and the terrain. Driving a heavily loaded vehicle aggressively/fast and uphill requires much more motor-power than driving a lightly loaded vehicle delicatedly/slowly on a level surface. (And in some cases, using regenerative braking, driving downhill can even turn Pm negative, so that it adds to Pg instead of subtracting from it.)
This equation is an approximation because some energy is lost when charging a battery, and the loss depends on the charge rate and battery temperature. However, deltas in Pm generally swamp this.
Thus, you need to make assumptions not only about trip lengths, but also about the driver. :-)
August 11, 2009 6:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
The Volt will only run in full-battery mode between 85% (upper limit) and 30% charge. Once under 30% the gasoline engine initiates to sustain the battery charge high enough to keep propelling the car. Any extra energy will slowly recharge the battery.
Although GM says it is possible, my feeling is that you'd have to be driving pretty slowly to get back into battery-only mode. Since recharging takes eight hours from a 120V wall outlet or three hours from a 240V outlet, I'd be surprised if driving at highway speeds would ever let the battery recharge high enough to go battery only for more than a few minutes at a time.
August 11, 2009 8:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
Incidentally, these limits are significantly different on the (strictly battery) Tesla, for a number of reasons, including two crucial differences:
- The Tesla's battery pack is liquid cooled, while the Volt's is not.
- The Tesla has no on-board generator so there is no reason to save some charge towards the low end.
The last part deserves a bit of explanation. As I noted in another comment here, the electric motor draw varies depending on whether the car is climbing a hill, for instance. The generator's output, by contrast, is constant. This means that at least some times, if the system is designed properly, the motor will draw more electric power than the generator puts out. In other words, (Pg - Pm) in my equation above goes negative at times.This "negative generation" must be made up somewhere, and that "somewhere" is the battery. If we assume that the car is not going to climb a hill forever—a pretty reasonable assumption; even the climb up from the Calif central valley to Tahoe, or up the Grapevine on I-5, eventually ends—and if we further assume that the car is "pretty likely" to go downhill as well, then eventually (Pg - Pm) will go positive again. The battery can thus act as a buffer, providing power during high demand and absorbing it during low demand. The generator-engine can therefore be sized for the average horsepower needed, rather than the peak.
This generator-sizing offers substantial weight savings (even more savings if the generator is a microturbine, but I already digressed on that earlier :-) ). And, as it turns out, if you get weight savings in a vehicle, you improve the mileage. We currently haul literally tons of metal just to transport a 150-lb (or 200 or 300 lb, as the case may be) person from point A to point B. This is quite a wasteful practice, and using motor-generator-battery systems promises to help a lot.
(As an example of just how much it helps, the Designline microturbine-generator electric-motor city bus gets more than double the fuel mileage of a standard city bus. A typical 40-passenger diesel bus gets about 3 mpg, while the Designline gets 6 to 8. This is as-seen-in-practice in the buses that Baltimore, NYC, and other cities are testing now. The microturbine-powered buses are also much quieter, much cleaner exhaust-wise—in other tests, microturbines were discovered to actually clean the Los Angeles ambient air, with the smog levels coming out being lower than the smog levels going in!—and promise to be much lower maintenance, although that last part has to go through the test of time to be proven.)
August 12, 2009 2:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
Enough of this One Man Crusade Against Truthiness, Donal!
August 11, 2009 8:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
But how else can I get you to comment, Ellen?
August 11, 2009 9:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ugh
I got a camry as a rental, It feels like I am driving my dads car. It's biiiig.
August 11, 2009 9:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
All cars go through this cycle: they are born small, and as they age, they get bigger and bigger. Your rental Camry is, what, a 15th generation model or something, so naturally it is huge. :-)
(Seriously, this happens a lot. The Subaru Forester was originally built on the Impreza platform, but after a few model year iterations, was moved to the Legacy platform, and thus grew several inches larger. The same thing happened with several other car models I was tracking, although I have forgotten the details since then.)
August 12, 2009 2:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
The way I see it, 1) the Volt is a helluva lot better than anything we have now, 2) the Tesla is out of a small company that's never done anything in large scale, so I don't take it as seriously as the #2 auto producer even though I wish them luck long-term, 3) prices in battery technology should decrease both from economies of scale and technical breakthroughs, 4) fewer moving parts decreases breakage/improves maintainability, 5) pollution savings will be significant, and 6) competition will come out to create more efficient versions of this if/when it marginally succeeds in the marketplace.
August 12, 2009 3:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
If they had kept going with the EV-1 program, instead of crushing them, they may have had a competitive hybrid on the market a decade ago.
August 12, 2009 8:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
Koulda, wooda, shudda
August 12, 2009 11:33 AM | Reply | Permalink