SANFORD: Too little, too late for electric cars

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.

GM said there was no demand for the two-seater EV-1 and that the car was not profitable.

Perhaps it wasn't as profitable as the giant, gas-sucking, SUVs. The little cars could be charged at home, had comparatively few moving parts and practically the only maintenance required was changing the brake pads and tires. But gas was cheap and big trucks were popular.

Now that gas prices are up again, there has been much noise about fuel economy. The Automotive X Prize falls into that category. But it's not enough!

Experience has shown that the only way to get to higher fuel economy standards is when economic incentive creates public pressure for tighter government regulation. This was demonstrated by the introduction of minimum fuel efficiency standards in the 1970s after the oil crisis.

Now the Department of Transportation (DOT) has proposed new fuel economy standards. They want to bring average fuel economy up to 31.6 miles per gallon by 2015. According to a Sep. 3 article on Grist.org, even the EPA (as dysfunctional as it has become under the Bush administration) criticized the DOT for using "unreasonable low figure[s] for future gasoline prices -- $2.42 a gallon in 2016" in their figures "which skewed the final cost-benefit figures in favor of lower fuel-economy standards."

No doubt the DOT fears that higher fuel efficiency standards will hurt the American auto makers. No doubt they are right. That was surely the case 30 years ago when imported auto manufacturers began making their ascendancy with smaller more efficient cars. And after all, overseas companies can't make campaign contributions.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Rising oil prices will only continue to make the cost of shipping things across the Pacific Ocean greater and greater. There is even one company in Europe that has begun using sailing ships to export French wine to Ireland, due to the high cost of fuel.

However, the Big Three (General Motors, Ford, and Chevrolet) need to get their collective heads out of the sand. And I fear the only way that is going to come about is through tighter government regulation.

This can only be done when the electorate convinces the government that the overall costs of climate change are doing to be far more damaging to this economy than the small financial burdens placed on auto manufacturers - burdens which would be shared by all manufacturers foreign and domestic.

We have the technology and the know-how. We have the workforce. And we now have the financial motivation.

Because $2.42 a gallon gasoline is nothing more than a pipe dream, and shame on the DOT for not sharing.

Monica Sanford is a 2nd year architecture and community planning major. Reach her at monicasanford@dailynebraskan.com