JackFlorey said:
AND as we've seen they won't buy it.
You say that, neglecting the fact that such a car has never been built and sold to the public for the niche that a car of its layout is traditionally designed to fill.
The 1st gen Honda Insight had a layout that was traditionally the domain of performance cars. That is, two-seaters. It could have easily been designed as a performance car, while still getting the best mpg rating of anything on the market at the time. On ecomodder, there is a K-swapped Insight that gets close to 50 mpg and does 0-60 mph in about 5 seconds, with the hybrid drive removed. John Wayland, designer of the "White Zombie" street legal EV drag car(once the fastest street legal EV in the world for years), wrote an article chronicling how he drove a 1st gen Insight with the hybrid drive intact and a turbocharger added, and it had Porsche Boxter performance without any hit on the fuel economy.
Had the Insight been designed for the performance car market, it might have sold significantly more copies, without a major hit to fuel economy, if any at all. Its drag reduction and reduced weight compared the performance cars on the market at the time in fact was a major advantage. All it needed was more power, and perhaps a RWD layout. Doable for < $2,XXX of added production cost.
You can build the car that ticks all your boxes for "best car in the world." If no one buys it, it won't make a difference. That's the problem. People want cars they like, not cars that are efficient. In that way high gas prices help immensely, because they start caring about how far it can go on a gallon of gas. Because while they don't care about efficiency, they care very much about how much it costs to operate.
But people can have BOTH. Load reduction is again, not rocket science. You can take an oversized late 1970s era V8 land yacht with a low-compression emissions-compliance-choked engine, and through streamlining it and giving it long-legged gearing, more than double its highway fuel economy to something akin to what modern cars with more advanced engine technology get. There was one on Ecomodder that approached 40 mpg highway, using its craptastic, horribly underpowered and inefficient V8, when it got something like 15 mpg stock on a good day. The consumer gives up nothing, and even benefits from increased performance and reduced operating costs. The auto industry gives up planned obsolescence and now they have to deal with consumer tastes shifting towards a form of vehicle that cannibalizes high margin competition and forces them to use their newest technology without milking the old tech for more profit.
JackFlorey said:
The high price of gas will help ensure that it's availabe for a long time, because 1) there is now tons of money to finance new drilling/fracking/better crackers and 2) the cost will drive people to more efficient vehicles and EV's, and demand will eventually go down. I am glad this is happening now and not when we are close to the end of oil - it will drive people to efficiency and alternatives sooner rather than later.
And if we do hit the end of oil in 40 years when 80% of the world uses EV's for shipping, farming, mining and personal transportation - that's a much better place to be in.
You're assuming that fracking will remain economically viable. It was already barely on the edge of viability when it was new, required a constant influx of loans and government subsidies, and most of the existing fields today have run dry. Unlike conventional oil fields that follow a Gaussian distribution regarding extraction vs. time, fracking fields are generally a reversed L-curve, starting flat, then falling off a cliff without warning. Conventional light-sweet crude oil peaked in production nearly 20 years ago, and our civilization is extracting the last remnants as fast as technology will allow, and sacrificing its ground water supplies and unpolluted farmland to do so. EROEI of current oil production is about 2-3, which makes renewables already extremely favorable, except they are not being deployed fast enough. Oil production is very likely to drop off a cliff in the near to medium-term future, and no amount of technology will fix that. Had the fracking fields been extracted from more slowly, we could have had room for a soft landing, but it's not looking likely.
It takes about 15 years for the U.S. auto fleet to turn over. Many people living paycheck to paycheck need a solution within this month, and that won't be happening.
It doesn't matter how much oil costs. People need to get to work, and in the U.S., automobile ownership is all but mandatory. People like us on this site are rare exceptions, and not everyone is in a position to orient their lives as we have, let alone being intelligent enough to do so. There are practical limitations. By the time people decide to stop driving because oil costs too much, that means they won't be going to work or buying much of ANYTHING. If that happens before alternatives are in place, that will mean collapse of society itself, because people will do anything they need to in order to survive and the current paradigm will no longer be at all viable while there will be nothing to take its place. Mass poverty and civil strife will be the inevitable result.
I'm doubtful we have 40 years to transition. We're lucky we made it this far. The time to start transitioning was really 40+ years ago. But back then, it was "morning in America" after another rigged election(just asked the hostages held in Iran thanks to a deal made by some politicians) and the solar panels came off the White House roof, and the rest has been history...
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