Greenpiece of My Mind

Being a bit of a car nut, chances are that if you are talking about anything automotive while I am within earshot, I am very likely at least casually listening in. I don't mean it in a stalker-ish sense, but the automotive world is inherently interesting to me, as are people's ideas, likes, dislikes, and misconceptions about it. Recently, my interest was piqued at lunch as I overheard a couple talking about a friend's new car.

Apparently said friend was very excited about and proud of her new car. While I didn't hear what kind of car it was, it was patently obvious that the couple in question likely couldn't be troubled to care any less about it. If anything, they seemed annoyed by their friend's exuberance, as she was apparently very proud of its newness, its style, and its green-ness. The lady remarked that the friend wouldn't shut up about the great gas mileage, and how it was a "flex-fuel" vehicle, which apparently made it more special.

Clearly confused, her husband asked. "What's that mean?"

"I don't have any idea," the woman said dismissively, "but she says it means it gets better gas mileage."

"Oh. Like a hybrid."

It turns out that people take offense to random strangers correcting their misconceptions in public without solicitation, so I refrained from doing so in this case. I just shook my head at the unfortunate commonality of it; while this couple wasn't the issue, their green-brained friend was - so caught up in her own Earth Mother smugness that she somehow misplaced her grasp on reality. Or at the very least least her ability to fact-check.

In the last decade-plus-a-few, car companies have stepped up their approach to vehicle efficiency and economy by several orders of magnitude. While this has resulted in some great technological leaps, there has also developed a sort of "Green Ideal" that is creeping into every aspect of society. Everything is Green - or at least it's supposed to be, and if it's not, some poor baby polar bear is crying on a slowly-melting iceberg in the north Atlantic, and it's all your fault.

The automotive industry is not the only guilty party these days, as every industry and market sector seems eager to bank on the Eco-Fad. Some computers, for example, are now being marketed as "environmentally-friendly" based on the amount of power they use and the construction of their GBs. A certain potato chip company, as another example, is now bragging about the fact that their bags are made from plants and as such are biodegradable. Several restaurants, fast food and traditional alike, heavily hype the fact that the cows used to make their steaks were served hormone-and-additive-free menus and not confined in holding cells. All of this is supposed to appeal to our ingrained desire to save the planet and make Mother Earth sing happy songs of joy. Or something like that. Your fanaticism may vary.

The problem with all this is that there is so much hype and haughtiness caught up in the whole "Let's Be Green and Save the World" ideal that objectivity suffers on account of it. The computer company neglects to mention that their Green Computer Box is priced like - or higher than - its competition but offers about half the performance of some of those competitors. The potato chip company's product tastes like eco-friendly cardboard, the same as it always has; given the hype surrounding the bag, though, perhaps I should try eating that - it certainly couldn't be any worse. And finally, despite claims that the animal was treated better and had a better life, the restaurant's non-hormone-addled cow was still led into a slaughterhouse and ended up dead on my plate in the form of an A1-drenched T-bone. Green perhaps, but still not very fortunate for the cow. The bottom line is that there needs to be more thought and reason behind our consumeristic decisions than falling into the Green trend just for the sake of being Green. The earth isn't going anywhere for a while, and contrary to popular belief, the planet will not be saved by your boycott of the KFC Double Down.

The automotive industry has a lot of these traps in it, mostly thanks to its occasionally-brilliant marketing departments. They come up with ways to entice the public into believing that "Green is good" (apologies to Gordon Gekko), that it is easy being Green (apologies to Kermit the Frog), and that you are a lesser man if you are not a Green Man (note: I will not extend apologies to Jim Belushi, as he should apologize to humanity as a whole for 'According to Jim.' I do apologize, however, for even making a passing reference to it).

Regarding the exuberant friend's "Flex-Fuel" vehicle, like many Green consumers, she was an easy mark for some marketing sleight-of-hand. "Flex-fuel" by definition denotes a vehicle whose engine is built to run on either regular gasoline or an ethanol-blended concoction known as E85. Of every gallon of E85, 85% of it is ethanol (a corn-derived alcohol) and 15% is gasoline. The Green argument is that these cars, by using E85, are using considerably less gasoline and therefore helping save the poor, crying polar bears on their melting ice floes.

While a good idea on paper, the practicality of this argument is offset by a few factual issues. The first is the availability of E85 to begin with: of the thousands of gas stations in the country, there are only 1900 or so stations that carry E85, with most of those being located in corn-rich states in the Midwest. As you might imagine, Arizona does not make that list, so it is doubtful that the Green friend had ever touched a drop of E85 (or for that matter, likely even knew of its existence or its necessity for her Greenmobile to live up to her hype).

Then there's the cost, both on the vehicle itself as well as the consumer's wallet. Ethanol by nature is a less-efficient combustor, which means that each combustion event generates less energy than its gasoline counterpart. In real-world terms, this means that overall fuel economy drops considerably compared to regular gasoline, even in engines specifically built for it. For the average consumer, this means that though the cost per gallon is lower, the vehicle will require more gallons to cover the same number of miles, meaning that you are paying more for the privilege of having lower fuel efficiency.

OK: math time.

As an example, let's use the Chrysler Town & Country minivan - bane of the suburban parent for fear of losing whatever coolness and dignity that may have been remaining in life. The standard gasoline-only engine is rated at an average of 20mpg, while its flex-fuel counterpart weighs in at an average of 13mpg while drinking E85 - that's a 35% difference right out of the gate. According to AAA, the average American motorist drives about 12,000 miles per year, so we'll use that as a baseline number. The standard Town & Country covers that distance using 600 gallons of gasoline, while the E85 version needs 923 gallons to do it (divide 12k miles by average MPG to get that number). From there, we can extrapolate the price over that distance: with an average gas price of $3.02 in Arizona at the moment, the standard version's 600 gallons of fuel cost a total of $1,812. With E85 fuel currently averaging $2.60 per gallon nationwide as of this writing (a price difference of 14% less than gasoline), the flex-fuel vehicle's 923 gallons ring up a yearly tab of just a few pennies under $2400.

Conclusion: while the E85 vehicle uses 85% less petroleum per gallon of fuel, it gets 35% less mileage per gallon and costs the consumer 25% more per year for the privilege.

Paying more money for less efficiency simply does not make financial sense, and until E85 engines can be built to at least match their conventional cousins' efficiency per gallon, they will serve as little more than feel-good Green options with more bark than bite.

And depending upon who your friends are, that can be a loud, annoying, smug and misguided bark to be sure.