I agree... and I think most people who rationally want to encourage conservation would agree as well.

More than the “auto enthusiast”, it really frustrates me that people whose job it is to report on the auto industry don’t understand this. So you have professional journalists (including those at Jalopnik) who don’t call bullshit on these claims.

And you’re right - its been more than 5 years since the footprint based…

More than the “auto enthusiast”, it really frustrates me that people whose job it is to report on the auto industry don’t understand this. So you have professional journalists (including those at Jalopnik) who don’t call bullshit on these claims.

And you’re right - its been more than 5 years since the footprint based…

It’s a legacy name, not indicative of current law.

In 2007 under Bush and a democratic congress , the government passed a reform to the CAFE standards that eliminated the old method of averaging together all the mpg ratings of the vehicles you sold into one corporate average number. Instead, each model gets an mpg…

Wikipedia even covers it:
“In 2006, the rule making for light trucks for model years 2008–2011 included a reform to the structure for CAFE standards for light trucks and gave manufacturers the option for model years 2008-2010 to comply with the reformed standard or to comply with the unreformed standard. The…

ACK!

So many people don’t understand this, but CAFE is not a fleetwide requirement anymore. Each vehicle has its own target based on its size that it has to meet.

You could quite literally have Ford sell 1 million Fiestas per year and 10 Crown Vics (back from the grave), and they could be fined on all of them if the…

Nope.

CAFE has an mpg requirement for each vehicle - not a fleetwide requirement. Toyota could offer 1000 variants of the Prius, but if the consumer wanted nothing but Sequoias, they could still buy them, and Toyota would face no fines under CAFE unless the Sequoia failed to meet its mpg requirement, which is based on…

“the growing consumer demand for larger, less fuel-efficient vehicles such as pickup trucks.”

Also known as the biggest BS excuse ever.

Each vehicle has its own mpg requirement, based on its size. Larger vehicles don’t have to hit the same mpg requirements - they get lower standards.

The 54 mpg target (~40 mpg on the sticker) is actually very achievable.

Many people are confusing the old CAFE, where all cars are lumped together, pushing each manufacturer to sell a small car to get room under the cap for a large car, with the new CAFE, where the standard is based on the size of the vehicle. Ford…

It also ignores that when the airlines pull losses, those losses tend to be enormous.

Over the entire history of the airline industry up through ~2010, the entire industry actually had lost money - that’s right, it was an entirely unprofitable business for nearly 100 years. They had some good years, and a lot of bad…

They had all sorts of problems with the fuel tank, and they were indeed used as the justification for killing it.

However, Lockheed and Northrop continued to work on the composite fuel tank concept and managed to prove it out a few years later. Oddly, its one of the only technologies that survived the project…

And I’m still pissed at Bush for cancelling the X-33. I mean, yes, it was overbudget, but Lockheed had already accepted eating most of the cost overruns, and the total overrun was less than the cost of a single shuttle mission. And they were nearly finished building it, too. That thing had some freakin’ cool…

Before you criticize NASA, you need to understand the problem :

Every president changes course for what NASA is supposed to do in terms of human spaceflight, scrapping everything that has come before and starting programs over. Then inevitably, they don’t actually fund anything properly, either.

It isn’t NASA that’s…

So... by the end of 2018, SpaceX is going to:

1) Build and fly a rocket model that has never flown before

2) Finish development of a capsule that hasn’t been qualified for flight

3) Use it to fling people around the moon.

I have a nasty feeling that Musk’s ego is going to get some astronauts killed with these approaches...

They absolutely have poor PR, that’s for sure.

And some of it honestly isn’t even their own fault. We’ve all heard stories where someone showed up drunk and the union fought to keep their job. The dirty secret is that by law, the union has to demonstrate strong representation or *they* can be sued. It’s a nasty…

And as I stated, your claim of defined benefit plans being unsustainable is entirely false.

The sustainability of a defined benefit plan is determined by those factors I listed.

3rd:

Makes no sense. Capital outlays aren’t subtracted from your revenues to get your earnings. They’re depreciated over time, and the depreciation hits your earnings statements. The outlays hit cash flow, not earnings.

Frankly, having worked with the UAW (but not as a member), most of the rap they have is spin that anti-union forces have been working up for years and people have been buying hook, line, and sinker.

Frankly, anytime someone says that defined pensions are not sustainable, I immediately doubt their knowledge.

Whether or not a defined pension is sustainable depends on only a few things.

1) Contribution rates
2) Benefit formula
3) Assumed rate of return
4) Current balance

If a company has reasonable expectations on rates…

I probably wouldn’t say that for any new highway, but when you get to adding that 4th lane, I’d mandate it either along with that 4th lane or prohibit any additional capacity without adding it. Not sure where the boundary should lie, but every additional lane brings diminishing returns, and if there is that much…