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Advanced Automotive Technology: Visions for a Super-Efficient Family Car

Another casualty of Newt Gingrich's revolution shut its doors a year ago this past September. Before the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) disappeared, however, its staffers rushed to complete as many active projects as possible. The report reviewed here, Advanced Automotive Technology: Visions for a Super-Efficient Family Car, is a product of that final burst of effort. The full report did not, in fact, make it out the door completely; the 38-page Executive Summary is the only portion available in final printed form.(1)

This is the fifth in a series of studies conducted by OTA's Energy, Transportation and Infrastructure Program on the energy efficiency of light-duty vehicles.(2) The four earlier reports examined the use of alternative fuels, prospects for improving the fuel economy of new vehicles in the near term, vehicle retirement programs, and U.S. energy use in transportation, with particular emphasis on motor vehicles. This study brings together a wealth of valuable information about vehicle-related "enabling" technologies and candidly discusses the challenges of incorporating some of the more exotic of these approaches into mass-produced motor vehicles.

On the whole, the report encourages policymakers to keep expectations about the potential of breakthrough advances in passenger-car body structures or powerplants low. There are several reasons for doing so. Such advances often turn out not to be technically feasible. Even if they do prove to be technically feasible, they are not always commercializable. When an advance proves to be both technically feasible and commercializable, a considerable period of time still must elapse before it can have an impact on the average fuel economy of the passenger car fleet currently in use. Take, for example, the vehicle envisioned by the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV), a joint effort of the U.S. government and the automotive industry:(3)

[E]ven if the PNGV were fully successful - and OTA believes that its goals are extremely challenging - developing a manufacturable prototype by 2004 would likely yield an actual marketable vehicle no earlier than 2010. Furthermore, as noted, the first vehicles are likely to be small volume specialty segment vehicles, with entry into the true mass-market segments starting from three to five years later, depending on the market success of the new models. Finally, unless the first vehicles were overwhelmingly successful, the transformation of the new car and light truck fleets would take at least a decade. In other words, absent a crisis that would force a risky acceleration of schedules, it might be 2020 or 2025 before advanced vehicles had thoroughly permeated the new vehicle fleet - and it would be another 10 to 15 years before they had thoroughly permeated the entire fleet. Thus, major impacts of advanced technologies on national goals are decades away at best.(4)

Policymakers should take warnings like this one to heart. It is crucial that they and politicians, who are looking more than ever for quick, cheap, technological fixes to complicated problems, understand the difficulty of totally reinventing the automobile.

# posted by Medical Information : 3:06 AM