On Big Vehicles

I am still driving a bazillion miles to work every day. (Readers you can start to feel sympathy at your earliest convenience.) But one thing I have to gripe about, truckers and the trucking industry. I personally pay about $20,000 a year in income tax, now some of that money goes to help keep unemployed Newfoundland fishermen on unemployment insurance, some goes to build subways... (excuse me Le Metro in Montreal), and some goes to build highways here in Ontario, highways that seem to be flooded with poorly maintained trucks.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying trucks are the bane of my existence, they just come pretty damn close. They need forever and a million miles to accelerate to highway speeds (causing traffic disruptions for miles behind them), they need just as long and far to decelerate, they are unstable, in the winter the top of the trailers are covered in snow and as a result leave a mini snow storm for the sorry sods stuck behind them. All too many truckers are very reckless with their vehicles, tail-gating and not allowing others to merge or change lanes and for kicks from time to time a whole wheel will just fall right off at speed on the highway and collide with another car three lanes over, going the other direction! (Killing the driver.) Then the industry will circle the wagons and call it a freak accident and say there is nothing that can be done about it. (Hint guys, as an amateur bike mechanic I'll tell you what the fix is, grease your lug nuts and use a torque wrench.) Then people get to wonder why there are so many highway fatalities.

Speaking of big vehicles, I found the following on the Globe and Mail web site in the drive section:

The shortcomings of the SUV genre have been well documented in works like Keith Bradsher’s High and Mighty – The Dangerous Rise of the SUV. Bradsher’s book shows how SUVs conquered North America thanks to an odd confluence of consumer demand, flawed government regulation, and short-sighted corporate policy (SUVs were hugely profitable for car companies).


Engineers were confounded by the popularity of SUVs, which are designed around an odd set of parameters – they’re too heavy, they have too much frontal area, and their height makes them unstable. But automotive purchase patterns are determined by a number of forces, and the strangest one of all is human nature. Author Malcolm Gladwell noted the psychology of the SUV market in a 2004 New Yorker story: “... internal industry market research concluded that SUVs tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills.”

Its a funny thing the SUV as a concept. I was speaking with a co-worker of mine who is a major auto enthusiast, he is in the process of building a car from parts using a Ford 1969 Mustang body with a big block V8 (I think his engine will have something in the neighbourhood of 350 cubic inches or about 8L of displacement, naturally aspirated). Obviously this guy loves his cars, and trucks, he has a Ford F-150 for use as his family (wife and two kids) and daily commuting vehicle, that Mustang will be his track day car.

From reading my blog, I would expect that he and I would disagree about many things, actually we don't. I am not so sure the F-150 makes much sense as a commuter but the engineering behind building a car, espeically one designed to be absoultely the fastest quarter mile (400m) finisher I have to respect. (Building it naturally aspirated means that while it will have an incredible quater mile time it's city fuel economey will be apalling, but at least it will be a lot less maintenance than say a 2L VW Touareg with a turbo charger.)

Anyway one day while talking with my co-worker, about cars, he mentioned that the SUV was the dumbest idea in automotive engineering. We concluded that it was a pickup truck chassis with a hatchback body on top. Now for non-engineers what this means is, well a truck chassis is designed to be very stiff and not very stable, but very cheap - after all it is assumed that truck drivers are more careful and have more weight to lug but do not mind driving slower. A hatchback is designed to be faster (than a truck) and have a higher centre of gravity than a conventional car. Combine the two and you have the worst of both worlds. A very high centre of gravity on a very stiff frame (even the so called 'crossovers' need a stiffened chassis) with a huge cross section to the wind. Net result, unsafe at any speed and pathetic fuel economey.

Furthermore, just becuase the engine has the latest in fuel saving measures, turbo chargers, fuel injection, and so on, the bottom line is, there is only so much energy that can be usefully converted from the potential chemical energy in octane into forward motion on the road. In fact I can even assert that for every four joules of chemical potential energy the classic internal combustion four stroke engine will only get about one joule of foward energy. (You want better fuel milage, ride a bicycle.)

On a related note, I heard on the news yesterday, the Saudis have delcared that in order to maintain a desired level of social services they feel that the desired price of oil ought to be about $100 (US) a barrel, their previous price was $75 (US). I also recall that in 2000 (12 years ago) it was $24 (US). Factoring in inflation and the fact that the US dollar, actually thanks to the disaster in Europe we better compare the green back to the Chinese RenMinBi (Yuan), so lets see in 2001 $1 (US) was about RMB 8.28, whereas today $1 (US) is about RMB 6.29. Thus the US dollar has allowed (by the Chinese) to decline by about 24% while the price of oil has gone up by over 400%. Now let's assume inflation from January 2000 to today averages at about 3% per year, inflation over 12 years would be 42.58%, thus what cost $100 (US) in 2000 should cost $142.58 (US) but factoring in the decline of the US dollar lets chop another 24% off, so $100 (US) in 2000 becomes $176.80. Thus if the Saudis liked oil at $24 (US) a barrel in 2000 they should like oil at about $42.43 (US) a barrel today.

The fact is the Saudis have always liked a low price of oil, it keeps the addict (America and Western Europe) hooked on their cheap smack. I suspect the real reason Saudi Arabia is letting the price of oil go up is to give the appearence that they still have some control over the price of oil. Currently a barrel of West Texas Intermediate Light Sweet closing at Cushing OK will set you back $101.20 and a barrel of Brent North Sea crude will cost about $111.19.

I guess the moral here is SUVs are the ultimate symbol or reckless excess in an enviornment that is rapidly running out of the good stuff. An interesting aside, the following article links oil price volatility to the rise in political partisanship.