More Automotive Future: Clean Diesel
Saturday, September 29th, 2007My essay a few weeks back called A View of Our Automotive Future stirred up a lot of controversy and generated a lot of reader email. It’s easy to forget that as wound up as people get about Microsoft, Apple, and Linux, nothing compares to what happens when you poke people where they really live: their automobiles.
I also managed to anger a whole ton of people with my comments about climate change being — to my mind — man-made. Almost no one wrote me to disagree that we’re experiencing climate change; but many SFNL readers wrote to tell me that global warming is not caused by the significantly increased CO2 levels generated in part by humanity. OK, well, everyone is entitled to their opinion. My concern is that the polar ice cap is melting, and we’re standing around debating whose fault it is. My tendency is to focus on solving the problem.
I’m happy to report that another huge batch of readers wrote to tell me that they, too, have purchased a hybrid gas/electric vehicle of some sort. Interestingly, though, a lot of people also wrote to tell me hybrids aren’t really the answer. Of course they’re not the last word. They still burn nonrenewable resources, don’t they? The point many were trying to make is that the complexity and weight involved with internal combustion/electric hybrid vehicles makes them imperfect — especially as replacements for larger vehicles. They also make small vehicles heavier with their battery packs. This is all true. It’s the engineering trade-off for a vehicle that has two means of propelling itself. But that doesn’t change the fact that even my wife’s relatively heavy Toyota Highlander Hybrid gets better gas mileage than its lighter nonhybrid Highlander brandmates. It also gets nearly two times the miles per gallon delivered by the SUV it replaces in the Finnie household. And it generates fewer harmful emissions.