Quote:
Originally Posted by Fat Charlie
I wonder how arbitrary it really was. Sure, you can see a bunch of stoners sitting around throwing numbers around, but maybe there's a chance that the numbers are based in reality. If there's a market shift towards cars and away from trucks for personal transportation, the fleet average is going to skyrocket.
Pointing at physics says a Yukon can't get 50 mpg doesn't mean that Bubba can't get 50 mpg on his solo commute.
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Good points. I'm merely pointing out our human tendancy to believe growth rates are sustainable, when in fact nothing with a rate of growth is sustainable.
The law of diminishing returns makes each incrimintal improvement to something exponentially more difficult to achieve. I immediately think of Moore's Law of transistor size in computer chips. We're just a few years away from being unable to substantially reduce the size any further. Physics has limitations, and we are running into those limitations. In the same vein, Toyota's goal of making each itteration of the Prius 10% more fuel efficient is not sustainable.
This isn't to say that improvement isn't worthwhile, just that we cannot extrapolate from previous gains what our future gains will be. For example, if battery density doubled in the past 10 years, we cannot assume that all it takes is more research to double it again in the next 10 years. Likewise, if fuel economy improved a certain percentage in the past, we cannot assume it reasonable to make the same improvement again in the future.
Each incrimental improvement is likely to be exponentially more costly, and at some point the benefit of improvement is outweighed by the substantially higher cost. This is why CAFE and EPA targets should be reviewed. Resonable people would consider the cost / benefit, but unreasonable people would simply impose demands on an industry to satisfy their religious (loosely used to refer to people who think global warming is humanities biggest threat) beliefs.
... and demonstrating 1 instance of reasonable action doesn't imply that all of a person's actions are reasonable. I'm hoping The Great Wall was just idle rhetoric to appeal to extreme voters instead of an actual foreign relations strategy.