Zowie: 35mpg by 2020. Pitiful to say the least. And yet , the auto lobbyists were apparently caught by surprise when the Senate passed the Energy bill by a large enough margin to defeat a veto. Of course the bill was gutted of practically everything that would make any difference in order to get those votes.
This is another example of the American car companies being so far out of touch that even this wishy=washy bill scares them. By 2020, 100mpg cars will be normal because the market will demand them. The technology is already available.
What’s going on is that Detroit has been making the same inefficient engines for so long that they are now really cheap to build- they amortized the costs of the design and plants years ago and now they cost little more than the materials. To develop new designs and build plants to manufacture them would raise the price and lower the profitability far beyond what they can handle in their present precarious financial state. Meanwhile the Japanese, Koreans and Europeans moved to constant innovation years ago and no longer depend on economies of scale that take years to pay off. Detroit is dead, killed by lack of strategic vision, unions who would cut off their own noses to spite their faces and terrible design.

Well, not exactly, unless you have the hundred grand to plunk down for a Tesla Roadster. However, as this Wired round-up article shows, there is a lot of incredible technology being developed in the automotive world. Ironically, very little of it is coming from American auto companies who seem to spend their collective energy lobbying to keep the status quo. While these innovators are building cars that are extremely efficient without sacrificing performance, Detroit is killing an energy bill that mandates a feeble standard of 35 MPG, ten years from now.
Is it any wonder that these dinosaurs are bleeding cash? They don’t appear to have any collective understanding of business strategy. While Toyota and Honda innovate almost constantly and own a market Detroit once dominated, all the US makers and their political puppets can do is argue for help from the government in the form of inaction.
Wake up guys- your world is finished.
For example (from the Wired article):

“U.K.-based PML Flightlink put four of its 160-horsepower electric motors in the wheels of a BMW Mini to produce a concept car that shoots from zero to 60 in about four seconds and hits a top speed of 150 miles an hour. The engines also act as brakes, recovering energy that charges a battery and giving the car a range of more than 200 miles. A tiny gasoline motor can be used to recharge the battery for longer trips, on which the car gets 80 miles per gallon.”

“Burning Miscanthus produces only as much carbon dioxide as it removes from the air as it grows, said Heaton, who is
seeking her doctorate in crop sciences. That balance means there is no net effect on atmospheric carbon dioxide levels,
which is not the case with fossil fuels, she said.”

Gigantic grasses (13′ tall at maturity) are showing great promise as a renewable fuel for generating electricity that is carbon neutral. They grow with little care and are much more efficient burners than other proposed biomass fuels like ethanol and biodeisel from canola oil. A recent presentation from two Illinois researchers is covered in this PDF, Giant Plans for Giant Miscanthus.

We have a giant grass in our front yard that we cut down to the ground at the end of each winter and it will be ten feet tall by the fall. It has spread into a diameter of over three feet and requires zero care from us. I can imagine farmers would jump on this if there was a ready market in the form of grass burning electricity plants available. Farming the grasses requires no specialized equipment- the same harvesters used for sugarcane are used.

I have been working on a post about how communities like Rochester need to be aggressively reassessing our mass transit systems from a strategic POV. With gas almost inevitably rising in cost as China’s oil demands increase and supplies and refinery capacities wane, we will be facing a transportation crisis in the next ten years. Our communities have been built based on the ready availability of inexpensive personal transportation. Were I to be forced to take mass transit to buy groceries, for example, I would have to set aside 2-3 hours to complete the task. Many less fortunate in our community already have to do so. Everything is car-distances apart. In many cases we don’t even have sidewalks on main arteries.
While I will still do the strategic mass transit piece (which I hope to publish as an Op-ed in our local paper), today I came across this BusinessWeek slideshow about an urban transit schema that fuses mass and personal transit systems in an innovative and very possible manner. Designed by an MIT team that included noted architect and visionary Frank Gehry, the solution is both elegant and practical. Will it ever happen? I don’t know but it may very well be that market forces will make it so.