Vehicle Manufacturing Restricting Speed Potential
When I took "Driver's Ed" back in high school in the mid-1960s, it was emphasized that driving was a "privilege", not a "right". Yet I now see people writing opinions that their own "pursuit of happiness", as guaranteed by the United States Constitution, is jeopardized by any sort of law restricting the possible "happiness" with which they are imbued by automobile ownership. This attitude shows how egregious our auto-centric society has become.
I am a member of the Society of Automotive Engineers, and have had a long list of vehicles owned, repairs and rebuilds done, books and coursework studied, races attended, as well as employment. But there is one fact that supersedes all my history, my California experience, my personal affection for all things "cars and trucks". It trumps all other factors in my personal and professional view of the role of "cars" in the USA, and it is the fact that the population of the United States stands at over 300 million people. This is 100 million more than when I first started driving! It is time to get away from our personal, unrestrained, self-promoting greediness, and acknowledge that things must change, and values retained on the basis of a romantic remembrance of past sights, sounds, and adventures. There are simply too many of us now!
Think of this: it used to be a Christmas tradition in America, that on Christmas Day, male members of the household would go out with their guns and shoot every single bird they could find. Every single bird! This tradition would seem pretty darn strange today if someone were trying to keep and hold it, to "return to the best of times". Yet this will no doubt be no more fantastic to people one hundred years from now than our current "weird craze" for inefficient and profligate personal automobile transport.
Our personal choices of how we get from "A" to "B" in an automobile are actually pretty restricted. Imagine going into a clothing store, and being shown the limited selection of "clothes", and every one of them, no exceptions (1) had a plastic face guard plus head covering to keep wind and rain off (2) enabled you to be warm outdoors while the temperature was minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit (3) prevented broken bones or bruises if you fell a distance of seven feet (4) cost $2000. That would be some sort of "get up" to wear at the beach, or to climb into before heading off to get coffee at Starbuck's! Yet, if manufacturers only made those clothes and nothing else, and those features were mandated by law....what else could you wear?
That is just about where we stand with our automotive choices, and it doesn't make much sense for clothes, does it? That clothes analogy seems ridiculous, because you can avoid all the outlandish conditions of wind, temperature, safety, implied in that hypothetical "outfit" . Yet there is one thing that is present in all automobiles, truck, and motorcycles that is "built-in" to that clothes analogy. And that "hidden factor' cannot be avoided in our current vehicles:
Speed.
There is no physical restriction on speed built into any of our vehicles. And no restriction, no matter how much you overload the car, or how well you drive!
I mean a "sane" speed restricting application. It's now a "selling feature" to say that there is electronic speed restriction on some high-priced vehicles to prevent the car from exceeding 120 mph. My, how my personal "happiness" has eroded with that electronic device!
Take the most smallish, modestly-built vehicle on the road today, and there is nothing about it that won't prevent you from loading it up with four NFL linemen, all their bags and suitcases, and driving down a mountain road at seventy miles an hour, rain, wind, and snow pounding down. And, if you crash, the manufacturer is at fault, because not enough 'safety' was engineered into the vehicle.
Because the manufacturer has product responsibility (and liability), all means of personal automotive transportation have to be "over-engineered" to handle the most extreme conditions of the most rare driving episodes. With more and more people on the road, and more types of conditions, traffic, lane changes, those "emergency episodes" are more and more common.
And like our hypothetical "outfit", we have to carry that "over-engineering" around, even when taking our car to get to Starbucks, one mile away on pool-table-flat road.
How did we get here?
It's speed that's "addicting". There is no "oil addiction". An addict feels good as a consequence of "scoring" that substance he craves. Believe me, no one in America looks forward to returning to the gasoline pump, again and again. There is no "oil addiction", only politics as usual (using short buzzwords and catch-phrases that obfuscate hard facts).
Consider that in the "oil crisis" of the 1970s, the speed limit was dropped to 55mph. And during World War II, there was fuel rationing but no need for dropping the speed limit, because it was already at 45 mph, quite low.
With today's high fuel prices, there has yet to be one clear call for lowering speed. You seldom hear media comments such as, "Let's fight global warming, drive 55." And there appears to be no voluntary reductions going on. I like to drive as fast (maybe faster) than the next guy. Yet, even lowering my maximum freeway speed to the "legal limit", 65 mph, usually results in other cars, 90% of other heavy SUVs, trucks pulling boats, everything, careening around me, overtaking and passing me at some distinctly higher speed.
Apart from "getting an edge" or, "keeping up with the competition", is there any rational reason why any vehicle (other than the police or fire or emergency) needs to go faster than 65 miles per hour? Any? Sure, we've all been late, driving like mad through traffic, even while muttering all the while and carrying the subconscious conviction of how unsafe it is what we're doing, while we're doing it. No law will change that.
What has to happen as an initial step, is, all motor vehicles must be modified to be incapable of surpassing 65mph. Downhill, pushed, wind-enhanced...whatever. It has to be a system-driven limitation, not a law to be flaunted.
Take this idea to the extreme, and look at what happens. At 35 mph top speed, engines get smaller, cars get lighter, and fuel consumption goes way, way, way, way up!
How far up?
Forget hybrids, hydrogen power, exotic battery cars. The quest for reducing carbon emissions and high mileage is on display every year at the SAE Supermileage competition, using technology no more exotic than a standard lawnmower engine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_Supermileage_Competition
Even the winning high school team gets over 1000 miles to the gallon! And the winning college team? 3000+ miles to the gallon! Sure the cars are low-slung, look unsafe (but safer than a motorcycle), but the main ingredient is the low vehicle mass. The less you carry around, the less you have need for a large powerful engine. And, if you do not have to merge onto the freeway at sixty miles per hour, your engine needs "no reserve", you car needs no "400 HP" fire-breathing V-8.
Many of my current ideas about cars and our American society have been derived from reading the book "Alternative Cars in the 21st Century" by Robert Q. Riley. I have the 1994 version, copyright by the Society of Automotive Engineers. There is a newer version, and I am planning to buy that version soon.
"Alternative Cars in the 21st Century", even my 1994 version, is far superior in facts to the recent "Future Cars" program aired in November 2007 on the Discovery Channel, and other popular media "quick-hits". In that "Future Cars" program, the 'fact' was asserted that in a conventional automobile, only "25%" (big onscreen numbers) of the energy of gasoline fuel used in a typical car is translated into power.
As the abover-cited SAE book shows, it's much worse than that:(page 36)"On the most simple level, when a 3500lb machine transports a 175 lb occupant on a local trip to the market, the available-energy pie is divided so that approximately 95 percent gets the car to the market and the remaining five percent gets the occupant there. More specifically, about 82 percent of the latent energy in gasoline is wasted when it is converted into mechanical power, which just pollutes the air and gets no one to the market. Of the 18 percent left, about a third goes to overcoming air resistance and the other two-thirds is consumed by inertia and rolling resistance, of which the occupant accounts for a small portion. In this scenario the occupant gets 0.006 of the fuel's energy, the car gets 0.174, and 0.82 is wasted. Since the automobile is responsible for 99.4 percent of the total energy consumed, and it tenaciously resists improvements in energy efficiency, minimizing the car itself is the most straightforward way to reduce its portion of the energy budget."
If you have one "take away" from my article, remember that number: "0.006". Less than one percent of the energy in the gasoline used in a car, gets you, the person, from A to B. Like the book says, "minimizing the car itself" is the only way to have real efficiency. And this is no "greenpeace"-biased piece. It is a book published by SAE, by an industry engineer!
In this book, you'll see that the automotive industry has invested much time, research, and money in a fascinating array of "minimized" cars. There is certainly no conspiracy to keep gas guzzlers. But they never come to market, because people would not pay the extra premium for the features. And, that extra premium can directly be translated into...
Speed.
You have to build in crash protection, frame performance, brake performance, acceleration performance, wheel and tire performance, crosswinds at high speed... all these factors create more weighty parts. And that means bigger engines, so the weight goes up, which means bigger power steering packages, etc. It is a onward-and-upward spiral that has no end, as long as a higher and higher possible speed is built into the car.
If we simply legislate into reality the idea that every motorized vehicle on the road must have an electro-mechanical system that will prevent it from traveling faster than 35 mph, our society will transform in so many ways:
> Train and light-rail speeds will now become preferred choices for arriving "early".
> National Fuel Consumption would dramatically decrease, and the price of fuel would drop.It is conceivable that the United States would eventually import zero extra petroleum. Where would that put our world politics? Zero imports!
> Cars would get lighter, and cheaper. And the cheaper cars means the wider the variety one person could own. Imagine a household, where the breadwinner bought three vehicles: a single-person car to commute in, a passenger car that held six people, and an open-wheel race car (here's where you get to drive 100 mph), stored at the track, all three for $25,000 total, new. All replacing the single Aud-Infinite-Beamer that tries to be all those things but does none of them well, but costs $40,000-plus and consumes five times more fuel than the lightweight "collection" in total would consume.
Isn't having a "collection" of specified objects the way we handle clothing, food preparation and service, music, books, gardening, etc.? Why not our motorized transportation?
> Automobile deaths, nationwide, would drop. Maybe to less than 10% of the current rate.
> Insurance and autobody costs would be reduced.
> Tires would be lighter, cost less, last longer.
> Less road rage. Less noise pollution, no more freeway barrier walls.
> Costs to build infrastructure (overpasses, bridges, etc.) would be reduced.
Reducing the top speed of all our personal motor vehicles to a physical, unalterable 35 mph would relieve so many problems we face, I am surprised that more people do not speak or write about it.
