What’s a car’s cost tunnel?
In his lectures at Stanford last year, Amory Lovins spoke of a concept called “tunneling through the cost barrier”. This is a contrarian notion where instead of optimizing a system, you optimize for the overall efficiency of the design and capture, rather elegantly, a significantly better design at less cost.
One of the examples Lovins gives is his own home. In this case, he hyper insulated this home to the extent that he didn’t need a central heating system. That means no real natural gas usage and his home keeps its temperature extremely well. He paid a lot for the insulation, but he saves on the expense of the furnace and the ongoing energy costs through the life of the home.
What, then, is the “tunelling through the cost barrier” strategy for the car?
The new X-Prize of the day, is the 100 MPG car challenge. Several organizations claim to be able to produce a car that gets 100+MPG (CalCars, Tesla). With all the new car technologies that have been developed over the years, none have really given us the “cost tunnel”? What technology is elegant enough to open up many other auto opportunities?
What’s wrong?
Well, there’s nothing really wrong with improving MPG directly. Hybrids and advanced engine technologies are great ideas. But they do not really change the context of how a car works.
So I think there are two elements that would lead us to the real “cost tunnel”.
1) Underweighting
It seems to me that underweighting seems to a technology that, while utilized “behind the scenes” leaves the most opportunity for creating a “cost tunnel”. In this case, much of what our big engines do is carry around our obesity. Lighter cars would allow us to use smaller, more efficient motors (cheaper) and less gas. Amory Lovins is a big proponent of this technology as well (maybe one day I’ll have my own ideas instead of talking about other peoples).
The end result, then, would be to keep our current knowledge of engine technologies, but scaled down making cars cheaper to make. Our fuel consumption would be small enough to be supported by a domestic biofuels industry (and it should be noted that most countries would be able to have a domestic biofuels industry just as the U.S. would). It would also make alternative storage technologies like batteries more viable for usage in cars making the growth in consumption much lower.
2) “Good Fuel”
Amory Lovins doesn’t talk about a real “alternative” fuel. The other opportunity comes from the standpoint of disaggregating fuel consumption with energy security and pollution. Hydrogen is the best option for this (albeit, still a difficult solution). But speaking more generally then hydrogen - a domestically available fuel that is at worst inert and at best, healthy for the environment. So maybe all of the traffic jams that we sit in might actually make our cities more pleasant. A Hummer H2 would be the “greenest” while a Toyota Prius would simply be without impact. With this being the case, improvements in MPG would only be needed to eliminate the need of having to stop every week to fill up. Improvements in engine efficiency can be developed to focus on performance for smaller cars.
I’m looking for a “cost tunnel” that creates new opportunities. At the moment, none of our technologies really allow that to happen. And while 100 MPG is certainly helpful with high fuel prices, it seems to only delay the inevitable
