re: #310 Mich-again

There is no silver bullet. Look instead for a thousand ways to reduce waste. Here are just a few ideas. Permit schools to go to 4-day weeks (save ~20% of busing costs and reduce the utility usage), time the stoplights in cities all across the country to improve traffic flow (stopping and starting kills your gas mileage), ease air permit rules to allow polluters to make incremental improvements to facilities (instead of the all or nothing approach we have now), promote plug-in hybrids to eventually replace much of the fleet, Deliver the US Mail 3 days a week instead of 6.

Think of lots of little ideas instead of looking for the one big one.

Here’s one silver bullet. Here’s a european BMW 5 series with a turbo diesel that gets incredible mileage and remarkable acceleration:

The replacement of the twin-turbocharged xDrive35d with the new xDrive40d diesel sees an improvement in emissions of 10 per cent, despite horsepower increasing by 20bhp to 306bhp. The Combined fuel consumption figure is 37.7mpg while the 0-62mph acceleration figure now stands at 6.6 seconds, down from 7.0 seconds.

Here’s the entire article:

telegraph.co.uk

Don’t tell me that if BMW can put a 5 series car out in Europe with that kind of mileage that we can’t increase our mileage on our cars in this country by 40 to 60 percent in the next 5 years.

Do you have any idea on how much that would decrease our oil imports?

Ford is making cars in Europe. GM is making cars in Europe (Opel). Don’t tell me that the tech being used in Europe can’t be used here.