Gas-guzzling days may be numbered
“I’m not expecting my children and grandchildren to have the same mobility I have,” says Margo Oge.
Oge, as described last time, led the way at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency when the Obama administration decided to impose new limits on fuel consumption for cars and light trucks.
Those standards require that by 2025, the average fuel economy of U.S. vehicles must improve to 54.5 miles per gallon, or 4.3 litres per 100 kilometres under Canada’s copycat rules.
Meeting that limit requires an annual fuel-economy gain of 5 per cent for cars and 3.5 per cent for light trucks. That can be achieved, says the now-retired Oge, mainly by further development of internalcombustion vehicles.
But the effort must continue beyond 2025 to keep climate change and air pollution in check, she says in her new book, Driving the Future. To prevent the average global temperature from increasing by more than 2 degrees Celsius — the limit to avoid disastrous change — entails an 80-per-cent cut in worldwide greenhouse-gas emissions from 2005 levels by 2050.
The U.S. share of that effort demands emissions from transportation drop from the 1,600 million tonnes of a decade ago to just 320 million in 2050. Achieving the 2025 standard for cars and light trucks would get the American number down to 800 million tonnes. That would leave another 480 million tonnes to be cut over 25 years.
Oge calls that task a “formidable” challenge. When cars have been as sloppy and inefficient as ours, getting the first big fuel-consumption reductions is relatively easy. But the better vehicles get, the harder it is to make them even better.
She argues it’s essential to maintain the annual 5-per-cent improvement beyond 2025, through further development of internal-combustion engines, weight reduction, downsizing, better aerodynamics and renewable fuels. Battery power and fuel cells should also play a major role.
But even 5-per-cent cuts for 25 years would still leave U.S. transportation emissions 220 million above the 2050 target.
The key point: These calculations assume we’ll keep using vehicles as now; something that, Oge says, can’t happen.
“If you’re going to have the same vehicle fleet as now, every car would need to be at zero emissions,” she says. That, of course, is impossible, because not every new car could be free of greenhouse-gas emissions and many older vehicles would still be in use.
Which is why her children and grandchildren won’t drive as she does.
“We can’t afford the type of mobility we’ve had,” Oge says. “To add two billion people to the planet . . . it has to be different.” The change will require “all sorts of expertise, dedication and, most important, radical innovation in technology and how we live and work.”
That means fewer cars on the road, and much less private ownership. People will usually take public transit and employ on-demand services when personal transportation is the only option.
Cars will become a tool, available when needed, fully linked with the outside world.
“Drivers will expect their vehicles to ‘connect’ with the rest of their daily lives,” Oge says. “Instead of oversized, luxurious go-carts, cars and trucks will be ‘personal operating systems,’ enabling drivers to experience transportation in much the same way they relate to smartphones, computers and other networks on a daily basis.”
Most important, Oge says, cars will be autonomous, eliminating aggressive, fuel-guzzling driving and circling for parking spots, making on-demand services far more efficient and freeing drivers to take advantage of the new connectivity features.
Amidst these changes, car companies should be fine, Oge concludes. Population growth will compensate for lower ownership, and the manufacturers, forced to “change the way they think about ownership,” could, for example, create their own ondemand services.
All of this is possible, not guaranteed. But it appears, at least, that the days of the Sunday drive and lone drivers commuting in their own vehicles are numbered. Peter Gorrie is a regular columnist for Toronto Star Wheels. For more Toronto Star Wheels auto news, go to thestar.com/autos. To reach Wheels Editor Norris McDonald: nmcdonald@thestar.ca.
When cars have been as inefficient as ours, getting fuel-consumption cuts early on is relatively easy