The simple fate of growing up in Southern Michigan ties virtually everyone to the automotive industry. I grew up reading Car & Driver cover to cover. I knew 0-60 stats of every production performance car manufactured. I worked summers in college at my neighbor’s machine shop. Most of the time I mindlessly pushed Ford fuel pump covers through an industrial grinding machine. When I wasn’t grinding fuel pump covers under the watchful eye of Rusty, the machine’s operator, I milled mounting brackets for air conditioning units.
That said, I felt a connection to the State’s dominant industry. For a time I was an apologist for Detroit. Why couldn’t the Big Three keep up with or out pace the Japanese and Europeans?
Off the line product quality as measured by JD Power of the Big Three has long suffered. In JD Power and Associates 2007 rankings by marque, only Lincoln/Mercury scored above 3 stars in JD Power’s 5 start ranking. Porsche, Lexus, Toyota, Jaguar, Infiniti and Honda were the other marques scoring 4 or 5 star rankings.
The Big Three hold great responsibility in their failure to market progressive, high quality and highly efficient automobiles. For too long have they been aggressively marketing higher margin SUVs and are just now paying the price for their product development single mindedness. As much as the executives and product developers should be held responsible, shouldn't too the United Auto Workers? The UAW has had the information and the ability to influence the products they build. The UAW certainly exerts its influence on other business practices of the auto makers. Shouldn't they also be concerned about dwindling market share and product line health? As much as the Big Three have been asleep at the switch, so too has the UAW. Labor has ignored its responsibility to maintain the health of the hand that feeds it.
In all of this industrial-political-economic fiasco enter biofuels. Ethanol and biodiesel compete for market and mind share as environmentally sound transportation fuels. Corn-based ethanol production in the US has been less about economic and environmental gain and more about political influence of the agricultural lobby. This spring, The Economist, an erstwhile defender of the free market economy, agreed with Fidel Castro’s statement lambasting the US policy of corn-based ethanol production.
A Friday, November 30th USA Today article “E85 does poorly in cost-benefit analysis,” highlights the lifetime cost-benefits of hybrids vs. diesel vs. E85 fueled vehicles, in a Pardee Rand Graduate School study. The study estimated that at current prices, E85 vehicles would cost an average of $1,600 more to operate over the lifetime of the vehicle. A diesel-powered auto was estimated to save an owner $2,300. That's nearly a $4,000 advantage to diesel, an existing and widely available technology.
The energy content of E85 is 70% that of gasoline. That means lower fuel mileage and less power (100% biodiesel also contains 70-80% less energy content than petrolem diesel). So why have the Big Three been pushing ethanol? For starters, ethanol is a political win for farm states. Cars engineered to run E85 require less transition for the manufacturers and consumers. Europe far exceeds the US in its existing passenger car fleet of diesel autos. Between one third to one half of all European passenger vehicles, run on diesel fuel. The US automotive fleet is a fraction of that.
Castro rightly points out that ethanol from corn feed stocks requires more energy inputs than ethanol derived from sugar cane (widely grown in Cuba) or wood (the feedstock poised to most benefit the NW). Biodiesel can, on the other hand, be more easily derived from waste oil and crops such as canola and algae, with less energy input.
With current technology (at least until wood-based ethanol becomes widely refined), high efficiency gasoline-fueled autos and diesel-powered cars provide more of a solution to the US dependence on petroleum than ethanol will for the foreseeable future. Diesel cars have the additional capability of burning carbon-neutral (or even net carbon benefit) biodiesel from waste oil and agricultural feed-stocks, with little or no modification off the showroom floor.
The internal combustion engine powering automobiles traces its existence to 1879 when Karl Benz was granted a patent for the internal combustion engine. Benz designed and built his own four-stroke engine that was used in his automobiles, the first cars in production. Why then have petroleum-based fuels remained the dominant market force for more than 100 years? Probably for the same reasons coal, first used in a distributed investor-owned utility generation station by Thomas Edison in 1882, still fuels more than 50% of all electricity production nation wide.