2008 Woodie Awards
SANFORD: Too little, too late for electric cars
Monica Sanford
Issue date: 9/5/08 Section: Opinion
At the New York International Auto Show on March 20, Progressive Insurance Company and the X Prize Foundation (which provided a multi-million dollar prize for the first private company to launch a man into outer space) announced the Automotive X Prize: $10 million for the first car to achieve 100 miles per gallon fuel efficiency.
So what?
I would love to see someone win this prize (especially if it's myself), but I'm not going to do cartwheels over something so long overdue. It's like buying your kid a pony for graduating from kindergarten.
I bought my first car when I turned sixteen. It was a 1986 Oldsmobile Cutlass Calais. That was a tank of a car, four door, power everything, all steel body. No matter what, it go 30 miles to the gallon.
At 19, I bought my first new car. It is a 1999 Hyundai Accent GS, a tiny, bare-bones, plastic box on wheels. Thirteen years of automotive evolution and it still only gets 30 miles to the gallon, despite the fact that it probably only weighs half as much as the Olds did.
Henry Ford's 1908 Model T got 25 miles per gallon and was designed to run on ethanol so that farmers could brew their own fuel. By 1980 the average passenger car was running on leaded gasoline to the tune of 23.1 miles per gallon. In 2004, that average had risen to 24.7, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Some improvement!
You'd think in a hundred years, we would have been able to come up with something better. But wait! I think we did.
In 1996, General Motors began leasing a cute, little, two-seater called the EV-1. This electric car could travel 160 miles on a single charge. It was created in order to comply with California's Zero Emission Vehicle Mandate which specified that 2 percent of all new cars sold in the state meet zero emissions standards. GM leased over a thousand of the little cars, but declined to sell any outright.
Despite happy drivers, waiting lists, and an offer to purchase the remaining cars outright, GM discontinued the program in 2003 and ran all the cars through the crusher. Two years before they had managed to overturn California's ZEV mandate because it violated a federal law which barred states from making fuel economy regulations.
So what?
I would love to see someone win this prize (especially if it's myself), but I'm not going to do cartwheels over something so long overdue. It's like buying your kid a pony for graduating from kindergarten.
I bought my first car when I turned sixteen. It was a 1986 Oldsmobile Cutlass Calais. That was a tank of a car, four door, power everything, all steel body. No matter what, it go 30 miles to the gallon.
At 19, I bought my first new car. It is a 1999 Hyundai Accent GS, a tiny, bare-bones, plastic box on wheels. Thirteen years of automotive evolution and it still only gets 30 miles to the gallon, despite the fact that it probably only weighs half as much as the Olds did.
Henry Ford's 1908 Model T got 25 miles per gallon and was designed to run on ethanol so that farmers could brew their own fuel. By 1980 the average passenger car was running on leaded gasoline to the tune of 23.1 miles per gallon. In 2004, that average had risen to 24.7, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Some improvement!
You'd think in a hundred years, we would have been able to come up with something better. But wait! I think we did.
In 1996, General Motors began leasing a cute, little, two-seater called the EV-1. This electric car could travel 160 miles on a single charge. It was created in order to comply with California's Zero Emission Vehicle Mandate which specified that 2 percent of all new cars sold in the state meet zero emissions standards. GM leased over a thousand of the little cars, but declined to sell any outright.
Despite happy drivers, waiting lists, and an offer to purchase the remaining cars outright, GM discontinued the program in 2003 and ran all the cars through the crusher. Two years before they had managed to overturn California's ZEV mandate because it violated a federal law which barred states from making fuel economy regulations.
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Be careful what you wish for, you just may get it
posted 9/09/08 @ 4:06 PM CST
"On Monday, the chief executive of the Ford Motor Company, Alan R. Mulally, said he expected broad support in Congress for a loan program to help automakers accelerate their development of more fuel-efficient vehicles. (Continued…)
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