Worried about soaring gas prices and looking for something with a little better fuel economy? How about a nice Toyota Avensis? Or a Ford Mondeo? Or a turbodiesel anything?
If the Toyota and Ford model names seem a little strange to you, there's a reason. You can't buy them here. And the supply of turbodiesels in the U.S. market is very limited. But they are all big sellers in Europe and other parts of the world.
A lack of technology rarely is a roadblock to solving problems. Sometimes the difficulty really is in having a willingness to use the technology. Automobiles are a good example, but hardly the only one.
For example, there's voicemail. The technology has become incredibly sophisticated over the years. Speech recognition systems can process routine transactions efficiently and accurately — sometimes more so than a poorly-trained human would. Doesn't matter to me. I keep hitting the "0", "*", and "#" keys on my phone until the system surrenders and puts a person on the line. If I had wanted to talk to a machine, I would have used the organization's Web site in the first place.
So it is with automobiles. Avensis and Mondeo play the role of the Camry and Fusion respectively in their company's product lineups: the bread and butter family car. The crucial difference is that they are smaller than their U.S. counterparts and have smaller engines. Consequently when similar products are offered here, Americans push the pound-sign button.
Several years ago, Ford sold an earlier version of the Mondeo as the Contour. It flopped because it sold at a price close to that of the bigger Taurus, and Americans regarded it as a bad buy. The closest Toyota has come to bringing the Avensis into the United States is in using its chassis for the Scion tC coupe, a sporty two-door aimed at young drivers that bears little resemblance to the practical sedans and station wagons sold in other countries.
This is too bad. Smaller cars with proportionately more room inside than standard American cars would be very practical in the narrow streets of Boston and other older Massachusetts communities. Moreover, from the perspective of technology, the laws of physics are more determinative of energy consumption than any government fuel efficiency edict. Less weight means less energy is required to move the vehicle; smaller shapes encounter less wind resistance, and so on.
Technologies exist to help mitigate the problem, most prominently hybrids and turbodiesels. Hydrogen fuel cell cars are much talked about, but are years away from realization. The first two are what's on the market now.
Hybrids are simply cars with two engines — one a conventional gasoline unit, the other an electric motor. The electric motor provides sufficient additional power so that a smaller gas engine — there we go with the "smaller" again — can offer the same performance as a larger one. The electric motor is fed by batteries that are recharged by the gas engine (ideally at a time when the engine isn't working very hard) and also through recapturing energy that might otherwise be lost, notably while breaking.
All of which is to say that a hybrid is a great solution for stop and go driving. The electric motor will more efficiently handle the "go" part than a gas engine while the "stop" recharges the batteries. On the highway, though, the energy savings are not as great because there the gasoline engine does most of the work.
Therein lies the utility of the diesel. Its design is such that it produces power in a more useful range than conventional gas engines so that it can accomplish more with less horsepower. As a result, it will provide better gas mileage in almost any kind of driving.
Turbocharging (basically blowing more air into the engine's intake so that the fuel-air mixture produces more power) ups performance and also helps reduce the pollution to which diesels are prone. Air quality rules have been an obstacle to turbodiesels' acceptance. Only in the last year has the federal government mandated reducing sulfur in diesel fuel, which with some other technical advances, make diesels clean enough for general use.
There is, however, no free lunch. Cars powered by hybrids and turbodiesels cost more than cars with conventional engines, so much so that at current U.S. gas prices the fuel efficiency savings are not sufficient to cover the extra cost. Even with those technologies in place, it would still be true that a smaller and lighter car would have better fuel economy than bigger ones. Europe's fondness for such cars admittedly is not entirely voluntary — high sales and fuel taxes there severely penalize gas guzzlers.
Still even Bay State drivers concerned about the gas crisis would be well advised to consider that when shopping for a new car that efficient technology helps but size does matter.
Al Gordon is a Massachusetts-based writer who specializes in technology and consumer electronics. You can read more of his articles at www.algordon.com/techblog.html and e-mail him at eagle@algordon.com.
