Re: theWatt Podcast 75

Ben:

The real fallacy in the logic, is in failing to make a proper comparison between the energy efficiency of personal automobiles that are fully loaded against the alternative of not using an automobile.

If I have a car that can carry four adults each weighing 200 pounds, and that car also includes a trunk that generally carries about 80 additional pounds of gym bags, laptops, and emergency tools for the car, I get closer to 40% of my chosen vehicle weight as payload.

Now, not all of the vehicle weight is designed to make those people comfortable, some of it actually improves the overall efficiency of motion compared to having no vehicle at all. The wheels, for example, are far more efficient from an energy point of view than shoe leather since rolling requires far less work than walking. The car body is also a far more streamlined shape than a human body - much less four of them - which would provide quite a bit of aerodynamic resistance if it was moving at the same speed that a car can move. (My motorcycle riding friends generally get close to the same fuel economy as I do, even though they are in lighter vehicles and cannot carry anywhere close to the same passenger load.)

When all is said and done, the choices that have been made by hundreds of thousands of engineers and millions of customers are not as short sighted as they are portrayed by Mr. Lovins.

While there are lots of oversized vehicles on the road that are often occupied by a single person during the working day, I would bet that a far larger portion of those vehicles than Mr. Lovins would admit are at least occasionally used to carry a much greater load. When we make our vehicle choices, most of us cannot buy one car that fills the easiest need and buy another one to fill the high demand use. (Of course, there are SOME cities where flex vehicle programs might change the dynamic a bit.) It would not be a good use of material or energy resources for everyone to have as many different vehicles as might be needed.

I admit that am a bit defensive about personal automobiles. I have raised a family and never want to give up the memories that we generated by traveling in comfort and safety around the country. The hundreds of millions of car owners in the US are not a scourge, and the engineers that have supplied them have not designed junk.