Biden administration sets 50 miles per gallon fuel economy standard for 2031

I'm 70% sure that the larger truck exists because exceptions have literally been made to the law on purpose due to lobbying, which is why every company pivoted to them.

You may live somewhere where people constantly tow travel trailers or large boats, but this isn't the case everywhere. Loads of people buy trucks with the idea the bed will be used every other weekend, then they end up commuting to an office job and getting groceries. If they were primarily used for hauling things around, the average truck wouldn't have a larger passenger cabin than its cargo bed.

Station wagons can just as easily go to the hardware store and pick up full sheets of plywood, load up the lawn mower and trimmer, and as much sporting equipment as a family could wear. What wagons don't have is the aggressive design that pick up trucks have come to be.

Most cars could tow a single axle utility trailer if you needed to move what I mentioned - even appliances or furniture. I know a couple that tow a two person caravan with a Mini Cooper. Even when someone does need larger weight or volume capacity on a regular basis, a van has most of the benefits of a pick up truck with better fuel efficiency.

People buy trucks for towing and hauling, and bigger is better and safer for towing.

All the lifted duallies with caps and rubber band tires would say different.

I never ever see people towing and hauling with those machines. My Honda Civic is 16 years old and is fine, my car before that was a Nissan Sentra and died at 22 years old.

New cars are not shitty.

Prices for cars in general was at an all time high. Don't piss on my shoe and tell me it's raining. They're still way overpriced.

The only EV I can find from an American brand that is in any way appealing is the Bolt. Everything else is a giant truck or SUV, and to be honest I don’t feel safe driving such a huge piece of metal, and I don’t have the money to justify buying one. No American options are affordable or reasonably sized. The US is doing EVs in possibly the most unsustainable way possible.

This isn't aimed at just American manufacturers (Tesla, GM, Ford) but all vehicles sold in the US.

Sure, but with almost no exceptions, the popular cars with the worst mileage are American ones.

Most other rich countries have much more ambitious plans that include phasing out fossil fuel only cars COMPLETELY, and are able to do so because their politicians don't have to kowtow to the intertwined interests of their owner donors from Big Oil and Detroit.

People always seem to resort to "American protectionism" and other falsehoods when discussing stuff like this

Because it's NOT a falsehood. See above.

Are they though?

The employee training the company offers is “woefully inadequate,” Reveal reported in its investigation. Turley told me she was never taught how to do her job and only shown videos that included a history of the plant and information about Tesla, but nothing about the work she would be doing. “You pretty much have to learn from the people that’s in there,” she said. Cleon Waters also said in his filing that he was never given any training for his job assembling parts of car motors. California safety regulators cited Tesla eight times for deficient training between 2013 and 2018.

-- Possibly the least offensive thing in this article: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/tesla-racism-sexual-harassment/

Does that sound like a vehicle that is "perfectly safe" to you? A vehicle built by people who have to learn on the job?

Half of all EVs cost >$54,000. Give us the $10,000 Chinese ones and they'll sell like hotcakes.

When there's that big of a difference in price, people can afford to put in chargers or take extra steps to make it work.

American vendors aren't producing more EVs because EVs don't have mass appeal

You've got that backwards: there's less people buying American EVs than there should because there aren't enough and cheap enough options from American companies.

Just about every other car maker on the planet has several popular EVs on offer, though, so they're shooting themselves in the foot long term to avoid the expense of pivoting short term.

the market clearly cannot bear mass adoption of EVs at this time

Again, you're wrong. I suspect you're taking the bad build quality of Teslas specifically beginning to hurt their sales as a sign that all EVs are unviable. That's not reality.

the buyers for all those EVs we were making don't exist.

Again, other way around: people WANT EVs, but American companies are hardly making any good ones available. Almost all other car makers are, though, at increasingly competitive prices too.

I’d love a truck like that little B-series Mazda had when I was in high school in the 80s. Or the little Toyotas. I just need something with a bed that gets decent mileage. Not something with 6 tires, needs a step ladder to get into, and enough room for 8 people. My penis is big enough already. 😂

I went with the Maverick for a work truck and I’m very happy with the choice. 30mpg and I don’t have to climb up to get a ladder. Ford is an idiot for not making this a plug-in, I’d buy 2 more on the spot.

I've posted about this before so I'm just going to copy it here

No, vehicles have gotten larger because of the same problem as most of the issues in the United States: politics!

You see automobile manufacturers have to meet an average fuel economy across their entire fleet under the CAFE (Corporate average fuel economy) act of 1975. CAFE was a good idea as it forced the auto industry into actually improving on fuel economy year after year throughout their entire fleet or be met with steep fines for ever 0.1mpg off the target.

In 2011 CAFE was changed which directly caused the auto market we have today. See in 2011 the formula on how you'd calculate your fleet's avarage MPG got changed to now factor in vehicle footprint as a variable which auto manufactures quickly caught on to mean the larger a vehicle is the smaller their entire fleet's MPG has to be.

On top of that in 2012 "medium-duty trucks" was added as their own category with a lower MPG requirement meaning if your truck or SUV fell into that category then you would have a smaller MPG target for your entire fleet.

Now put yourself into the shoes of an early 2010s auto manufacture, would you rather design small and light vehicles that require you to meet a pretty high fuel economy level across your entire product range or would you inflate the size of your vehicles and move all R&D into finding ways to get your entire fleet classified as a medium-duty truck/SUV with a smaller MPG requirement? Of course you are going to take the latter.

The changes to CAFE in the 2010s killed small vehicles as we knew it. Ensured light duty trucks stayed dead domestically built or chicken tax be dammed. Caused the explosion of crossover SUVs to flood the market. All while making vehicles more dangerous and worse for the environment.

My understanding of the current situation is that EPA Guidelines give a lot of wiggle room / outright don't control vehicles above a certain size. Therefore manufacturers are reducing the vehicles that actually get regulated by those guidelines in favor of monster trucks for grocery getters.

Regular cars are hit by the regulations, but trucks are exempt.

Essentially, the guidelines set a minimum MPG/ton, or something like that. Whether vehicle manufacturers increase MPG or increase weight, both have the same effect. Manufacturers figured out they could save money by not increasing fuel economy and also make more money by making larger vehicles and selling them as if they're premium for being larger.

My car, a 25 yr old Skoda Octavia TDi gets about that mileage.

I have been a part of a group of people that moved a geo metro across a parking lot. Took 6 high school kids about 5 minutes.

2 seat cars are a thing, but they're typically low-clearance sports cars.

So?

He could set a midpoint in his own term.

How do you stay accountable when you don’t set limits in your own term?

I don’t mind long-term goals, we need them, but there should be milestones and frankly I’m surprised it’s apparently an unpopular opinion.

I was referring to 2025.

That’s why I said six years before 2031.

Plugshare is great to plan things out for a long trip.

So I have an EV and solar. This gives me a very clear picture of my power usage. The EV adds a lot to my base power usage. And this is with a class 1 charger. A commercial class 2 charger is 4 times the power usage.

Orange is my power usage. Here is a day whew I came home at noon charged and then went out in the evening charging when I returned home. You can see how much it adds to the base draw. The spikes are my ac.

If you add thousands of electrical car chargers to the grid without upgrading the carrying capacity of the transmission lines and the power generating capacity of the power plants you'll have more demand than what the utilities can supply.

Texas has those problems because they refuse to be a part of the national grid. EV charging/demand has little effect on a national sized grid. A fully electric water heater draws more power for long periods of time than any EV I am aware of. And those are everywhere in the US.

3-phase 240v service is already available in most modern homes and def available to most apartment complexes that have to supply power for hundreds of apartments.

The move to EVs will not happen overnight. Expect it to take a few decades.

Texas' (and California's) issues are due to massive deregulation. Having extra capacity than is necessary esta into profits. So companies try to only have as much infrastructure as absolutely necessary. Additional AC use from "100 year" heatwaves (that are now happening every few years) were not really something they planned for and since they do not have the extra capacity, there are issues. They basically just have to properly model it...or have a more regulated market that makes sure there is additional capacity.

But it’s really not. Sure, we need serious upgrades to support the end result, but that’s not a place we suddenly get to. The same years/decades it takes to get there are what we have to grow infrastructure to match.

Distribution infrastructure handles current power needs and has some buffer built in to handle expected growth, so no big deal to install more chargers. Distribution infrastructure already reacts to growth - as it approaches capacity, utilities have incentive to build more. In that sense, this is just like all other power uses, and no big deal.

The real difference is the speed. Most people are expecting a faster transition to EVs and electrification than distribution growth has historically supported. While this does need to be addressed, there’s no reason for it to block buildout of chargers. It’s fine in the short term and in the long term, the biggest driver of increased transmission will be that demand.