My General War On Nonsense

As my regular readers sense, I have declared a general war on nonsense, which is more graphically and accurately described as bullshit. (I didn't want to put that word in this post's title.) As George Carlin said, America's leading industry is the manufacture, distribution, packaging and marketing of bullshit. See my post The Kingdom Of The Blind. I've included the Carlin video again because it never gets old.

My general war on bullshit is not a war I can win. The "enemy" is everywhere. But I am not discouraged. I always win the small battles or skirmishes I choose to fight without suffering any significant damage.

Today's bullshit concerns the alleged greater fuel efficiency of the America car and light truck fleet, which is estimated to comprise about 250 million vehicles. This may seem to be relatively unimportant bullshit, and maybe that's true, but I see references to this fairy tale all the time. Each time I see one, it grates like fingernails on a chalkboard. The latest comes from Salon's Andrew Leonard, a Master of Bullshit carrying water for liberal Democrats everywhere. His recent column was called The great gas mystery: Higher prices, but continued growth.

A year later, the equation seems different. Americans are driving fewer miles and consuming much less gas. In 2011, Americans drove around 34 billion fewer miles than in 2010. In January, the four-week average for U.S. gasoline consumption fell to its lowest point since the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In March, a MasterCard study reported that in the most recent 52-week period, “U.S. gasoline consumption dropped by 4.2 billion gallons, or 3 percent, vs. the previous one-year period.”

Improvement in fuel economy explains some of the shift. Over the last four years, the average fuel efficiency of the American auto fleet has risen almost four miles per gallon. But that doesn’t explain the change in miles driven.

Did you spot it? In the second paragraph, where he says over the last four years, the average fuel efficiency of the American auto fleet has risen almost four miles per gallon? There's no link! No source! In the first paragraph I quoted here, there's a source for everything he says. And then he makes a substantial claim about the fuel efficiency of the American car fleet, and all of a sudden there's nothing to sink your teeth into, no source for me to follow to substantiate that claim. For the true aficionado of bullshit, this glaring omission is a definite sign that something's up. It just doesn't pass the smell test.

I set out to substantiate or falsify Leonard's claim. Good data wasn't hard to find, and thus there's no doubt that what Leonard wrote is bullshit. Let's start with this time series from the Bureau of Transportation, Table 4-23. We are looking at the average U.S. light duty vehicle fuel efficiency, miles-per-gallon (mpg) per calendar year.

Year	2000	2001	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011
Light duty vehicle, short wheel base	21.9	22.1	22.0	22.2	22.5	22.1	22.5	22.9	23.7	23.8	U	U
Light duty vehicle, long wheel base	17.4	17.6	17.5	16.2	16.2	17.7	17.8	17.1	17.3	17.4	U	U

U means there's no data for that year. It is easy to see that the average fuel efficiency of the light duty vehicles with a short wheel base has risen 0.9 mpg since 2007. For a long wheel base (light trucks), the fuel efficiency has risen 0.3 mpg. That's nothing like the nearly 4 miles per gallon Leonard claimed.

Stuart Staniford of Early Warning looked at the longer-term trend last year in US Fleet Fuel Economy. He concluded that "this series continues to disappoint."

Says Staniford: "If you take the total vehicle miles traveled estimated by the Federal Highway Administration that I graphed yesterday, divide by the amount of gasoline consumed according to the EIA (after removing the heavy truck mileage that's mainly diesel), you can get an estimate for the average fuel economy of the entire US auto fleet.  This is different than the EPA's estimates for new cars because it represents the actual performance of the entire fleet on the road, new and old."

You can see that this data is somewhat ... disappointing as Stuart said, given that oil (and thus gasoline) prices have been rising by fits and starts since 2003. And there's also this little "peak oil" problem we're looking at now and down the road.

But Leonard may have a leg to stand on in the future. Or perhaps he meant to say that the average fuel efficiency of the America's car fleet may increase 4 miles-per-gallon four years from now. The Bureau of Transportation also includes this handy chart showing the average mpg for new cars and light trucks.

New Passenger Car and Light Truck Fuel Economy Averages: 1990–2011

I don't want to get into it too deeply, but auto sales appear to be brisk lately now that gasoline is set to move above $4 per gallon. Many of these newly purchased vehicles are more fuel efficient than the clunkers they are replacing.

That's good, because at this rate of change America will delay the coming peak oil apocalypse by about 4 minutes

But we should also bear in mind that the turnover rate in the American car fleet has been far lower in the last four years than it was prior to 2008 because of extremely poor new car sales.

From Calculated Risk. Update — it seems that March new cars sales yield an annual SAAR of about 14.3 million, not 15.1 (based on another data set).

And if the turnover rate has been so low, then it is completely, totally, absolutely, utterly and perfectly impossible for the average fuel efficiency of the U.S. car fleet to have risen by almost 4 miles-per-gallon in the last 4 years as Andrew Leonard claimed, and as the other available data substantiates. That much is clear.

So, did I win this latest skirmish in my general war on bullshit? I believe I did.

Time to whip out that victory cigar!

Bonus Video — George on advertising and bullshit. Priceless. And remember—mileage may vary!

 

Comments

[sharonsj]

Well, because of the economic recession/depression, most people cannot afford a new fuel-efficient car. I read that the average age of a car on the road today is ten years old. So the mpg is dreadful.

As prices go up, we are driving less and less. And as long as we have a corrupt congress, we'll never see the same fuel efficiency that we see in European cars.

[John D]

I saw a Plymouth Reliant driving down the road the other day. Googled it and found that they stopped making them in 1989. People are keeping cars much longer than the experts think.

[Love my Crown Victoria]

Mileage means so little anyway.

New 33 MPG Car Cost: $30,000
$4 Gas over 100K miles: $12,000.

Older 20 MPG Car/Truck Cost: $2,000
$4 Gas over 100,000 miles: $20,000.

That's $20,000 in my back pocket. Plus I save more by not insuring a car I can easily replace with cash I save.

Besides, I like a big car, especially with the predatory and aggressive driving encountered nearly every day on America's Roads of Rage.

Just keep it looking respectable so you don't get pulled over for Driving-While-Poor. I just got a rust fix and half a paint job for $900 from Mr. Shade Tree that'll probably last 3 years.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/NO-RESERVE-New-York-State-government-surplus-vehicle-NYSStore-/270946697382?pt=US_Cars_Trucks&hash=item3f15ae80a6

[Ben]

Wow, Dave! This was absolute Ether, and I mean absolute Ether to American made bullshit.

(ps Ether is a song that was made by Nas in 2000 as a response to a track titled The Take Over by Jay-Z - it was one of the biggest rap battles in hip hop history, arguably between the two biggest rappers from NYC, and it produced Ether which is generally regarded as a top 10 diss track of all time)

[PBD]

Thanks very much Dave for another excellent post!

Have been a regular reader for some time and find your site to be one of the best out there.

Regarding America's (among others) "leading industry", I wonder if you have seen this blog site - http://mtwsfh.blogspot.ca/

It seems to have been unfortunately abandoned in April, 2011 - but still maintains a decade by decade account of American history - sans bullshit (indexed along the right hand side).

It presents an interesting historical complement to the contemporary bullshit that you so effectively deconstruct each day.

Please do keep up your excellent work!

[Mike Brehm]

Dave -

New keyboard please. I snorted coffee all over mine when I read the phrase about us delaying the peak oil apocalypse by 4 minutes!

Oh my, that was good.

So, playing around a bit with the numbers for light-duty SWB vehicles: if the 2010 average is 31 mpg and the 2011 average is 33 mpg, then over the last 4 years the average increase is 3.98 mpg or close enough to 4, as "claimed" by Leonard.

Looking at this chart (http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_04_23.html) I noticed that the claim for vehicle efficiency in the lower half of the table [for new vehicles ONLY] is 33.9 for 2010 and 33.8 for 2011. Using those two numbers mixed into the table you presented gives 4.7 mpg. Of course, it also represents an astounding 10 mpg increase in a year's time, completely contrary to the general improvement trend (as shown in Stuart's graph). There would have to be a HUGE discontinuity in his curve right at 2010 to make that believable.

So it seems as if Leonard is practicing a very pernicious form of bullshit by mixing apple and orange lines from an "official" (cough, cough) US government chart. And he mostly knows that the majority of folks won't take the time to investigate to find the real numbers as Dave did. And, then to play with the numbers to see what is actually being represented.

Fact is, just GIVE every driver a fucking Prius and you'll start to see an improvement in average fuel efficiency. Of course that would mean using our military to take over the Toyota corporation to do our bidding and build us 200 million cars in 2-3 years or so. Ain't gonna happen. Easier to keep junkers on the road and steal oil from places, at least according to our current societal trade-off matrix.

Just another wishful thinking, pie-in-the-sky piece from Leonard to assuage the masses and get us all thinking that things are "getting better!", "looking up!", "green shoots!" and all that other feel-good nonsense.

Good job shooting this kind of crap down Dave.

[brett]

Don't the black boxes that do high frequency trading for the likes of Goldman Sachs scour the internet for news stories to try to fit negative and positive news into an algorithmic decision to buy or sell? Does that just push the fantasy thinking and denial even harder than typical human nature or am I in the nut house?

[Wanooski]

@Brett, if that's true then God(s) help us all...

[james]

Dave, I'd also been noticing this "efficiency meme" creeping into articles about how the US has become - cough - an oil exporter. Had seen Stuart's graph, and now your stats complete the picture.
It's really amazing how articles in so-called respectable newspapers and magazines really aren't being checked for accuracy and misleading articles. Part of the problem is that there's a whole loada dumbing-down going on, and no-one really cares anymore. If a celebrity says something, or a journo writes something in the msm, it's just gotta be true !