Slightly OT, and I totally agree with fuel efficiency and less dependence on oil, but ... A slight problem also needs to be addressed - less gas tax revenue. In Minnesota and probably many other states, gas tax revenue is used to build and maintain roads, so the state will have to find another equitable method of raising needed funds. Toll roads? We drive through Illinois a couple of times a year and easily pay $5 in tolls each time for the privilege of driving on crappy roads. Not sure where their toll money goes?
Back to Mustangs: I just took a quick drive to our local Quick Trip convenience store in my 84 Capri RS 5.0 - love that car!
Yup, here in Oregon where people have flowery rainbow dreams of Jetson's mobiles flying to the tofu store, there was talk about tracking cars and charging by the mile.
Eventually monies will have to be collected, somehow, but it ain't here yet.
The 84 Capri looks almost as good as it did when I drove it off the showroom floor 25 years ago. It's getting older but I'm aging, as in "look at that old fart driving that cool car".
I suppose there are younger people who wonder what 5.0 means when they see a Mustang or Capri. For us older folks, we remember the Z28 Camaros from the late 60s that had the 302 engine (302 cu in = 4.94889 L). Close enough to 5.0 for us with 5.0s! Whatever, Dick
When I was shopping for a family/slalom/time-trial car in 1971, I looked seriously at the Hornet Sportabout (wagon). It was pretty quick in acceleration, had plenty of room, but two too many doors, didn't turn very well, looked a little ugly in an era of uglies, and you couldn't get it without a load of extras that weighed more than they were worth.
I settled on a Chevy Vega Kammback, still one of the best shapes produced; got it with rear seat shoulder belts as pretty much the only option. Eventually did very well in the slaloms, held the Solo One lap record for B Sedan at Willow Springs, and had no engine problems until it started smoking a bit at 60,000 miles. All that on an Opel transmission and a single one-barrel carburetor.
The next Vega was a GT Coupe, and got the same kind of treatment. High point of my racing career was catching the Levis Team HiBall Gremlins in Turn Nine at Riverside (California) in practice at the April, 1975 IMSA little sedan race. They were 30 miles an hour faster on the long straight, but the Vega outhandled them everywhere, and would have passed them at S/F if it had more horspower.
That didn't stop the Gremlins and Concordes from winning plenty of IMSA races, though. Part of the kind of preparation that went into the factory-supported cars was typified by the rain gutters: they were ground off and smoothed over. Worth a mph or two, I guess.
Haven't you noticed? As car became more fuel efficient gas prices rose accordingly. Now when you buy that fuel efficient green car that delivers 50 mpg you'll be paying $10 per gallon instead of $2.50.
I just talked to the former DOT secretary about gas tax revenue and She's all for these tracking schemes, still thinks we should have a system where people pay based on what they drive, where they drive, when they drive. Talk about big brother... How can people not see how un American such a scheme is? The politicians act like it's impossible to just raise the gas tax to make up for the better mileage of today's cars. It is so simply, you don't need a 1000 page law, or a whole new bureaucracy, or anything. All you need is a one page law with one sentence that says the gas tax is $XX.XX. I suspect quite a bit of the push for these "track and pay" schemes is by people who will make money off selling the tracking systems and infrastructure. I wish we could get all the lobbyists on one room and nuke them.
The 'unamerican' part is having travel being tracked and/or logged by the government.
Nothing about mpg going up changes the basic rule, fuel economy is roughly proportional to vehicle weight. It also does not change that the amount of fuel used is proportional to the distance driven and that vehicle weight is proportional to the wear and tear on the roads (with regard to passenger vehicles, where the dramatic climb begins is outside the weight of passenger cars and trucks(SUVs).
The simple solution, if there really were a problem (there isn't as fleet fuel economy hasn't changed much), is to just raise the amount of tax per unit volume of fuel. Somewhere on thenewspaper.com there is an article that goes under the hood of 'falling revenue'. Turns out the falling revenue has been to the reduced large truck use in the economic down-turn, not passenger vehicles with higher fuel economy.
The point was that we already have a perfectly good "user fee" system, it's called the gas tax. There is no need to create yet another fee system, and a far more complicated one at that, that requires tracking of the movements of every driver. THAT is UN-American. I don't expect a Canadian to understand why, that's why you're a Canadian, you don't particularly value freedom.
Straight up government lie to grab more power over our daily lives withe their tracking schemes.
I'll actually dig up the cites for you:
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"From 1991 to 2006 the average efficiency improved by only 1.8 per cent to 17.2 mpg (7.31 km/l)."
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"The American Road and Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA)crunched the numbers and found this assertion to be entirely untrue. Infiscal 2007, the US Treasury reported that a total of $29.4 billion wascollected from the taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel. In 2008, the totalfigure grew by $185 million to $29.6 billion. Lower traffic volumes didcause gasoline tax revenue to drop $70 million, but this figure was morethan offset by a $256 million increase in revenue from the tax ondiesel, which is primarily paid by the commercial trucking industry.View revenue chart.
These truckers, hit by tough economic times, cut expenses significantly. Sales of new rigs plunged in 2008. That caused a $2.4 billion drop in revenue from the 12 percent tax on the retail sales of trucks and trailers. An accounting change in the way kerosene and similar taxes were transferred ended up showed a paper loss of $722 million from the fund. Together these factors, which are unrelated to the number of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in 2008, accounted for the $3 billion drop in trust fund revenue."
And a bonus... I found one of the stories on fuel tax diversions:
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