Nostalgia Cars: Where the Industry is Getting It Wrong

My younger brother owns one of those new Mini Coopers. A neighbor up the street owns two of them. They're very nostalgic, but physically they're big, comfy, have all the usual luxuries and safety so are expensive and not very fuel efficient. Having a Mini means you've "made it" enough to afford a silly car, not that you're struggling hard to get there. You pay a premium for what the car evokes in styling cues and price point. Its not the real deal. Its a lovely counterfeit, better in most ways. Where it fails is fuel economy. All that weight requires a bigger engine to move it, and that means its not the sippiest engine around.

The Fiat 500 replaced a small cheap car with a ragtop and flimsy panels that barely kept the rain off, and a 2-stroke 500 cc engine meant to help post-War Italy get through the rebuilding poverty and still get to work in the rain, while the rest of the population was literally riding Vespas on cobblestones or gravel past bulletholed monuments and bombed out shops that used to house Mussolini's brown shirts and the Nazis. That they did this is a big part of why I think Americans will take the similar path, eventually. We don't really have much choice.

Look, Fracking is getting us natural gas and oil from previously unusable source rock, which is great, but dissolved gases means there have been some bad environmentalist fodder, fixable, even profitable with a degasser on a well that stores the methane for home use or sales. Fair is fair, after all. Instead of complain your sink is on fire, pull the gas out, compress it, and sell gas bottle refill service or to one of those propane companies. Why not? Or convert your car to run on compressed natural gas and never buy fuel again. Its like making lemonade instead of complaining about how much you hate the color yellow. Duh.

Anyway, the oil side of things, for transportation fuel comes at a particularly bad time in the US economy. We're in doldrums with a socialist trying to impoverish America and largely succeeding. We're going to need taxes on fracking, and will export that oil to China on the open market for hard currency to pay for socialized medicine just to keep our doctors and keep the population alive. Would you HONESTLY trust a pot-head midwife to care for your infant? Hell no. You want actual labwork and actual qualified pediatricians and that won't happen with the current cost-scale for real doctors, which Obamacare can't possibly afford because its a bad law. This means that oil availability, and thus prices, will continue to rise. Even under the next president. Even if the USA divides into autonomous regions because DC is clearly nuts and offers nothing positive to the rest of the country. DC is a parasite. It needs to be purged. Sectioned off. Defunded.

So fuel economy still matters, even with fracking getting us non-OPEC oil. We'll still be selling half or more. That only leaves us half to burn ourselves. To get to work and deliver medicine and power the ambulances to the hospitals staffed with who knows how qualified doctors. Meh. Bad scene. To get best fuel economy, moving a vehicle is power to weight ratio. The less weight, the less power required to go up that hill, or the faster it can go. We need to sacrifice speed and weight to gain fuel economy, thus continue to move at all in what is essentially post-war economy. War with the Arab world, one we both lost. They're running out of oil, and we're running out of money and patience.

Really, the right answer is bring back the sub-liter engine, and design the car to go slow, under 60 mph, not for 130 or whatever. Even if they don't mandate lower speeds under this president, slower means less fuel used. Its basic physics. Air drag coefficients are exponential with velocity. Under 40 mph, your hand out the window isn't deflected that much compared to 55 or 75 mph. My old VW bug was small, light, and relatively cheap. If it had been made of aluminum or carbon fiber and a bit smaller (they're surprisingly big on the inside), it could have run a smaller engine and be just as slow. My 1.6 L boxer engine only got me to 55 mph and barely 60 downhill with a tail wind. That's literal, btw. I drove to to San Francisco once, down 101. That big grade near Sausolito was brutal going up and WHEE! going down, slow lane both directions.

Here's what I think we should do:

1. Build Fiat, Mini, VW Beetle in carbon fiber and aluminum, get weight down to 1200 pounds. 
2. Design crash safety for 60, not 100 mph. Allow cheap Euro vehicles in USA, despite poor safety. 
3. Standard models have few electrics, no luxuries like electric windows to save on weight. 
4. Bring back proper manual ragtops and high door sills for stiffening. 
5. Use carbon fiber tub such as McLaren uses for center of car. Huge weight reduction and strength. 
6. Reduce engine size to Liter or less. Motorcycle engines such as in Smart Cars are ideal, when vehicle weight is low enough. 
7. Sell these cars cheap, like regular econobox cheap, so they aren't just curiosities for the rich nostalgia crowd. 
8. Have governors authorize through enforcement rules for the state highway patrols, slow vehicles in the slow lane. This will reduce speeds overall and make fuel economy better for trucks too, since the speed differential is eating their profits. Big trucks have lots of air drag too, after all, and that wastes diesel. When they can drive slower, they are more efficient. 

And sell the 49cc Vespa for $900, full trim, because the actual unit is 20 minutes assembly work and $125 in parts. No really. They brag about this. Also sell the 150cc EFI Vespa for $1500, since that's nearly $250 in parts and almost 22 minutes in assembly time. Woo! So expensive! Instead of the $4400 they're currently charging. Do that and they'll sell millions of the things, and replacement parts. And Vespa riding gear. Just think. But they don't. This is a niche for someone to exploit. 

These solutions are probably going to happen anyway, but it would be nice if the car companies started producing UL models (Ultralight) based on this premise. You don't need exotic batteries or Yttrium for electric wheel hub motors if you're just a lighter vehicle to begin with. Rumored tests of the Prius engine in a non-Prius car had 10+ better MPG, allegedly, which was a scandal that threatened their Green Image at Toyota so they squashed it, allegedly. And it makes sense, since without batteries, you strip out half the weight of a Prius. Power to weight ratio: ding! I will say I remember reading that all Priuses return to the factory when wrecked and can't be sold to regular parting out. Whether this is to recycle exploding Lithium batteries or to deny access to the Atkinson Cycle engine to hot-rodders or other gearheads interested in the high-torque small displacement motor getting shoehorned into something lighter than a Prius, that is speculation. 

This is what I think the auto industry should be doing. There are lots of poor college graduates serving coffee or waiting tables or standing behind counters in various retail outlets that nobody has money to visit anymore because college graduates are under-employed by the President they voted into office. Just Desserts? Indeed. But the punishment for naivete is overly harsh and while many won't learn from their mistakes, having been brainwashed by 17 years of lower and higher education, some will, and all have to live with it either way. If America continues like this, without adapting to the harsh reality of Scarcity, what happens to their future? Best to accept a life with slow and unsafe cars so we can move at all. Get used to Minimum Wage jobs because those are the only ones around any more. Accept the burden of repaying debts the Baby Boomers caused for their own comforts and Security decades ago, and the jobs they exported for a better return on their portfolios. We're stuck with this mess. We can't fix it till those votes are gone. And human life expectancy in America is 83. That's 18 more years of guaranteed poverty while the Boomers live it up on Social Security, keeping the party going since they hold most of the votes. Unless Obamacare gets rid of all the doctors....