Past as Prologue: The Detroit Edition
Fuel efficiency standards, government bailouts, intransigent corporate cultures, Americans’ undying thirst for large cars… it’s beginning to sound like 1980 again. Where’s my K car?
From the archives of the New Yorker, this Detroit dispatch, by Joseph Kraft and titled “The Downsizing Decision,” (interestingly, the word only seems to refer to making cars smaller, and not laying off workers) is worth a look.
Sample paragraph:
Then, in April, 1979, G.M. introduced a compact four-cylinder, front-wheel-drive vehicle, produced as the X-Car and marketed as the Chevrolet Citation, the Pontiac Phoenix, the Oldsmobile Omega, and the Buick Skylark. Thanks to the comprehensive reduction in size, G.M. more than held its own at the time of the second round of gas lines. Its share of the market for American-built cars soared to over sixty per cent—and set new monthly records, which, among other factors, put Ford in trouble and sent Chrysler running to the government for help. Even though hard hit by the recent slump, with first-quarter profits down eighty-eight per cent from a year ago, G.M. is the only major American car manufacturer in the black. In April, it has accounted for sixty-five per cent of sales of American-built cars. Robert Stempel, the general manager at Pontiac, told me, “These days, it’s exciting to be at G.M.”
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This entry was posted on Monday, April 27th, 2009 at 3:34 pm and is filed under Cars, Etc.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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April 27th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
More fuel efficient cars don’t mean a damn if we continue to give people bad information on how to drive and mis-manage traffic.
Fast acceleration is better. Below 55mph, higher cruising speeds are more efficient (see graph, page 5).
And slow acceleration decreases throughput at lights.
April 27th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
“And now we have the killer. Here each dot shows the speed and load for a typical mid size car at 1 second intervals during the US fuel economy test. Of the time the car takes to do the test, just 5 seconds are in the island of best BSFC. Quite a few of the dots (the authors say that they overlay) are at worst BSFC – idling at zero load with the car stationary!”
April 27th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
(That’s not a criticism of the EPA testing, it’s a criticism of the way we drive.)
April 28th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
Oh-oh. Someone wants to make a point.
Interestingly, the first paragraph of the very “page 5″ reads as follow: “Aggressive driving (speeding and rapid acceleration and braking) can lower your gas mileage by as much as 33% at highway speeds and 5% around town.” So much for “Fast acceleration is better”.
April 28th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
Key there is braking and also highways speeds.