What Will the Car of the Future Look Like?

During the 1990s, Bill Clinton and Nobel Laureate Al Gore led an administration that did nothing to increase the federal fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks. But if there is a second Clinton administration, led by Sen. Hillary Clinton, she plans to push to double the fuel economy of U.S. cars and trucks to 55 miles per gallon by 2030.

Sen. Clinton's ambitious energy platform is just one sign of how the auto industry has lost control of the fuel efficiency debate after two decades of successfully spinning demands for tougher mileage standards as assaults on safety, jobs and freedom. It was a great, V-8 powered ride. Now it's over.

Industry executives may harbor private skepticism that carbon dioxide pumped out of cars is to blame for melting polar ice caps or threatened polar bears. But there's no doubt the political climate has gotten hotter for car makers. From the campaign trail to Congress to the federal courts to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, auto makers are getting knocked on the head to do more to curb automotive oil consumption and CO2 emissions.

Could car makers meet Sen. Clinton's challenge to double in 23 years the fuel economy of the average car sold in America? Sure they could. That's not the real question.

Cars that get 55 miles per gallon or more can be found as antiques in museums (or on the Internet.) Right after World War II, for example, European car makers built a variety of mini-mobiles such as the Messerschmitt KR175, later called the KR200, that carried one person on three wheels and averaged some 60 miles to the gallon.

You could say the Messerschmitt is a cartoon design no serious person would consider as a response to today's transportation needs. What about the company called Aptera, which is promoting a vehicle with three wheels that will be powered by some kind of batteries? Aptera, one of a number of electric car upstarts, says it will offer this super-efficient transporter for about $30,000.

The Toyota Prius and the Honda Civic hybrid you could buy today are rated at about 46 miles per gallon and 42 miles per gallon in combined city and highway driving -- and the numbers that would be used for Corporate Average Fuel Economy compliance are higher. A new generation of lithium-ion batteries and some tweaks to the computers in their gas engines probably get them to 55 mpg.

A more sober analysis of what's possible in advanced automotive design comes from a group of MIT researchers, including John B. Heywood, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Sloan Automotive Laboratory at MIT.

The paper, Factor of Two: Halving the Fuel Consumption of New U.S. Automobiles by 2035," assesses three basic scenarios for boosting the average fuel economy of U.S. vehicles to 42 miles per gallon by 2035. First, car makers could channel future improvements in vehicle design toward boosting fuel efficiency -- instead of using them to goose power or 0-60 performance. Second, they could increase the use of diesel, turbocharged gasoline and gas-electric hybrid technology. Third, they could reduce the size and weight of vehicles.

"Over the next three decades, consumers will have to accept little further improvements in acceleration performance, a large fraction of new light-duty vehicles sold must be propelled by alternative powertrains, and vehicle weight must be reduced by 20% to 35% from today," the MIT scientists write.

For example, today's Toyota Camry accelerates to 60 miles per hour in 9.4 seconds, weighs about 3,157 pounds (1,435 kg), delivers 160 horsepower and averages about 27 miles per gallon (8.8 liters per 100 km,) according to the MIT study.

A hypothetical Camry that weighed 2,525 pounds (1,148 kg), and had a 1.4 liter, 128-horsepower engine could accelerate to 60 miles per hour in 9.2 seconds, but would average 42 miles per gallon (5.5 liters per 100 km.) The same exercise applied to a Ford F-150 pickup would produce a vehicle that weighs 877 pounds less than today's vehicle, gets around on a 162 horsepower engine and averages 27 mpg, compared with 17.3 mpg today.

(The MIT Study bases its numbers on adjusted Environmental Protection Agency mileage figures, which are typically lower than the mileage figures used to calculate Corporate Average Fuel Economy. Thus, when the MIT research group writes about cars averaging 42 miles per gallon, that would translate to about 50 miles per gallon for CAFE purposes. A 55 mpg CAFE average would be about 46 miles per gallon in real world driving, MIT researcher Anup Bandivadekar writes in an email.)

Unfortunately, the scientists at MIT have not come up with a formula for providing a free lunch.

Depending on how various technologies are applied, the total costs of re-engineering cars to get to an average of 42 mpg (which is short of 55 miles per gallon, of course) would be $54 billion to $63 billion. Some of that cost would reflect the expense of designing small cars to be safer, although the researchers argue that by eliminating the heaviest vehicles from the road, overall safety would be improved.

At a conservative fuel cost of $1.85 a gallon, the MIT team estimate it would take four to five years to recover the initial costs -- not counting the possibility that people would "spend" the fuel efficiency increase by driving more.

Putting full emphasis on boosting fuel efficiency would increase the average cost of a car by about $1,400 by 2035, and the cost of the average truck would go up by about $1,600, the MIT researchers conclude.

So now we have the real question posed by Sen. Clinton's 55-mpg proposal. It isn't whether 55 miles per gallon is possible. It's who will pick up the tab?

Sen. Clinton's proposal calls for offering the auto industry (Detroit's Three or all the auto makers with factories in the U.S. isn't clear) $20 billion in low interest bonds to "retool the oldest auto plants to meet her strong efficiency standards."

That $20 billion sounds like a lot, except when put against the auto industry's capital needs. For that sum, you could design and tool up about 10 new cars and 10 new engines for the whole industry. GM alone sells more than 70 models in the U.S.

Car makers fret that without higher gas taxes or other government subsidies to drive consumers toward smaller, less powerful, more expensive cars, they'll wind up losing money.

"The whole concept of "retooling" is … naïve," GM Vice Chairman for Product Development Bob Lutz wrote in an email sent from the Los Angeles Auto Show. "That's not the problem. The problem is the thousands and thousands of dollars worth of expensive technology added to every vehicle to achieve those CAFE numbers."

As candidates and lawmakers battle to get more mileage out of the discussion of mileage, consumers should remember that what's really being discussed are big changes in economics and expectations.

"What we are struggling with today is not so much a technology question, but do we have context and political will to make this happen," says John DeCicco, an automotive expert with the Environmental Defense Fund.

Mr. DeCicco says the U.S. could adopt a system that puts caps on CO2 emissions and give companies credits for beating those caps. So, for example, the credit GM gets for a Chevy Volt plug in hybrid could be sold to an oil company, which could then pass on the cost to consumers by way of prices for petroleum products.

Meanwhile, unless GM finds oil under its headquarters in Detroit or develops a way to refreeze the Greenland ice cap, a modern day Rip Van Winkle who falls asleep in an auto dealer's waiting room will awake in 20 years to see a very different fleet of cars for sale. Who knows? Maybe the Messerschmitt will make a comeback.