Saw an article today in www.edmunds.com about the new Yaris. Both the 4-door sedan and the ugly 2 door hatchback are included. OK, Honda, Toyota has made it's move.......WHERE is the Fit????

 

The Fit was NEVER scheduled to come out in the U.S. until Spring 2006. My local dealer thinks it will be sometime in March. No one in a position of authority with Honda has ever said differently. We are just gonna have to wait, they are still in the midst of making final design decisions and getting the US model to meet all government standards. That stuff takes time.

 

Edmunds lists the EPA city/hwy mpgs for the Yaris as 34/40, which is not even as good as the 2005 Civic HX. I think I will pass. I hope that the Fit does much better in terms of mpgs. Let me also state that I am extremely disappointed with the 2006 Civic mpg figures, which represent a 17% decrease in city efficiency compared to the 2005 HX. What were they thinking?

I will not be able to support them unless the Fit turns out to be much more efficient.

 

No offense GDIV, but you can't compare the '05 HX to the new '06 Civic. The HX has a 117-horsepower engine, and the '06 in EVERY trim line has a more powerful, smoother 140-hp engine that leaves the 117 in the dust. The auto trans gets 40mpg on the highway. And you're disappointed by this? Come on dude, you gotta be kidding me. There is no more fuel-efficient car in the Civic-size category on the road today, all things considered. And the design is mind-blowing, I'd urge you to go drive one if you haven't already. This car is SO much more than just its mileage rating, if you haven't sat in one, you're missing out.

 

The days when horsepower rules are fading fast. World oil production may already have peaked; optimists say it will peak around 2026, and the demand for oil continues to rise. I'm placing my bets on cars that provide safe and reliable transportation with the highest efficiency.

 

I have to disagree with that for a a couple of reasons:

1. Much of the world's oil supply is only available from offshore oil wells, and we've barely begun to do large-scale offshore oil production.

2. There's still a huge amount oil yet to be tapped with modern production methods in the former Soviet Union.

3. Crude oil alternatives such as oil shale, oil tar sands and coal liquification have barely been tapped. With Royal Dutch Shell's recent announcement that they may have the technology to extract oil from oil shale and oil tar sands in situ without having to mine out the shale or tar sands, that could open up enough oil to almost equal the entire Persian Gulf's known reserves at economic prices.

4. The prospect of using methane hydrates as a hydrocarbon fuel base could mean the equivalent of accessing the equivalent of 10 times the known world oil reserves!

5. Companies are seriously looking at growing large tanks certain types of algae with very high hydrocarbon content; that could make it possible to make diesel fuel, kerosene and gasoline from a truly renewable biological source but also the byproduct could be used to make ethanol, another useful motor fuel.

In short, technology will outrun the doomsayers as usual.

 

Also huge untapped oil reserves in Antarctica (possibly more than found in the entire rest of the world to date). Cost of extraction will be higher than other areas but if the oil price is high enough.

 

I don't care about HP. I care about efficiency and emissions. I will be stuck with my next car for at least a decade, and possibly two, and I don't want to feel sick and twisted in my gut every time I buy fuel (like I do now). I'd rather have a weaker engine.

I find it relatively easy to get excellent fuel economy on the highway because of my driving habits and I spend little time in highway situations so the city rating is far more important to me. Better 40 highway than 30, but it would be closer to 50 or 60 or even higher if I had my druthers.

I can't argue with this, but I still want higher efficiency.

I am afraid that I might like it, and another problem, aside from wanting the utility of a hatch, is that I can't really justify the extra expense. $12-ish for a base Fit or Yaris is more doable for me than even a manual DX Civic with dealer-installed air (which would be very similar to my last Honda). Now maybe if the dealer is willing to cut me a steal deal on such 2006 Civic, I might have to consider it, but I suspect that even if that were the case, I would have to wait a long time for the hoopla to die down to get it, since it is still such a hot item.

 

Yes, I am confident in our ingenuity. We will find some new technology that will get us out of this mess. But will it depend on fossil fuels? Will it be anything like the automobile?

1. "Much of the world's oil supply is only available from offshore oil wells, and we've barely begun to do large-scale offshore oil production."

Yes, there is more oil under the oceans, but the amount discovered so far is nowhere close to what we will need at current consumption rates (84 million barrels per day), much less at the rising rate of 2% per year that our expanding world economies now demand. The problem is that total discoveries of crude oil, both on land and at sea, peaked in the 1980s; since then, we've been depleting known reserves at a faster rate than new reserves are discovered. Oil production has continued to increase in the meantime because the reserves have been large enough. But sometime between this year and 2026, world oil production will peak.

By the way, don't expect oil production in the Gulf of Mexico to be fully restored before the next hurricane season.

2. "There's still a huge amount oil yet to be tapped with modern production methods in the former Soviet Union."

That's true, but not enough to sustain current rates of consumption, much less a rising rate of consumption. The same could be said of new Alaska oil (ANWR): at best, we'll get another year of what the U.S. needs. Go to Google and search "peak oil." You'll find disagreements about when world oil production will peak (0-15 years), but not about whether it will peak. My next car will be used within that period.

3. "Crude oil alternatives such as oil shale, oil tar sands and coal liquification have barely been tapped. With Royal Dutch Shell's recent announcement that they may have the technology to extract oil from oil shale and oil tar sands in situ without having to mine out the shale or tar sands, that could open up enough oil to almost equal the entire Persian Gulf's known reserves at economic prices."

Oh yes, there's lots of coal and shale oil and sand oil, but it costs about 20 times as much to extract as the oil we now pump directly from the earth. As time goes by, fossil fuels are requiring more and more energy to extract and produce; and they will require more destructive means of extraction, such as strip-mining, which raises the cost of land diversion and restoration. Before it literally runs out, oil will become too expensive for most of us to use.

4 and 5. "The prospect of using methane hydrates as a hydrocarbon fuel base could mean the equivalent of accessing the equivalent of 10 times the known world oil reserves!. . . .Companies are seriously looking at growing large tanks certain types of algae with very high hydrocarbon content; that could make it possible to make diesel fuel, kerosene and gasoline from a truly renewable biological source but also the byproduct could be used to make ethanol, another useful motor fuel."

Turning food into fuel requires more fuel than turning oil into fuel. Why shouldn't it? We can't wait another hundred million years or so for natural processes to make new oil. Besides, when we divert fisheries and farmlands to the production of fuel, we bring our demand for fuel into a collision with our demand for food at a time when world population approaches the earth's carrying capacity. We already depend heavily on petroleum for fertilizers, pesticides, and food production technology. In the mechanized world, gone are the days of one farmer and a mule for every forty acres. If mechanized farms start using even more horsepower to grow, harvest, transport, and distill bio-mass to produce new fuel, what will that do to the price of fuel and food? And how much additional stress can our fisheries and farmlands sustain?

I'm betting that we'll see an ever-increasing cost of automotive fuel no matter what we do. It will rise substantially in March '06 when the U.S. begins to pay back its strategic petroleum reserve for what was borrowed just after Katrina. There will be valleys and peaks after that, but the general price trend will be upward, not downward, until automobile drivers and other consumers of fossil fuel behave in ways that nature can sustain. For me, the next step will be to make my next car, maybe my last car, as fuel-efficient as possible. For sure, I don't need 140 horses.

 

I haven't heard of oil in Antarctica, but it's not implausible. Here's the rub: "cost of extraction." As oil gets more and more expensive, and it will, more and more people will be squeezed out of bigger cars into smaller cars and ultimately into cars that run on some other technology altogether, or into some other form of transportation altogether.

Honda is a great company, but America seems to have lulled them with a false sense of energy security. Honda is starting to supersize the Civic. Will the Fit reverse that trend?

 

jenshome,


Right now, the two most likely alternatives to pumping "regular" crude oil are extracting oil from oil shale/oil tar sands/coal and growing certain types of algae to create motor fuels.

Up until recently, you literally had to mine out the oil tar sands and oil shale in order to extract the crude oil from it, an extremely expensive process and not very environmentally sound. What Royal Dutch Shell discovered was that by heating the oil shale/oil tar sands and injecting high pressure steam, the crude oil can be pumped out in liquid form in situ without the enormous expense of physically mining out the tar sands or oil shale. With this discovery, that makes is possible to use improved versions of the steam injection technology and mechanical oil pumps already used on California oil fields to extract the oil out, potentially at the same production cost pumping out oil in California. This could make some 400-500 billion barrels of crude oil in North America locked up in tar sands and oil shale extractable.

If you've read the January 2006 issues of Motor Trend and Popular Science, both had articles that talked about the potential of using certain types of algae with very high hydrocarbon count that could be grown in special vertical tanks that wil have little impact in other agricultural activities. When the algae is processed, the resulting oil can be refined into diesel fuel, kerosene or gasoline, while the sludge left over from the processing could be turned into cattle feed or processed further into ethanol motor fuel. This idea has enormous potential, since you can set up these special algae tanks just about anywhere in the world near a water source, and we will end up with "distributed production source" of hydrocarbon fuels that for one thing won't be threatened by things like hurricanes.

 

If these technologies prove to be cost-effective, I'll be among the first to celebrate. So far, none of them will be as cheap as what we have now, and that means a continued rise in oil prices. Here's a dated but informative explanation of the "peak oil" problem. It's the magnitude of need that most people have a hard time appreciating:

http://www.hubbertpeak.com/campbell/commons.htm

 

jenshome,

I've read that report and frankly, the author too easily dismisses the potential for new motor fuel sources.

Remember, what Royal Dutch Shell discovered is still only in the early stages of development; they are right now working on improving the technology so it becomes relatively cheap to heat the oil shale/oil tar sands so the resulting oil can be pumped out using mechanical pumps like those used in California oil fields.

Extracting hydrocarbon fuels from algae has already been successfully demonstrated, and a number of companies (notably EcoGenics and a number of others) are right now building pilot plants to demonstrate this technology can be scaled up to industrial scale. Since algae is a renewable resource, that means there's nearly no such thing as running out of fuel source.

 

I've been reading the posts and find them very interesting. Would I be correct in saying that gasoline will be the fuel of choice for some years to come? Other fuel like ethonol, natural gas, hydrogen, etc would not be major players? I find this interesting, because I read some articles on ethonol, and thought it would be an inexpensive way to replace gasoline - less mileage, but more power and cleaner burning. I did a post here on Fit Freak about that, but didn't get much response, so I guess it's a topic that people aren't very interested in now. The only country in the world that seems to like ethonol is Brazil. Well, just my 2 cents. :-)

 

While ethanol can run on modified gasoline engines, the big downside is that the fuel density is far lower than that of gasoline, so you need to use more ethanol to travel the same distance. That's why most cars in Brazil run in "flex-fuel" mode, being able to run either in pure form but usually in a 50-50 mix of gasoline and ethanol.

 

That's because the alternatives are significantly less efficient than petroleum-based fuels. There is a free paper by Pimentel on ethanol production from various plant crops. It's somewhat controversial but he finds them all to be net energy losers.

http://petroleum.berkeley.edu/papers/Biofuels/NRRethanol.2005.pdf

Also, from a Dec. 6 2005 commentary in The Guardian:

"In 2003, the biologist Jeffrey Dukes calculated that the fossil fuels we burn in one year were made from organic matter “containing 44×10 to the 18 grams of carbon, which is more than 400 times the net primary productivity of the planet’s current biota.”

I don't think it's realistic to expect plants to solve our problems with their very low rates of stored energy. It takes an enormous emount of energy to convert that plant energy into a useful form.

There aren't any easy answers. Biodiesel from algae is reputed to be about the most efficient plant-based process but it hasn't been demonstrated and frankly, I am very skeptical, although I do have hope and I would love to be proven wrong.

The only thing I am absolutely certain about is that we have to drive less, and when we do drive, we should drive with the highest efficiency.

 

Ethanol requires more energy to make than gasoline because farming the grains that go into Ethanol involves petroleum fertilizers, petroleum-powered machinery, petroleum pesticides, and then more energy to distill the grain into alcohol. The algae farms mentioned by MtViewGuy188 have not been proven cost-effective, but maybe some day they will. (By the way, we have a world fresh water crisis on the horizon.) Ethanol also produces less power than gasoline, so you'll get lower mpg when your gasoline is blended with ethanol. Of course, the farmers here in Kansas love Ethanol because it gives them another way to make money on their crops. From a consumer's viewpoint, it means more expensive fuel and more expensive food, and more tax dollars to support Ethanol subsidies. It also puts more stress on farmlands at a time when growing world populations require more food. Natural gas is the cleanest and most efficient petroleum product, but everyone knows that and so now we're straining natural gas supplies, too. People in the midwestern U.S. will know this when they receive their home heating bills in January. Hydrogen is a great idea if we can figure an efficient way to make it and store it. Right now it takes lots of energy to make hydrogen. So, until we have a proven, cost-effective replacement for gasoline, we'd better be very frugal with what we burn in our automobiles. And don't forget, we use petroleum for lots of other purposes: plastics, lubricants, drugs, etc., etc.

 

I, too, am skeptical of biomass solutions. Unfortunately, the debate has become politicized and so it's hard to distinguish real science from propaganda.

Here's the USDA's position:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/aer721/

Of course, the USDA may be too close to corporate farming interests and their farm-belt congressmen to render an objective report on ethanol.

 

Kind of funny you mention that because one advantages of these high-hydrocarbon count algae is that they are designed specifically to thrive in seawater. Because we don't need the enormously expensive process of desalinating water, that means these algae growing tanks can be placed anywhere near the oceans (we're not running out of ocean water anytime soon!).

 

False. This has not happened and will never happen. The majority of new cars coming out with more and more HP than its previous generation. Cases in point... E46 M3 is currently rated at 333HP, the next generation E90 M3 is projected to be rated at 400HP. The IS300 is 215HP, the new IS350 is 306HP.

Keep in mind the extremely popular tuner aftermarket. Without more performance demands, they will die a painful death. Thats not likely to happen.

The true question is, can high HP engines exist while still being fuel efficient? I say yes.