Written by Jeremy Cook on Thursday, 10 January 2008 Category:Random Hits:2138

So I'm sitting here on a plane, flying to St. Louis for work. I'm expecting about an inch of ice on the ground when I get there, I'm missing Christmas parties, Volleyball games, football games, and basketball games to come out here for the next 8 days, and none of this is really bothering me because something else is.

Ironically enough, this isn't about the airport. It's not about work. It's not about sports.

On this 2 hour 22 minute flight today, we're talking cars.

But I pick up a popular choice of mine, Motor Trend Magazine, their 2008 Car of the Year edition. I always liked Motor Trend, there are shockingly enough people out there that care enough to push favorites and hate on car magazines, good for you, I needed something to read on the airplane, and Motor Trend fit the bill.

But I get to reading about the car of the year, and I begin to form an opnion on new cars today, and I start to ask questions.

Why are they all so damn ugly?

Why are they all so damn big?

Why are they all so damn heavy?

Who honestly needs a Toyota Camry to do 0-60 in 6.2 seconds?

Is that a Toyota Camry or Robert Kubica's F1?

 

But at that point, it raises the question, why are we, in a world with limited resources, with the government recently raising CAFE standards for the year 2020 (that's a whole other rant on the worthlessness of saving face by passing that bill) only using technology to make cars bigger and faster? Performance is not JUST 0-60 mph times. Aluminum being lighter then steel shouldn't just mean you go out of your way to throw twice as much of it in the car. Performance is cornering, performance is manuverability, performance is stopping power, and MOST of all, in todays eco-friendly world my vegans, performance is ECONOMY.

The 2008 Ford Taurus, 2 Tons of American Genericness

You have a 4025 lb Ford Taurus with 263 horsepower running to 60 mph in 7.2 seconds. You have the aforementioned Camry's running 0-60 times 6 seconds, SIX SECONDS. Come here, come here, listen to me, I wanna ask you, what's your 0-60 mph time? What is it son? IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT IT IS. You don't know how fast your car goes to sixty unless you're a GIGANTIC dork such as myslef. To you, it either feels like it goes, or feels like it doesn't. While this car is going to GO good luck seeing more then 18 mpg out of that puppy, and I am being GENEROUS by giving you 18, you'll probably see 16, if you drive like 98% of New Jersey, you'll see 14.5. It's true, it's damn true, it's rated 17 city/24 highway, and even though the EPA has gotten better with their ratings, they're still rarely right. You want a car's body to be strong, you want a car to be safe, and you want it to perform well, and one easy way to do this is by cutting the fat off the waist. Trim it a lil bit around the edges before you throw it on the Hibachi and add the ONIONS.

If we compare cars of 10 years ago to cars today, we have cars that weigh 1,000 lbs more, cars that are SIGNIFICANTLY safer, and cars that go SIGNIFICANTLY faster. So now, at this point, you're sitting there going, DUDE, how can you just rant about this, what have you got to offer on this topic? I ENJOY my SUV that gets 12 miles per gallon and makes me the baddest popped collar pink shirt wearing punk on the planet. What does your honda accord ass have to say about this?

Well, then I'll tell you. What I have to offer is this, a few ideas on some improvements that could be made and my thinking on how they work out in the favor of everyone. I'm sure other people have said them before, and others will say them again. But I'm saying them now, and YOU are going to read them. These things won't take away your SUV. They won't take away your popped collar or your fluffy booties. They'll just make your car better, and you happier, and EVERYONE, I mean EVERYONE, happier. And isn't that what we all want? To be happy?

First of all, we're going to begin with the styling. Cars today are ugly in a lot of ways. Boxy looking with weird undulations all sitting high off the ground. I call this FUSUV syndrome. You can figure out the acronym yourself, it's not too hard. It's like they took the boxyness of the 80's, and the SUV's of the 90's, and somehow thought that the result would be a good thing. Well it's not, many cars have nice touches here and there, and there CERTAINLY are cars out there that are just gorgeous, but by and far, things just need to change.

This is a fine piece of automotive beauty

This is not

If all of our cars are going to be ugly, why can't we at least make them technically beautiful? The thing you don't realize about the boxyness that's going around, is that it helps hurt your acceleration and it helps hurt your gas mileage. We start by throwing in some smoother shapes that allow for reduced drag in the front and smoother airflow around ALL parts of the car. This allows for reduced drag up front, the engine work less to get you to higher speeds, allowing for higher performance from lesser engines. How do you think the cars in the solar competition down under go so far every year? I'm not saying we need to go to THAT extreme of the ugly spectrum, but there is a compromise in there somewhere in the middle grounds that will make everyone happy.

Up next, we take a look at the engines of these vehicles. If you can get 270 horsepower out of a 3.5 liter V6 and get almost the same gas mileage driving a 300 lb heavier car as my 2.7 liter six at 180 horsepower from 1995, then you can make a 210 pony 6 that can get BETTER mileage then my old car, while finding a nice happy medium in performance. Give it a lil less gas, lower the redline, lower the shiftpoints, hit your 90% power at lower revs. This is all stuff that's been done in cars before, but never for this common goal.

Next you start to throw in technologies like Cylinder de-activation (shutting off 1 or 2 banks of cylinders in the engine at cruising speeds), CVT's (or start teaching people to drive Standard/Stick/Manuals again, easy way to improve mileage) and I see no reason why it cannot be done. An added advantage of doing this, smaller V6, helps cut a bit of the bulk off the car. So you have a less powerful car, that STILL hustles you onto the freeway, passing the trucks and the sunday drivers. But it weighs a little less, gets better mileage, and still gets you where you need to go. What's wrong with this?

(ANOTHER Beverage service, we've been on the plane for 1 hour, that's THREE Beverage services, plus two sets of peanuts, tell me you get this on Delta or American, you're lying, don't even try, look at that, she even left the can)

Lastly, maybe semi-lastly, we come to the bulk. Just like our people, our cars are obese. Whether they're SUV's, crazzy crossovers and station wagons, even commuting sedans, a lot of cars these day are carrying around the spare tire, the pouch, the extra baggage, the newborn, the 3rd-5th chin.

Like most of America, yours truly included, there's no way this is neccessary. Lets put these boys on a treadmill. Lets throw in some carbon-fiber, some almunimum and magnesium, heck how about some plastic. Saturn's plastic doors might have been flimsy and cheap looking, but that doesn't mean that something couldn't be worked out does the job right. Make the doors/hoods/trunks out of hybrid setup of plastic/rubber/metal. We can make bulletproof vests that are light as mythril, rubbers that are soft and flexible and stiffen on impact enough to stop soccer and baseballs, folding step-ladders that my mom can carry around but will climb my fat ass to the roof. There is no excuse for cars to weigh as much as they do. Cutting cylinders out of the car will drop weight, lightweight transmissions, manual transmissions, carbon fiber and light-weight metals, all are at our fingertips, lets really use them in real cars. Cutting back on the weight of the vehicle makes it easer to move the car less work from the engine. This allows for better efficiency and more performance out of less power. This means your car still goes just as fast, with less power, but improved gas mileage, acceleration, handling, and stopping. These things are all HURT by heavyweight cars, and all improve significantly with cuts in weight (see Miata/Lotus type cars).

The last step in doing all of this is by far the hardest. Mechanical designs are easy to change, updated, and re-do, people are harder to change, that takes years and years of a new mindset or even evolution itself.

Now (channeling the Bernie Mac show) that last problem . . . . . IS YOU AMERICA. I tell you what America, this fetish for large cars makes no sense. Sedans are safe cars, in some ways inherently, sitting lower to the ground, it helps prevent rolling over, AND it generally allows for more precise handling dynamics. Smaller cars fit in smaller places, they are in fact both harder to hit and easier to maneuver out of a tight spot. Bigger can most certainly be better in many a case, but in the case of cars, this default love for all things big and large, is costing us money.

Putting more into a car can cost more to build it. Big cars can cost more to maintain, whether it be from more parts that can break or need replacing, bigger tires that cost more to replace, or larger amounts of fluid needed to maintain. Big cars use more gas, and I don't know if you noticed, but at $3 a gallon, we're still cheaper in than MUCH of the rest of the world, Iran's not trading with the US dollar attached anymore, and our supplies aren't opening up anytime short of a crisis, do you really think it's going to come falling back down anytime soon?

Add to that, the way people drive, hard gas, hard brake, hard gas, hard break, repeat ad nauseum. The two times your car is LEAST efficient, are:

1) when accelerating
2) when breaking

Not only is your engine running for no reason at all when you slam on the breaks to ride someone's ass at a merge or a stoplight, but you wasted all the energy you just put into it when you MASHED on the accelerator. I've gotten 27 miles a gallon on a 400 mile trip in my old, worn-in Accord. That was all highway, which is the ideal situation, but you know what, I took a break for a phillies game, I got on and off a few times, hit some traffic at different parts, and I got 27 miles per gallon on a car that's rated around 21/27 under the OLD (read completely inaccurate) EPA system. When was the last time you hit your high EPA number?

Did I drive 55 mph the whole time? Oh goodness no, I'm pleading the fifth here, my right to not self-incriminate. Did I run the accelerator like Grandma on a sunday afternoon wandering about town? No, I gave it the gas it needed to get me onto the road and to the speed I wanted to go. Every car is different, every car has different shift points, and every engine uses fuel and hits it's power at just slightly different points, it's part of the fun of different cars and each one has it's advantage.

But this will take effort. You've got to hit the gas easier, you've got to learn to cruise along from light to light. Smashing the gas until you get to a light that's been red the whole time just doesn't make sense, it don't make you get there any faster, you already know that things red. It's not going to say “oh ****, he's late to meet Wanda, better turn green.” If you're on a ramp, merging onto the highway, gradually accelerate, get yourself up to speed so that you can merge. This gets you up to speed more easily, prevents everyone on the highway from having to slam on the breaks because your slow self just stopped all of them. This saves other people gas, which is nice of you, and makes other people happy and nicer, which makes you happy and nicer, and the world is a happy place, which I 100% for (except when I'm a ranting lunatic)

So there you have it. A few simple steps towards a good cause.

1) Fix the styling. If it's going to be ugly, at least make it work well technically.

2) Cut back on the power, use fuel-saving technologies to actually save fuel, not just allow greater power at the same fuel levels.

3) Time to diet. We're not gonna be all driving around in 2100 lb cars that have 6 people in them that weigh nearly as much as the car itself, but if you cut 300 lbs off the weight of a car, combined with the other savings netted above and below, it's going to help.

4) learn to drive, I realize this is damned near impossible, I've seen all of you drive, you suck. But it's something to consider the next time you spend $60+ filling up your SUV at the pump.

Now the downside to all of this? You're going to tell me that prices are gonna go up. Well they're going up anyways. You used to be able to get a legit honda accord or Toyota Camry, with a 6 cylinder engine, for under $20k. If prices are going to go up, why not have them go up for something that is going to save you money, and the costs are short-term, these technologies will cost less and less to manufacture as more and more are purchased.

And this is the bottom line. If you drive 15,000 miles a year, and get 22 mpg in your car, you're spending $2045 a year on gas at $3 a gallon. If you're driving 15,000 miles a year, and getting 24 mpg in your car, you're spending $1875. That's almost $200 a year, for an easy, safe estimate. Over 10 years, that's almost $2k, and we're not talking about interest here either, and we're not talking about gas at $3.50 or $4 a gallon to boot. So lets go, automotive industry of America, we need to stack up and get it done. Get Big Oil out of your pocket, grow a sack, and do something for the greater good for once. For now, I think I'm gonna puke the next time I see a Dodge Magnum.

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