Daily Score Blog

Get this:

You save more fuel switching from a 15 to 18 mpg car than switching from a 50 to 100 mpg car.

Okay, I'm obsessing. But apropos of my post yesterday, I just calculated this little fact and I had to share. This assumes, of course, that both cars are driven an equal amount. (Hat tip is in order for Jon Rynn, commenter at Gristmill.)

So, we should stop trying to design a techno-magic "car for the future." It really won't end our oil addiction or save us from climate change. That's right: no more HyperCar and no more FreedomCar. At least not until we've done the dull and unsexy work of boosting fuel economy at the bottom of the fleet, where it matters far, far, far more.

The real fix for oil addiction isn't exciting, and it doesn't lend itself to massive research investments. But the good news is: we just need to do stuff that we already know how to do. So here's my new policy proposal. While CAFE standards (fleet averages) are groovy, what we really need to do is simply outlaw vehicles that get below, say, 15 or 18 mpg.

It's easy like that.

Check out the chart below the jump...

Grrrr. Last week, I was all excited that a federal judge had cleared the way for California to demand cleaner cars. All that remained was approval from the EPA.

Not too surprisingly, the EPA has said no.  No clean cars for us.  Not yet, anyway.

And, of course, Arnie's pissed -- and so are the 17 other states (including Washington and Oregon) that have hitched their car standards to California's.  Says Gov. Schwarzennegger:

“It is disappointing that the federal government is standing in our way and ignoring the will of tens of millions of people across the nation,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said. “We will continue to fight this battle.”

And Arnie will never, ever stop fighting. NEVER!!  Well, not until we melt his robotic endoskeleton.*

* This is 100 percent true -- I even saw it in a movie once!

A while back, I mentioned that I'd traded in my clunky old furnace for a new-fangled, super-efficient model. Not without some trepidation, though, since I took out a home equity loan to pay for it. For me, debt = yikes!!!

But despite my aversion to living on borrowed money, I reasoned that -- provided that things played out as I expected -- the furnace would start paying for itself from day one.  It was a risk, sure, but one I was willing to take.

Without a loan, an efficiency upgrade like this can take a while to pay for itself.  With up front costs of $3,500, more or less (really, more, since I went for the most super-efficient model), it could be 7 years or longer before the gas savings would pay off the cost of the furnace.  And while that's a rate of return that patient investors would leap at, I'm just not that patient!

However -- and despite the greed and farcically bad judgment on display in the ongoing mortgage market meltdown -- financial instiutions do tend to be more patient than consumers.  Banks are willing to lend now, in the hope of making a profit a decade down the road. 

So I figured I could take advantage of their farsightedness, by letting them pay for my furnace now, and paying back the loan gradually, using whatever money I saved on fuel to pay interest and, eventually, principal.  That way, I'd use less gas right away -- with obvious climate benefits -- and I wouldn't pay a cent more for heating (combining fuel and financing) than I did before the upgrade.

But it was a bit of a leap of faith, since I didn't know in advance how much fuel I'd save!  If I gambled wrong -- and it turned out that the old furnace was actually pretty efficient -- the new furnace might turn out to have been a dud of an investment.

So how have things turned out?

In a word:  AWESOME!!  (Thankfully.)