Share this
Twitter
Myspace
Digg
Del.icio.us
Reddit
Slashdot
Furl
Yahoo
Technorati
Newsvine
Facebook
Export PDF
Print
E-mail
TagsDespite hybrids and electric cars and carmakers’ pledges to increase their automobile miles per gallon, a new study indicates we really have not come that far in improving fuel efficiency over the last 90 years.
A report by the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute shows that overall motor vehicle fuel efficiency in the United States reached 17.2 mpg in 2006 — up barely more than three mpg since 1923, when cars traveled 14 miles per gallon.
Physorg.com reports that researchers Michael Sivak and Omer Tsimhoni, whose study was published in the journal Energy Policy, found that automobile fuel efficiency zoomed from 13.4 mpg to 21.2 mpg by 1991. However, that number had improved to just 22.4 mpg 15 years later.
Medium and heavy trucks, meanwhile, averaged only 5.9 mpg by 2006, up from a mere 0.3 mpg over a 40-year span.
“Future improvements in fuel economy of vehicles are needed across the board, for both passenger and commercial vehicles," said Sivak, the research professor and head of the institute’s Human Factors Division. "Some of the improvements in effective fuel efficiency will come from the ongoing partial shift from using light trucks to cars for personal transportation.”
Sivak and his partner said that car and truck makers should put their efforts into improving the efficiency of the least-efficient vehicles within each class.
For instance, improvement from 15 mpg to 16 mpg for a vehicle driven 12,000 per year would save 50 gallons of fuel, while boosting efficiency from 40 to 41 mpg over the same span would save only seven gallons of fuel.
“In other words, society has much more to gain from improving vehicles that get lower gas mileage," Sivak said in a psych.org article. "Such improvements could be fostered by tax policies that assist the development and introduction of new relevant technologies and encourage scrapping older vehicles."
Meanwhile, the reason gas mileage improvements in automobiles have been so minimal since 1980 is because cars are bigger and more powerful, according to MIT economist Christopher Knittel.
In his study “Automobiles on Steroids,” published in the American Economic Review this past December, mileage of vehicles sold in the United States improved by barely more than 15 percent, mainly because curb weight of those vehicles was up 26 percent and horsepower leaped a whopping 107 percent.
Knittel said in the article that if cars were still the same weight and horsepower as they were in 1980, they would be getting roughly 37 mpg instead of the current 27 mpg.
—JOE GREENE, NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
