Letters to the Editor
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Just a thought...
I'm going to show my ignorance here, but here goes:
Since the 70's, there have been rumors about ways to get more energy efficiency out of internal combustion engines. You'd hear about a guy that drove his Lincoln (or some other gas guzzler) from Florida to California, averaging 50 miles per gallon, or some such number. Then, the story would vaporize. My question is this: Is there the possibility that someone, somewhere in this country, devised something that would actually work, only to have been bought out by the Big Oil companies? Is there a way we can scour the patent records and find out what is really buried in those archives? I understand that patents are bought and then they are off limits, but this is quickly becoming a national emergency, so perhaps we could override the protective rules and expose some inventions that would help us get out of this mess. Until we come up with alternative fuels on a large scale, we'll have to get by with the cars we have. If my car could get even 10 miles per gallon more, that would make a difference in my life.
Uncover the buried patents, and lets take a look. It couldn't hurt--
Or, maybe it's just another urban myth. Still, there's always the possibility...
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@Sajwan
This proposal by Clinton/McCain is nothing more, nothing less than a scam. Scams do work though, they take people in and fleece them. That's what will happen in this case too.
Both McCain and Clinton would have you believe that gas prices at the pump fall out of the sky. In that upside down world, one might experience a small benefit at the pump with a tax holiday. But we live in reality, right?
In the world known as reality, a relatively stable supply (oil production) met with increasing demand (summer is 5% higher usage) means higher prices at the pump. Now Clinton and McCain want to lower prices aritificially by eliminating a small fixed tax on the product.
Guess what the result is? Anyone with one basic course in econ knows that prices will rise. This tax holiday also takes place at the very height of American usage, encouraging MORE consumption. Why would you encourage demand of a product already in high demand when you want to LOWER PRICES?
This is what is meant by "stupid." Not only does this tax holiday not save anyone any kind of real money, it will do the exact opposite of what we want it to do, which is keep prices down. I would bet anything that within a few weeks, prices will be back up to the previous levels. So the consumer saves....nothing.
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@sajwan -- you are missing the point -- cutting the gas tax will not cut the price of gas
US consumers are not all going to replace their cars by summer. The price of gas is set by what consumers will pay for it -- tax included -- that is supply and demand. So if consumers will pay say $4.05 a gallon, they will pay $4.05 a gallon, and they don't really care what the constituents of that $4.05 is -- i.e., gas production cost, gas company profit, gas station costs, gas station margin, state gas tax, federal gas tax. So if you eliminate the Federal gas tax all that will happen is that consumer demand will force the price of gas back to $4.05 a gallon -- the difference will be that now the money that would have gone to the Federal government will go to someone else in the supply chain, and the most likely person to get that money is the oil company as an extra 18ยข profit.
That is why the idea is economically illiterate, it will not lower the price of gas because it will not lower US consumer demand -- it will just raise the already high Oil company profits by handing the the Federal governments share of the $4.05 a gallon -- them and the Saudis etc who will be able to charge yet more for oil.
Indeed, Osama bin Laden is on the record complaining about high European gas taxes because of this very issue -- because he sees them as taking money that otherwise would flow to the Arab oil producers.
Cutting the Federal gas tax will not save the US consumer any money, it will just mean that they will have to pay another way for the highway maintenance that the Federal gas tax now funds. the very idea is economically stupid, it is the worst type of pandering. If you want to cut oil company profits and for that matter what OPEC gets, raise the gas tax -- and watch, gas prices will not go up as much as the rise in the gas tax.
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Ann1960 -- the only way to cut the fuel consumption of a Lincoln Continental
Is to put it in a car crusher.
Internal combustion engines are about 25-30% efficient -- that is to say that only about 1/4 of the energy extracted from a gallon of gas is turned into propulsive energy, the rest is lost as heat, inertia (changing the direction of the pistons at every stroke), noise, etc. You really cannot change the efficiency of an engine that already exists, its a function of its basic physics. Nor can you make a huge engine more efficient -- in fact it is less so since it uses energy just to turnover.
At the end of the day Americans could use more European style engines which has about twice the power to weight ratios and also give up on fantastically over powered cars (with a 55 mph speed limit, ok 75-80 enforced, you really do not need v6 and v8 cars and 3 liter engines, hell French 1.1-1.4 liters work fine on roads where everyone drives much faster) using engine designs that in some cases are 30 years old. The average European car is twice as fuel efficient as the average US car, and most people regard them as better built, better handling and more "sporty."
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@MacK
"At the end of the day Americans could use more European style engines ..."
Anecdotally, I can vouch for that. Whenever I rent a car and am stuck with some American model, no matter how "compact" or even "subcompact" it is, the highway mileage is much less than that of my big ol' Passat. In fact, the Passat gets significantly better mileage in town than the American rentals do on the highway.
The Passat gets mid-thirties and up on the highway, depending on how fast I need to drive (the speed limit vs. my preferred 65) and the terrain. High thirties is fairly pathetic, I know, but from a comparative point of view, it's pretty adequate, and I can avoid replacing the vehicle for awhile, until something MUCH better comes along.
Detroit simply chooses not to build fuel efficient cars.