Cost, Effectiveness, and Deployment of Fuel Economy Technologies for Light-Duty Vehicles PDF Download

Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309373913
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 812

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Book Description
The light-duty vehicle fleet is expected to undergo substantial technological changes over the next several decades. New powertrain designs, alternative fuels, advanced materials and significant changes to the vehicle body are being driven by increasingly stringent fuel economy and greenhouse gas emission standards. By the end of the next decade, cars and light-duty trucks will be more fuel efficient, weigh less, emit less air pollutants, have more safety features, and will be more expensive to purchase relative to current vehicles. Though the gasoline-powered spark ignition engine will continue to be the dominant powertrain configuration even through 2030, such vehicles will be equipped with advanced technologies, materials, electronics and controls, and aerodynamics. And by 2030, the deployment of alternative methods to propel and fuel vehicles and alternative modes of transportation, including autonomous vehicles, will be well underway. What are these new technologies - how will they work, and will some technologies be more effective than others? Written to inform The United States Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission standards, this new report from the National Research Council is a technical evaluation of costs, benefits, and implementation issues of fuel reduction technologies for next-generation light-duty vehicles. Cost, Effectiveness, and Deployment of Fuel Economy Technologies for Light-Duty Vehicles estimates the cost, potential efficiency improvements, and barriers to commercial deployment of technologies that might be employed from 2020 to 2030. This report describes these promising technologies and makes recommendations for their inclusion on the list of technologies applicable for the 2017-2025 CAFE standards.

Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309045304
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This volume presents realistic estimates for the level of fuel economy that is achievable in the next decade for cars and light trucks made in the United States and Canada. A source of objective and comprehensive information on the topic, this book takes into account real-world factors such as the financial conditions in the automotive industry, costs and benefits to consumers, and marketability of high-efficiency vehicles. The committee is composed of experts from the fields of science, technology, finance, and regulation and offers practical evaluations of technological improvements that could contribute to increased fuel efficiency. The volume also examines potential barriers to improvement, such as high production costs, regulations on safety and emissions, and consumer preferences. This practical book is of considerable interest to car and light truck manufacturers, policymakers, federal and state agencies, and the public.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Automobiles
Languages : en
Pages : 42

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Book Description

Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309159474
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Technologies and Approaches to Reducing the Fuel Consumption of Medium- and Heavy-Duty Vehicles evaluates various technologies and methods that could improve the fuel economy of medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, such as tractor-trailers, transit buses, and work trucks. The book also recommends approaches that federal agencies could use to regulate these vehicles' fuel consumption. Currently there are no fuel consumption standards for such vehicles, which account for about 26 percent of the transportation fuel used in the U.S. The miles-per-gallon measure used to regulate the fuel economy of passenger cars. is not appropriate for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, which are designed above all to carry loads efficiently. Instead, any regulation of medium- and heavy-duty vehicles should use a metric that reflects the efficiency with which a vehicle moves goods or passengers, such as gallons per ton-mile, a unit that reflects the amount of fuel a vehicle would use to carry a ton of goods one mile. This is called load-specific fuel consumption (LSFC). The book estimates the improvements that various technologies could achieve over the next decade in seven vehicle types. For example, using advanced diesel engines in tractor-trailers could lower their fuel consumption by up to 20 percent by 2020, and improved aerodynamics could yield an 11 percent reduction. Hybrid powertrains could lower the fuel consumption of vehicles that stop frequently, such as garbage trucks and transit buses, by as much 35 percent in the same time frame.

Author: Terry Dinan
Publisher: Nova Biomedical Books
ISBN:
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 86

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Book Description
Several Members of Congress and public interest groups have recently proposed policies that would reduce gasoline consumption in the United States. Such proposals stem primarily from a desire to enhance the nation's energy security and to decrease its emissions of carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas that affects the Earth's climate. This book compares three methods of reducing gasoline consumption: increasing the corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards that govern passenger vehicles, raising the federal tax on gasoline, and setting a limit on carbon emissions from gasoline combustion and requiring gasoline producers to hold allowances for those emissions (a policy known as a cap-and-trade program). Also, the book weighs the relative merits of those policies against several major criteria: whether they would minimise costs to producers and consumers; how reliably they would achieve a given reduction in gasoline use; their implications for automobile safety; and their effects on such factors as traffic congestion, requirements for highway construction, and emissions of air pollutants other than carbon dioxide. In addition, the book examines two more policy implications that lawmakers may be concerned about: the impact on people at different income levels and in different regions, and the effects on federal revenue.

Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309170567
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
Since CAFE standards were established 25 years ago, there have been significant changes in motor vehicle technology, globalization of the industry, the mix and characteristics of vehicle sales, production capacity, and other factors. This volume evaluates the implications of these changes as well as changes anticipated in the next few years, on the need for CAFE, as well as the stringency and/or structure of the CAFE program in future years.

Author: Kenneth Thomas Gillingham
Publisher: Stanford University
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
When gasoline prices rise, people notice: the news is filled with reports of pinched household budgets and politicians feeling pressure to do something to ameliorate the burden. Yet, raising the gasoline tax to internalize externalities is widely considered by economists to be among the most economic efficiency-improving policies we could implement in the transportation sector. This dissertation brings new evidence to bear on quantifying the responsiveness to changing gasoline prices, both on the intensive margin (i.e., how much to drive) and the extensive margin (i.e., what vehicles to buy). I assemble a unique and extremely rich vehicle-level dataset that includes all new vehicle registrations in California 2001 to 2009, and all of the mandatory smog check program odometer readings for 2002 to 2009. The full dataset exceeds 49 million observations. Using this dataset, I quantify the responsiveness to gasoline price changes on both margins, as well as the heterogeneity in the responsiveness. I develop a novel structural model of vehicle choice and subsequent utilization, where consumer decisions are modeled in a dynamic setting that explicitly accounts for selection on unobserved driving preference at both the time of purchase and the time of driving. This utility-consistent model allows for the analysis of the welfare implications to consumers and government of a variety of different policies, including gasoline taxes and feebates. I find that consumers are responsive to changing gasoline prices in both vehicle choice and driving decisions, with more responsiveness than in many recent studies in the literature. I estimate a medium-run (i.e., roughly two-year) elasticity of fuel economy with respect to the price of gasoline for new vehicles around 0.1 for California, a response that varies by whether the vehicle manufacturer faces a tightly binding fuel economy standard. I estimate a medium-run elasticity of driving with respect to the price of gasoline around -0.15 for new personal vehicles in the first six years. Older vehicles are driven much less, but tend to be more responsive, with an elasticity of roughly -0.3. I find that the vehicle-level responsiveness in driving to gasoline price changes varies by vehicle class, income, geographic, and demographic groups. I also find that not including controls for economic conditions and not accounting for selection into different types of new vehicles based on unobserved driving preference tend to bias the elasticity of driving away from zero -- implying a greater responsiveness than the true responsiveness. This is an important methodological point, for much of the literature estimating similar elasticities ignores these two issues. These results have significant policy implications for policies to reduce gasoline consumption and greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. The relatively inelastic estimated responsiveness on both margins suggests that a gasoline tax policy may not lead to dramatic reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, but is a relatively non-distortionary policy instrument to raise revenue. When the externalities of driving are considered, an increased gasoline tax may not only be relatively non-distortionary, but even economic efficiency-improving. However, I find that the welfare changes from an increased gasoline tax vary significantly across counties in California, an important consideration for the political feasibility of the policy. Finally, I find suggestive evidence that the ``rebound effect'' of a policy that works only on the extensive margin, such as a feebate or CAFE standards, may be closer to zero than the elasticity of driving with respect to the price of gasoline. This suggestive finding is particularly important for the analysis of the welfare effects of any policy that focuses entirely on the extensive margin.

Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309216389
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
Various combinations of commercially available technologies could greatly reduce fuel consumption in passenger cars, sport-utility vehicles, minivans, and other light-duty vehicles without compromising vehicle performance or safety. Assessment of Technologies for Improving Light Duty Vehicle Fuel Economy estimates the potential fuel savings and costs to consumers of available technology combinations for three types of engines: spark-ignition gasoline, compression-ignition diesel, and hybrid. According to its estimates, adopting the full combination of improved technologies in medium and large cars and pickup trucks with spark-ignition engines could reduce fuel consumption by 29 percent at an additional cost of $2,200 to the consumer. Replacing spark-ignition engines with diesel engines and components would yield fuel savings of about 37 percent at an added cost of approximately $5,900 per vehicle, and replacing spark-ignition engines with hybrid engines and components would reduce fuel consumption by 43 percent at an increase of $6,000 per vehicle. The book focuses on fuel consumption-the amount of fuel consumed in a given driving distance-because energy savings are directly related to the amount of fuel used. In contrast, fuel economy measures how far a vehicle will travel with a gallon of fuel. Because fuel consumption data indicate money saved on fuel purchases and reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, the book finds that vehicle stickers should provide consumers with fuel consumption data in addition to fuel economy information.

Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309268524
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
For a century, almost all light-duty vehicles (LDVs) have been powered by internal combustion engines operating on petroleum fuels. Energy security concerns about petroleum imports and the effect of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions on global climate are driving interest in alternatives. Transitions to Alternative Vehicles and Fuels assesses the potential for reducing petroleum consumption and GHG emissions by 80 percent across the U.S. LDV fleet by 2050, relative to 2005. This report examines the current capability and estimated future performance and costs for each vehicle type and non-petroleum-based fuel technology as options that could significantly contribute to these goals. By analyzing scenarios that combine various fuel and vehicle pathways, the report also identifies barriers to implementation of these technologies and suggests policies to achieve the desired reductions. Several scenarios are promising, but strong, and effective policies such as research and development, subsidies, energy taxes, or regulations will be necessary to overcome barriers, such as cost and consumer choice.

Author: United Nations
Publisher: UN
ISBN: 9789211091687
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The World Economic Situation and Prospects (WESP) is the definitive report of the United Nations on the state of the world economy. One of the most highly anticipated economic reports from the United Nations, it is jointly produced by the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and the five United Nations Regional Commissions.