A Defense of the GM Bailout
Posted by
Eric de Place
11/14/2008 08:05 AM
Because small fixes make the biggest difference.
Despite the excellent reasons to reject the GM bailout, consider this: a strings-attached investment that tweaked GM's production model could reap huge climate benefits -- perhaps bigger than anything else we do to autos in the near term. That's because the biggest opportunities in fuel economy are at the low end of the fleet, not in FutureCars.
Remember: you save more fuel switching from a 15 to 18 mpg car than switching from a 50 to 100 mpg car. (The explanation is here and here.) For a company like GM that's based on building fuel-wasting behemoths this has huge implications. Seemingly minor tweaks can yield colossal returns. Let's take a look at some specific changes to the GM fleet:
- The Hummer H3 averages 15 mpg. Making an H3 that gets just 18 mpg would be the fuel-saving equivalent of turning the Prius into a 100 mpg hypercar.
- The GMC Yukon Denali is even worse: it averages 14 mpg. Turning one of those tanks into a 20 mpg truck would save more fuel than turning two Toyota Tacomas (22 mpg) into two Honda Civics (29 mpg).
- The Chevy Trailblazer is worse yet: it averages 13 mpg. For every Trailblazer we made that got 22 mpg, we'd save as much fuel as we would by taking a Toyota Corolla (31 mpg) off the road entirely.
- Making a single Cadillac Escalade (14 mpg) get just 18 mpg would save more fuel than turning a 50 mpg car into a 500 mpg car.
