Tag Archives: automobiles

Governments around the world should forcibly limit automobile travel to 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) per person per year, says the ominously named Patrick Moriarty, an engineering professor at Melbourne’s Monash University. That’s 4,000 passenger-kilometers a year, so in the United States, where the average car carries 1.67 people, that’s really 2,400 vehicle-kilometers (about 1,500 vehicle-miles) per person per year.

Wave good-bye to 80 percent of your mobility if Moriarty has his way.

Since Americans drove about 8,900 vehicle-miles or 15,000 passenger-miles per person in 2019, this mandate would require an 83-percent reduction in auto travel. In other countries, it would be less, of course. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australians drove 255 billion kilometers (about 160 billion miles) before the pandemic. Assuming 10 percent of that was heavy trucks, buses, and motorcycles (as it is in the U.S.), then that represents about 6,000 miles of automobile driving per person. Moriarty’s proposed mandate would reduce that by a mere 75 percent. Continue reading →

Electric vehicles cost more to buy than gasoline-powered vehicles, but they supposedly make up for at least part of that cost by lower fuel costs. The Department of Energy estimates that (as of March 20) gasoline cost an average of $2.85 per gallon while the electricity required to produce the same amount of power cost only $1.16 per egallon.

Photo by Mr. Satterly.

Not so fast, says a consulting firm called the Anderson Economic Group, which points out there are other costs that have to be considered with an EV that are built in to the price of gasoline. These include:

• The cost of buying and installing charging devices;
• High registration fees charged by many states to make up for the lack of fuel taxes collected from owners of EVs;
• The time spent refueling; and
• The miles of driving to charging stations, which are less numerous than petroleum fuel stations.

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Planners and planning advocates are obsessed with manipulating people’s behavior, and in particular with reducing the amount of driving we do. One dictionary defines “obsess” as “Preoccupy or fill the mind of (someone) continually, intrusively, and to a troubling extent,” and it is certainly troubling that so many planners believe their goal is to destroy one of the major engines of our economy and spend much of the effort towards achieving that goal.

One simple trick improves the fuel economy of this minivan by almost 50 percent, but planners ignore such improvements in favor of simply demonizing auto driving. Photo by Kevauto.

A case in point is an article in Vox titled, “How to end the American obsession with driving.” The article was written by journalism student Gabrielle Birenbaum, who believes that driving is destroying the planet. Wildfires and hurricanes (which seems to think never happened before) prove that global warming is happening; transportation is “the biggest sector of pollution”; and automobiles produce 58 percent of that pollution. Therefore, she reasons, we must reduce driving. Continue reading →

Automobile accidents can be horrible and tragic and we should take the most cost-effective steps we can to reduce or eliminate them. But anti-auto people aren’t interested in cost-effectiveness: they just want to do whatever feels good no matter how much it hurts society.

“Out on the highways there was such a sense of freedom — I thought I would explode from sheer happiness,” wrote the photographer. Yet others look at this picture and all they see is costs and externalities. Photo by Gayle Nicholson.

Case in point: a recent article in Bloomberg’s CityLab argues that automobile advertising promotes dangerous behavior and should be strictly regulated. Apparently, one brand of cars saying that their vehicles are “tough” and another brand saying that their vehicles will “thrill you” encourage people to drive too fast or too recklessly. Continue reading →

In 1970, the average car in the United States was 5.6 years old, and the average light truck was 7.3 years old. That meant that someone buying a car wouldn’t expect it to last much longer than 12 years, or 15 for light trucks.

Used car for sale. Photo by John Lloyd.

On Monday, a research group called IHS Markit announced that the average age of cars and light trucks has increased to 12.1 years. Data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics indicates that cars have caught up with light trucks in the longevity sweepstakes, so someone buying either a car or light truck today can expect it to last close to 25 years. Continue reading →