The 100 Mpg Car That Isnt - Road to the Middle Class

OUR LIBERAL media friends are getting all excited about the birth of the 100 miles per gallon car. There are even people driving around with stickers advertising their triple digit gas sippers. Here’s a characteristic gushy article on the topic from MSNBC.

But wait a minute. These gas sipping miracles aren’t really getting 100 mpg. If their owners were corporate advertisers they would be getting sued for false advertising.

This phoney-baloney way to get to 100 mpg relies on buying an expensive conversion kit, including more of those expensive metal-hydride batteries, and plugging your car into the electric outlet. You don’t really get 100 mpg from the total energy input into the car. You get 100 mpg on the gasoline you buy, augmented by “free” power from your home electric outlet. Only you get to see the cost of the free power on your electric bill.

You could say that you are saving because you are charging the car using off-peak power during the night. But if you are a liberal environmentalist you do not believe in market prices, you just look at the difference in overall energy use.

Let us look at that. The key is to think about losses.

If you are charging your hybrid at home then you start with coal. There are losses at the generating plant, say 30 percent. Then there are losses in electrical transmission, say 15 percent. Then there are losses in charging your battery, say 20 percent. Of course, you are saving because you are not paying road fuel taxes.

If you are running a hybrid then you are saving from the smaller gasoline engine (if you have a Prius; Camry and Highlander hybrid owners forget it) and from the energy saved by recapturing energy in regenerative braking, about 50 percent. But you have the energy losses in charging the battery, which are substantial.

And of course if you have converted your hybrid into a plug-in hybrid it has cost you something north of $10,000. Try amortizing that over the life of the car.

OK. Now let us do the math, with our handy-dandy energy price calculator.

If you put “3.00” into the gasoline price field you will see that it is equivalent in energy to 8 cents per kilowatt hour. How many of you folks out there are paying more than 8 cents per kilowatt hour to your electric utility?

Just checking. Because you see, if the price of gasoline goes back down to, oh, $2.00 per gallon, then the 100 mpg car isn’t going to look too good, is it?

Sphere: Related Content | | print

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

TAGS

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

mysql close 0

Energy Price Conversion Calculator (thanks to Robert Collette)
Crude Oil	Gasoline	Natural Gas	Electricity	Coal
$	$	$	$	$
$/bbl	$/gal (w/o tax)	$/mmbtu	$/Kwh	$/short ton