Fuel Economy is Mental

Our fuel efficiency problem is 90% mental. This weekend, the White house asked Rick Wagoner, the CEO of General Motors to step down. I don't know all the reasons why, but I am going to assume it has a lot to do with needing fresh thoughts in General Motors. And apparently Rick Wagoner does not symbolize fresh thinking. In fact the new GM muscle car, the Camaro is just now hitting the dealers lots. And Rick Wagoner was one of the CEOs flying their private jets to Washington to ask for taxpayer money, to build more muscle cars. But Rick Wagoner's worst moment had to be the killing of the electric car in 1999. Not just stopping production, but sending perfectly good cars off to be crushed, arresting the people who were trying to buy back their electric cars, and then turning GM's resources toward producing the Hummer. This was timed to coincide with the beginning of the George W. Bush years, with their pro-oil agenda. So far, there is no proof any of this history is connected to Rick stepping down. But apparently Rick is very popular with "car enthusiasts" i.e. not the environmentalists.

It's not just the mentality of one person that needs to be changed. The entire American car-consuming public is riddled through and through with a fuel wasting mindset.

Here are just a few of the many beliefs and attitudes that true or not, block the way to saving fuel. I think these ideas are mostly North American.

Some of the ideas are: To be safe on the road, you need to drive a bigger vehicle than anyone else on the road. Small cars are dangerous. Walking or riding a bicycle makes you sweat so you need a shower after doing it. Creeps and unemployed people ride buses. Trains are never on time. Vehicles need a lot of power to be safe, because you need acceleration to get out of a dangerous situation. Running the car air conditioner saves gas. The bigger the air conditioner, the more you save. If you don't have four wheel drive, you will get stuck. Wider tires have the best traction. Motorcycles are even more dangerous than small cars. Scooters are not manly.

There are also delusions and wishful thinking being spread about uncritically. Is it actually possible to have a 100 mpg Hummer that weighs as much as an armoured vehicle and also can smoke it's rear tire? Such cars are apparently being built by back yard inventors and get shown on TV news programs as if their claims were true. I use the word news loosely, but that's what infotainment is called these days.

The ability to drive without wasting too much fuel is almost entirely mental. Obviously, being able to maintain a slower speed is all in your head, it has to do with starting earlier, not being in a rush. Deciding when it is more appropriate to walk, or carpool. Then things like choice of car, and being able to drive a smaller car safely. Lots of people today in America have never driven a small car or a low powered vehicle, and believe it is more or less impossible. A friend of mine was helping his elderly mother buy a new car, to replace her old gas guzzling V8 station wagon that she no longer needed. They were looking at a Ford Taurus, and she was genuinely worried that she would not be able to drive a car with only six cylinders. How many other people are like that? And that was Canada, not the USA, where the mentality of bigger cars is even more prevalent.

When I learned to drive it was with a 1963 25 horsepower 4 cylinder Envoy. This car is long forgotten, it was a Canadian market version of the British Vauxhall. I learned to drive this car on mountain roads at a time when all other cars were V-8 monsters. The Envoy had three manual gears on the column, and had to be shifted down to second and then to first to climb most of the hills in and around the town. This is a tricky and kind of scary proposition for a beginning driver. In first gear, it was screaming along at 25 mph. I'm not saying we should go back to that vehicle, as it also had poor gas mileage (nobody I knew cared back then about gas mileage). But learning how to drive a low powered car would not be a bad idea, as it could shake up a lot of the ingrained beliefs that have been promoted for decades in our culture.