Why Your Car Doesn’t Get 50 MPG

Posted on July 30, 2008
Tag(s): Cars and Transportation | | Email this

Newsweek has a good article about why automakers are not yet mass producing cars for the United States market that get 50 miles per gallon.

It might seem ludicrous to you that there isn’t a mass market right here and now for a 50mpg car. For crying out loud, we’ve entered the age of the $128 fill-up. (The cost of topping off a Chevy Suburban). But here’s the problem: to get to 50mpg in the near future, consumers would have to trade off at least one of three very important things—cost, drive quality or safety. That’s because the quickest way to make a car more fuel-efficient is to make it smaller, lighter and equip it with some high-tech (a.k.a. costly) propulsion system like a plug-in gas-electric system.