interview
>
lovins
> lovins 2
Lovins 2 (2:13)
Topic(s): Efficiency
User Comments
© WGBH Educational Foundation
Please watch the clip first. If you plan to use it, review
the Rules of Use, then click on the download button.
This clip is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution
Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Video Transcript
Of all the fuel energy you put into your car, 87 percent, 7/8s
of it never gets to the wheels—it's lost first in the
engine, then driveline idling and accessories. Of the 1/8 of
the fuel energy that does reach the wheels, half of that
either heats the air that the car pushes aside or it heats the
tires and road. Only the last six percent of the fuel energy
actually accelerates the car and then heats the brakes when
you stop. And then remember that only about five percent of
the mass you're accelerating is you—the other 95 percent
is the car. Therefore only about six percent of five percent,
or 0.3 percent, of the fuel energy ends up moving the driver.
After 120 years of devoted engineering effort this is not very
gratifying, but we can do a validated order of magnitude
better than that. By redesigning the car to have good physics,
be light, have low aero dynamic drag, low rolling resistance
—and it turns out that's actually not difficult, it just
takes attention. So you know the industry, just to take
aerodynamics as an example, has done experimental cars with
drag coefficients point 14-odd passively, point 12-odd
actively—they've had briefly production cars at point
19—slippery cars on the road today like the Prius or the
Honda Insight are point 26. So why should the new electric car
the Volt from GM be point 32? What's so difficult about
getting much better than that, well maybe they were just in a
hurry and maybe it'll improve. But why is the average car in
the point threes? It should be much lower than that. You know,
we knew how to do that stuff back in the 1930s. In fact, why
is the average car today only about efficient as a Model A?
