Bailouts, Gasoline and CAFE Standards

It won't work

The bailout debate is intense, far-reaching, and complex. It can't be boiled down to a single blog. Books will be written in the future about this historic economic collapse. So multi-faceted is this issue, it has to be broken into bite-sized pieces suitable for digestion by lay people, scientists, economists and Harvard MBA's. (Laughter in the background? I hope so.)

This particular blog deals with gasoline and the maximum performance one can expect from a single gallon of gas. This is a fact and you can check it elsewhere: The amount of BTU's (British Thermal Units, a measure of energy) available in a gallon of gas is FINITE. That means a certain amount of energy is available and it cannot be changed through alchemy or other forms of magic. How we convert that energy to rolling stock can be summarized by boring equations which in the bitter end comes down to how much horsepower it takes to move a certain amount of weight a certain distance. Are you falling asleep yet?

There is a maximum amount of performance that can be attained by a vehicle moving down the highway. When the weight of the vehicle, passengers and desired speed are accounted for, X equals Y meaning that, after you have lightened the materials, reduced the rolling and wind resistance you can expect Z. That means that is the top performance available from the BTU's available from said gallon of gas. Once you've extracted every ounce of power from that gallon, you're DONE. We may be near that finite top performance.

Now reduce the passenger and cargo potential by making the car smaller and also reduce the size and weight of the engine. Guess what? There is a technological problem because the smaller engine, although moving a smaller load, still uses a similar amount of fuel. For example, if a car moves four people and a cargo load 30 miles down the road on a single gallon of gas, what is the benefit of having a little, UNSAFE smart car moving two people with a substantially smaller cargo load down the road 60 miles? It doesn't make sense. If this were economically smart, we'd ALL be driving tiny little scooters suitable for one person. Except that a scooter getting 120 miles to a gallon is fine until you want to move four people 120 miles. You'd need four scooters, which is 30 miles to a gallon.

It appears to me that we are nearing or maybe have even reached the ultimate power- to-weight-to-performance and safety potential in automobiles powered by gasoline. Now couple that with the unfair and impossible CAFE (Coporate Average Fuel Economy) standards set for auto manufacturers and you can see the folly of dictating mileage standards based on FANTASY and good intentions. Maybe science should prevail over environmental whack-job stupidity. I've never met a so-called environmentalist I couldn't bitch-slap into submission with facts. They get mad and stalk off in anger.

Without beating this to death, I'll point out that the Chinese used to ride bicycles and scooters. They've since opted for cars because they're not stupid. They have freeways and expressways now. They're burning the fuel just as we are and happily polluting the environment. That's all bad but it's to be expected. Give them a few more years and they'll be driving high-lift pick-up trucks while we are all reduced to driving roller skates with engines.

The auto manufacturers have deigned to bury themselves with labor contracts that have bankrupted them, but they've had plenty of help from the Federal Government with the CAFE standards and legislators beholding to both the unions and the environmental lobby. The poisonous bailout plan is apt punishment for our collective misbehavior and we're going to pay for it or rather, our children and grandchildren will pay for it. In the end, the death of the auto industry will be the result of our failure to recognize that you can't legislate or fantasize 100 miles per gallon into a viable conveyance.

Captain Push has a couple of final notes. Some of the "hybrid" vehicles for sale only get a SINGLE mile per gallon more than their conventional counterparts. These hybrids sell for several thousand dollars MORE than the conventional models. But hey! You look good driving a "green car." For the electric crowd, when you plug that hippy in, the coal-fired electric plants go into "high burn" to get that battery-burning baby fired up for its 40 mile drive. I'll explain hybrid and electric in a future post. It isn't pretty.

Colonel John Paul Stapp and Murphy's Law

"Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong."

As a youngster growing up near Lockheed, I became interested in aviation. I sold newspapers at the entrance to some of the giant plants where state of the art aircraft were being developed and built. I saw U-2's and F-104's flying overhead and eventually was lucky enough to have a grand tour of the complex including the ejection-seat shop and huge CAD room where computers were drawing wing designs on plotters larger than a pool table.

An obsessive bookworm, I read everything I could put my grimy hands on regarding aviation. One of my favorite subjects was G-forces and the man who rode the rocket sleds, Colonel John Paul Stapp. The vivid pictures of the torture he endured during these tests were etched into my mind and never forgotten. He was a true hero of mine.

Flash forward many years to 1998 when I first met Fanny. She mentioned that she was the niece of Paul Stapp. My fascination was recalled and renewed and I began to research him again. I found more and more interesting facts about his remarkable life. His research led to seat belts in automobiles and the safe ejection systems used in military aircraft. Reknowned for those achievements something amusing is often lost. That is, he made "Murphy's Law" a well-known phrase.

Quoting Wikipedia: Witty and charismatic and thus popular with the press and his staff, Stapp's team in particular, and its workplace subculture is also the clear originating source for the ubiquitous principle known as Murphy's law. There is no question, setting aside the specific murkiness of its attribution, that Stapp was its actual popularizer and probably framed its final form, first using the soon to be widespread term in his first press conference about Project MX981 in the phrase, "We do all of our work in consideration of Murphy's Law" in a nonchalant answer to a reporter. It was his team that, within an adaged-filled subculture, and while using a new device developed by reliability engineering expert Major Edward Murphy[2], coined the euphemistic phrase and began to use it in the months prior to that press conference. When the unfamiliar "Law" was clarified by a subsequent follow-up question, it soon burst into the press in various diverse publications, and got picked up by commentators and talk programs.

Regrettably, I never got to meet Uncle Paul. Fanny and I maintain a collection of Colonel Paul memorabilia including a poster-sized reproduction of the Time magazine cover shown above. He was a true American hero and every year, I write to the President and our legislators requesting that he be posthumously promoted to General.