not to belittle your point...
Funny you mention a Fiesta, a car bound to be manufactured in Mexico...

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Offshore jobs are a sore subject. If the big 3 expect any loyalty from us, you would think they would try to keep us working. I am driving 2 American made vehicles now, but in the past I have a VW first and then a Ford, then a Honda, then a Chevy citation (that one did me in for GM). Then 2 Hondas and 3 Toyotas. I just like to have a vehicle that never has to go back to the dealer. The point I am trying to make is that we really can't afford to buy inferior vehicles. I expect our auto manufacturers to be the best in the world, and if they are not, they are going to keep losing market share.

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Ford misses the mark again.
Unless this sucker gets 35MPG minimum (preferably 45 and I'm guessing it really gets maybe 21/27) - this is a wasted joke of vehicle line. There's no reason not to buy a Hyundai Genesis instead of this - as powerful, better build quality and 'toys' costs less, I'm sure better handling and while Genesis doesn't have the mystique (bs status hype) of a BMW or Mercedes - it's better in all respects for less money.
Then again I don't know why more people don't do Buick Centuries and Lesabres...... Lesaber is a full size that gets BETTER gas millage than it's Estimates...... 2003 Lesabre can get 25-29MPG mixed driving and 32-34 all highway if you're careful and it's HUGE family size - and CAN actually TOW a boat/trailer... etc. a few design flaws aside - why not market what's already there. If you have a super heavy foot and city drive only - you'll probably never get less than 22MPG the Lesabre. SO WHY IS IT SUCH A BIG DEAL WHEN SUCH AND SUCH A CAR GETS 17/21............ AHHHH! or a tiny little car gets 25 or 30...... it's AMAZING.......... A FRIGGIN LESABRE DOES THAT NOW!!!!!!!!!!! SHEESH. Lucerne isn't quite as good in general - but Lucerne can get better millage than a Chevy Cobalt or Honda Civic or Toyota Carolla for LESS MONEY for MORE CAR and BIGGER! Car.
SHEESH.

There is no real excuse for every vehicle not to get at least 40MPG. The car industry sabotages itself. Someone with more than 1 brain cell should run Ford, GM, et al.
We're cutting down... we don't need fourty different brands we're cutting down to the core 10 (yes and exageration) HOW ABOUT CUTTING DOWN TO ONE, 1, a little more than 0 and a lot less than 2. O N E!
COMBINE TECHNOLOGY......... CONSOLODATE
Inspire trade restrictions in our Government promoting US jobs and manufacturing WHILE regulating those US jobs. ie, limiting cheap competition can be horrible unless you controll the companies benefiting - limiting they're ability to make whatever they want without the competition.
I'll run any one of the companies - I guarantee I'll have more jobs, make items for less money and make the companies profitable again. And I'll do it for $100,000 a year not 150 MILLION a year.

Problem with building in the US is primarily the Union. People working on assmebly line making 30-90 dollars per hour or more plus massive benefits. They can't compete with locations that even make a reasonable wage let alone a country where the costs are dirt cheap.

If the auto workers are willing to get paid a reasonably amount ($9-$15/hr lets say) for someone who's alternative is to be a Janitor or baggage handler................ then our auto industry would be at the supreme forefront - even though they would still be making much more than other countries farmed jobs.


I know - we all need to feel sorry for them and they are always not making enough...... problem is either they all be unemployed permanently (many who have SAVED have made enough money to actually live off of it for the rest of their lives even though they've worked for 15years and will have 40 of unemployment)

Problems with 'we're not making enough money.... soo horrible' are RELATIVE. If everyone you know has 1 car per family member and 1 or 2 sports cars/ fancy motorcycles per main member and maybe a nice boat and some ATVs and perhaps a vacation home in the south (FL) Then you could see how perhaps everyone wants that level. The problem arrises when the people living that life feel entitled to that or more for having the skill set of a person making $8/hr give or take.

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Carney, thats quite some hype of your own, you obviously own some stock in a corn ethanol company. Corn based ethanol barely even has a positive energy return after you factor in all the diesel fuel, petroleum based fertilizers and natural gas that it takes to farm it and manufacture it. Besides, even using every arable sq. inch of farmland in this country wouldn't produce enough ethanol to power our motor fleet.

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Chris, if I were a corn ethanol shill, I wouldn't also be advocating methanol fuel (which is what flex fuel cars were invented to run on, and which I'm sure the corn lobby is quite happy has been all but forgotten since its late 80s heyday). Also I wouldn't be advocating dropping our incredibly stupid tariff on Brazilian sugarcane ethanol.

I'm just a guy who has read a number of things and become persuaded that alcohol is the way to go.

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Chris Thomason said, "Corn based ethanol barely even has a positive energy return after you factor in all the diesel fuel, petroleum based fertilizers and natural gas that it takes to farm it and manufacture it."

Untrue. The only real voice pushing this is a radical named David Pimentel, an insect ecologist writing far outside his field of expertise, whose study on this has been taken apart by numerous others. Most notably in the January 2006 issue of Science magazine (probably THE most prestigious journal in the world), a comprehensive and sweeping study by Alex Farrell and colleagues at the Berkeley Energy Resources Group went over the calculations of ALL PRIOR LITERATURE and considered the critical question of how much petroleum is expended by making a given amount of ethanol compared to that used to make the same fuel energy's worth of gasoline.

Even using Pimentel's fatally flawed and now-discredited assumptions (for example using long outdated statistics to bias the results against ethanol) they found that the petroleum cost of ethanol fuel was about one FIFTH that of gasoline. Based on the assumptions of nearly all other (non-discredited, non-extremist) analysts, the petroleum cost of ethanol was less than one-TENTH of gasoline. In other words, more than ten times as much ethanol can be produced as gasoline with a given amount of petroleum.

Therefore, by switching to ethanol, we can reduce the amount of petroleum needed to make our fuel by as much as NINETY PERCENT.

"Besides, even using every arable sq. inch of farmland in this country wouldn't produce enough ethanol to power our motor fleet."

You overlook three things.

One, methanol needs to be a part of the picture. Methanol can be made from any biomass without exception, including crop residues (stems, leaves, cobs, etc.), dramatically boosting per acre alcohol yield. Also from weeds such as kudzu and water hyacinths which need to be cleared out anyway. Also waste such as rice bran, "black liquor" from paper mills (an environmental problem otherwise), grass clippings, raked leaves, trash, even sewage.

Two, we are only using a fraction of our farmland, let alone our arable land, at the moment.

Three, to the extent that you're right, that's a GOOD thing. That means our farmers would have all the business they can handle, with lots left over for the desperate poor in other countries, eager to sell their cash crops to the First World but walled out with tariffs and other trade barriers. At last we wouldn't perceive a threat to our own farm sectors from these imports, and a win-win develops. Our hundreds of billions of dollars of annual fuel spending that goes to OPEC could instead go to peaceful farmers, providing a powerful engine for development and lifting the poor out of poverty that is both bigger and more effective than the $60 billion or so all told combined world foreign aid budgets.

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Mike, alcohol fuel availability currently is heavily regionally skewed, with the Midwest (home of the corn farmer, source of ethanol) predominating. I agree that needs to change, which it won't soon enough until and unless Congress passes and the President signs a law mandating that all new cars sold in America have flex fuel capability as a standard feature, like seatbelts. Costs only $100 per car for the automakers, but in 3 years we'd have 50 million alcohol compatible cars on the road, enough of a market for entrepeneurs to pop up and existing gas station owners to begin dedicating pumps to alcohol, especially when gas prices rise again.

Again, flex fuel capability is very cheap for automakers and usually costs consumers nothing extra. By contrast the R&D expended on squeezing more MPGs out of dirty, economy-trashing, terror-funding gasoline is enormous. Hybrid capability costs THOUSANDS of dollars extra for customers compared to non hybrid versions of the same vehicle, even with generous tax incentives.

On CO2, ethanol's CO2 comes from plants, it's already part of the biosphere and the carbon cycle, thus adding no NEW greenhouse gas to the atmosphere. By contrast gasoline's CO2 is from deep underground, throwing new extra CO2 into the air, making the problem worse. Celebrating a mere reduction in net CO2 emissions is pointless; you've slowed down but are STILL headed for the cliff up ahead. Isn't STOPPING, making the situation no worse off, a better idea?

Conservation is and will be a failed strategy. From 1976 (when CAFE standards were first put in) to 1990, average MPG went from 13 to 20, but total fuel consumption went UP, not down, from 89 to 103 billion gallons a year (rising to 140 by 2005). And it's going to get much worse very fast. 800 of every 1,000 Americans are car owners; only 8 Chinese are. But car sales in China doubled from 2001 to 2003, and doubled again by 2007. They're gong to keep doubling. Even if each car burns less gasoline, with so many more cars, total gasoline consumption is gong to skyrocket, with all the environmental damage that comes with it.

Unlike gasoline:

Alcohol fuel emits less NOx and is a tenth as reactive to it.

Its vapor is easily washed out of the atmosphere by rain, further reducing NOx effects (gasoline vapor hangs around).

Alcohol emits NO smoke, soot, or particulate matter (a huge reduction in smog, which kills 40,000 Americans alone, and take a look at Beijing and Mexico City etc).

No sulfur (a major contributor to acid rain).

Is not a carcinogen or a mutagen (gasoline is riddled with ingredients that are both).

Is biodegradable when spilled, and dissolves readily into the vast hydrosphere to reduce levels below toxicity. No Exxon Valdez with alcohol!

And I already mentioned carbon.

PLUS no funding of terrorists, the Iranian nuclear program, etc.

Flex fuel is a BIG deal, but gasoline MPG increases or CO2 reductions are NOT.

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Curt, if we had a mandate that all new cars be fully flex fueled, able to run as easily on methanol and/or ethanol as on gasoline, then within a few years alcohol pumps would become a lot more common on their own, especially when gasoline prices began rising again, as they will given OPEC production cuts and rising automobile usage around the world (the Chinese have more than quadrupled their car ownership since 2000 and yet are still at only 8 cars per 1,000 people compared to 800 cars here).

When gasoline becomes significantly more expensive than alcohol, and you have (even if inadvertently, given the mandate) a flex fuel car, you'll jump on any local station that sells cheaper ethanol or methanol. A gas station that's able to undercut its competitors will do so and clean up. Nor can competitors agree to keep alcohol out. In the first place, that's illegal and there are lots of antitrust enforcers eagerly hunting for a career-making blunder from industry like that. In the second place, again, someone's going to cheat on the deal and undercut the others. In the third place, you can't round everyone up on the deal, so someone will undercut you anyway. In the fourth place, it's a lot easier for entrepreneurs and outsiders to get into the fuel selling business than it is the car business, so independents and new chains will pup up anyway.

Finally, if the price gap becomes big enough, the profit margins on alcohol will be HIGHER than on gasoline. After all, in summer 2007, methanol was selling for $1.70 per gasoline gallon equivalent (even less on a per gallon basis), while gasoline was going for about $3.00 per gallon. That means a gas station owner could have charged, say, $2.55 per g.g.e. for methanol, to pad his profit margin by an additional whopping 50% and STILL see customers flocking to his station. No one's going to ignore that kind of money. (By the way gas stations average about 8% margin on gasoline).

So a mandate that all new cars be alcohol compatible is I think much more effective. And avoids the huge backlash that would come from forcing gas station owners to put up ethanol pumps that at first would see very few customers. That's easily mocked, and a camera-friendly issue for opponents to exploit (a bustling station with an ignored E85 pumps, a salt-of-the-earth seeming owner complaining that one of his pumps has to be set aside for this fuel nobody wants, from which he could be making a lot more money for his kids' college fund or sick mother, etc.). Brazil did that mandate, but that was before the flex fuel era, and when the country was a military dictatorship and all the gas stations were government owned.

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E10 (90% gasoline, 10% ethanol) is mandatory already. It runs in modern gasoline-only cars with no problems.

Yes, ethanol has a lower energy content than gasoline, so adding ethanol to your fuel mix will cut down on mileage.

Personally I don't see the big deal about that, especially during times when ethanol costs less. I'd rather have more miles per dollar.

Also, this situation can be remedied fairly easily by automakers who can just make the fuel tanks bigger, so that a fillup on alcohol will take you as far as a fill up on gasoline used to in the prior models of that car. Oh, and alcohol fuel is safer in crashes, because it's less prone to explosion.

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Thanks, Carney. I agree, miles /$. With the advances in ICE we are seeing, I would be surprised not to see E-85 universally offered in California within the next couple of years. I may be wrong about the time table, but it looks like a good idea. The H2 people will complain about the CO2, but they really don't offer a practical alternative anytime soon. Out west, particularly, everything is so far apart a bicycle isn't that practical. Besides, the rider emits CO2!

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