Page 20 , RAIN Ja.nuary 1981 Raising A''Fleet Of .Rabbits· • • I l .it • •• By Amory Lovins I'd like to give you a few little numbers about how to save oil, be- · cause that is indeed a very urgent thing to do, and if you want to save a lot of oil quickly in this country there are only two important way~ to do it. It's a distressingly simple prescription: Stop living in sieves, and stop driving petrol pigs. Now we know that a basic weatheriza.tion program in this country just over the next 10 years would save us upwards of 2½ million barre.ls a day, which, by the way, is two-fifths of our present rate of oil imports. That's a big number. . • What a·bout the other three-fifths of our imports? We could do • that with qne simple fast payback measure . .. namely: turn over the car stock faster. Any of you who have tried to trade in a gasguzzler lately will know that its trade-in value has dropped pretty close to zero. So those gas-guzzlers have been trickling down to the poor people who can least afford to run them or replace them. But we have a lot mqre options than gas-guzzlers. Our average car now gets 15 or 16 miles per gallon. The average U.S.-made car sold last year did about 19 mpg. The average import, how.ever, did 32 mpg. A diesel Rabbit does about 42 mpg. The turbo-charged diesel Rabbit with a slightly down-sized engine so it gives the same performance as the pre_sent diesel Rabbit does about 64 mpg. • Volkswagen has already tested a four-door, four-passenger car, ~igger than the Ra}:,bit, \Yith a composite rating between 70 and 80 mpg. That's an advanced diesel. They'v,~also taken a big, heavy car and stuck into it, using off-the-shelf comp,,onents, a diesel electric hybri<J,-drive. That one did 83 mpg·the first time they turned it on. We know that it's really pretty straightfoward, without losing 'either comfort or performance, to get in the 70 to 100 mpg·range, and if we really put together the·hest technologies we have, we can push it a lot further than that. , Now a fleet of, say, ·60 mpg, that is about the same as the hondown-sized turbo-charged diesel Rabbit_:__20 extra horses in your Rabbit (that's difficult to visualize . . . very small horses . .•. ) would save us nearly 4 million ba.rrels a day. More than we get from the Gulf; about two-th,irds of our present rate of net oil i_mports; several pre-embargo !rans; 80 big synfuel plants; 2½ North Slopes. It's a big number. Well, how can we ac}:lieve that sort of fleet? I was figuring that rather than building synfuel plants, it would be much cheaper and . quicker to·saVie oil by using the same money to pay somewhere between half and all of the cost of giving you a free di~sel R~bbit or Honda Civic, or an equivalent American car 1f Detroit would make ·one, provided, however, that you will scrap your automobile and get it off the road. It's·no good to trade it in or sell it because then somebody else might drive it. You've got to g~t rid-of it, recycle it. . If you get rid of it and don't replace it, you ought to get a bounty based on its inefficiency and residual lifetime. Another way to do it would be that for each mile per gallon that your new car improves over the car you scrap, you should get a cash grant of about $200. That would give us an average 5-year payback against synfuels. Now you might suppose that it's really ltj,nd of hard for Detroit to make this sort of switch,.even tho~gh the latest word we get is that the 7,0 to 80 inpg VW may be on the market as early as '84. That may sp·e~d thii;igs up a bit. Around 1940 Detroit apparently switched over to making tanks and jeeps.and other completely different products in 6 or 8 months, having first said it was impossible. Now that is undoubted~y expensive to do. Detroit is already planning to spend around 50 billion dollars in this _decade for re-tooFng • on two rather timid n~w generations of cars, but suppose instead they retooled in one giant leap-frog, straight to state-of-the-art hybrids at 100 mpg. And suppose that the additional cost ... to do that was as·high as 100 billion dollars. I don't think that's a plausible number. That's almost enough to rebuild Detroit from the bottom up. But if it were that much, and if we spread that 100 billion dollars extra cost over a c~mplete new fleet, 100 million new cars r an<f30 million hew trucks, that,'s $770 per vehicle and the pay-back time is one year against the presen,t gasoline price! If only we·had a government that was economically conservative, rather than either muddled or reactionary. . . . -From Amory;s address to the Passive Solar '81 conference in Amherst·, Mas~achusetts, October 1980.
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