[3am]

You are precisely wrong. Targeting people that already buy into energy efficiency has low payoff.

Say you have your enlightened urban dweller, getting 50mpg. With the fancy new hybrids, let's say they double that and get 100mpg. Given 100K miles of driving, that saves 1000 gallons of fuel.

Now, take your suburbanite SUV driver getting 20mpg. You only have to get their mileage to 25mpg to save the same amount of fuel over 100K miles. Get them to 40mpg, and the improvement is 150% greater than the urbanite's.

Further, only electric vehicles are can realistically be 100% powered from renewables with current technology. Biofuels are in their infancy vs solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear.

Thank goodness for Tesla trying to push boundaries and for the early adopters that are buying them. Also, thank goodness for the Nissan Leaf, the Honda Civic GX, the Prius, and all the people making a difference and buying fuel efficient cars. It's a big problem and there's no "Wrong Way" to be helping.

[pclark]

The point OP is making is that these SUV people fundamentally do not care about efficiency - if they do not care, they have no interest in optimising their milage. The messaging is mostly wasted.

[potatolicious]

> " if they do not care, they have no interest in optimising their milage. The messaging is mostly wasted."

Right, and Tesla's messaging is not about efficiency. Their messaging has overwhelmingly been "holy shit this thing is fast! And green! And exclusive and the crowning achievement of our conquering of science and technology!"

Which isn't that different from traditional sports car marketing, except the green part.

Getting people to be more efficient does not necessarily mean selling efficiency to them and rallying them around it. CFLs and energy-efficient lighting has essentially become commonly as a fashion, as opposed to any significant increase in people's desire to be green. But I couldn't care less - if people are installing CFLs in their homes I don't really care how much they care about their electrical footprint.

[lotharbot]

> "CFLs and energy-efficient lighting has essentially become commonly as a fashion"

I don't think fashion was a big contributor to early adoption. It was mainly the perception of saved money and frustration. Early CFL packaging often had a comparison chart showing the $30 you'd save on electricity versus using incandescent bulbs, and the 6-10 fewer times you'd have to change a burned out bulb over the next 3-5 years. It's not specifically that people care about "being green", but they do care about saving money and effort.

[richardw]

I strongly suspect it's not a binary market with people that care about efficiency on the left and those that don't on the right. There'll be those that care, but prioritize higher performance. Those that want a bigger car due to safety reasons. Combinations thereof.

The market likely maps onto the technology adoption life cycle, and the hardcore SUV petrolheads are likely the 'late majority' or 'laggards'. That leaves a lot of room for market development before even considering those people. They'll take years or decades to change, so ignore them and focus on the customers in the early majority. That includes SUV or sportscar drivers who would like to save money, who do care about the environment, who have moved to a city, etc.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

This is a fallacy that is perpetuated all over the place, not just on HN. It's not that many SUV drivers don't care about efficiency; rather it's not a primary concern. The primary concern is having a vehicle large and powerful enough to do what they need to get done. Sure, for a percentage, that's just hauling their single fat ass to the mall. But for many more they need to haul a boat, or a pack of kids and all the associated stuff without tying it to the roof of the car, etc.

Have you even noticed how many hybrid SUVs are on the market? Who do you think is buying them?

[TechNewb]

>The point OP is making is that these SUV people fundamentally do not care about efficiency - if they do not care, they have no interest in optimising their milage. The messaging is mostly wasted.

I disagree. SUVs are a very common commodity in America, and there are many people whom acquired them for various practical reasons. I've had the same compact SUV since high school, over 10 years, and would love to 'upgrade' to an energy efficient electric car, I just can't afford it now, or any other car at this point in my career. Although I dream of the Model X, and think it's a great idea. I would rather take a train everywhere, but given America's infrastructure, currently a Model X is the next best thing.

[rbanffy]

Biofuels are definitely not in their infancy. My first car ran on ethanol and it was in the mid 80's. The technology in very mature.

[3am]

But most ethanol is net energy negative. Brazilian sugarcane is an exception, but it loses some of its advantage when it's shipped to the US in tankers. Even then, sugarcane requires non-renewable inputs (just not as much as corn). Cellulosic ethanol (from plants that can grow well on marginal farmland, like switchgrass) _is_ still in its infancy. Also, most current engines would need to all be retrofitted to run on anything much greater than E85 because of the greater corrosion.

You're right, though, I should've said something like 'practical biofuels' are in their infancy. I was really more referring to algae oil based petroleum or butanol, as they seem like the most promising candidates for a net-energy positive and high energy density renewable fuel.

(also, it's very cool that you ran on that in the 80s, mind if I ask what kind of car it was, or if you'd had it customized?)

[rbanffy]

> Even then, sugarcane requires non-renewable inputs (just not as much as corn)

I'm not aware of any. Fertilizers?

> most current engines would need to all be retrofitted to run on anything much greater than E85 because of the greater corrosion

OTOH, once the engines get retrofitted (mostly a surface treatment, IIRC), ethanol burns much more cleanly, with much less combustion residue buildup. The early engines had corrosion problems, but once the surface treatment problem was solved, they enjoyed longer active life than their hydrocarbon-burning counterparts.

> mind if I ask what kind of car it was, or if you'd had it customized?

It was a stock Volkswagen Gol (a project derived from the 1st-gen Passat). You can see a couple pictures here: http://carros.uol.com.br/album/volkswagen_gol_historia_album.... At the time, my aunt worked at their engineering department and got one for me as a gift. Mine was a third-generation ethanol engine. She was involved in the ethanol vehicle project.

Most cars you can buy in Brazil today are bi-fuel and can run with any mix of ethanol and gasoline. It's often a good idea to run the car with ethanol from time to time to clean the engine, as ethanol actively removes residue buildup.

[3am]

That is very, very cool. Thank you for posting the link and for the details on retrofitting the engines. I don't know if you're in Brazil, but my understanding is that they are way ahead of the US in renewable fuel usage. Most of our ethanol is corn based for technical and political reasons, and corn is a worse feedstock because it's more difficult for yeast to metabolize and it requires more fertilizer. So it's not nearly as economical here. And you are right, fertilizer is the non-renewable input. Most of the N (nitrogen) in NPK (nitrogen/phosphorus/potassium) is ammonia or urea derived from natural gas via something called the Haber Process.

[onemoreact]

It's the fuels that are in their infancy not the car's. Design a cheap energy efficient way to to turn cellulose into something close to gasoline and you will be able to make more money than Bill Gates. Theoretically it's possible, but nobody has gotten there yet.

[rbanffy]

After driving ethanol-running cars for more than 25 years, I must disagree. If you can't drive ethanol-running cars in your country, be assured it's not really a technical issue.

[onemoreact]

I often fill up with 10% ethanol gas which most cars can burn just fine, but the entire world's supply of ethanol is not enough to replace 10% of total demand with ethanol. We throw away enough feed-stock in the US to double world wide ethanol production, but it's simply not cost effective process it yet.

PS: It's not that far off though the US accounts for ~44% of the world’s gasoline consumption, but it's would take ~57% of the world's ethanol to switch every gas pump in the US to 10% ethanol.

[finnw]

> Design a cheap energy efficient way to to turn cellulose into something close to gasoline

The closest match is probably thermal depolymerization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization)

[alephnil]

In fact it is so mature that what we today call biofuels was what e.g Rudolf Diesel envisioned that his engines would run on, and the prototypes used for fuel. (He also thought of coal dust)

The problem is not the fuel itself, but the possibility to scale up production. Petroleum is available in vast quantities compared to all biofuel feedstocks. Most biofuels today compete with food production, or are not very developed, like cellulose. Even cellulose would have a hard time scale to the sufficient quantities if all the technical problems were solved.