It's 1979 All Over Again

The lightest Yaris weighs 2295 pounds. What makes you certain that a 2295 car can get 100 MPG?

Really I am working under the assumption that had we - or really, the engineers employed by the auto industry, as well as independent researchers supported by the U.S. government - started in earnest to develop fuel efficient cars 30 years ago, we would be much farther along. And even if my faith is blind and misplaced, it is not unreasonable to assume that fuel efficiency standards could be much, much higher than they have been for the last 30 years since the first crisis. It really gets my goat that we keep failing to learn lessons from the past, whether it's in energy consumption or in getting bogged down in unnecessary wars.

Yeah, and-- and-- AL GORE WROTE A BOOK !!

I'm sure your intention is not to let Democrats of the last thirty-odd years dine out on whatever cred they got from Carter's solar panels, but I run into plenty who do, believe me. >:

Phhttt, no, hardly. The Clinton Admin deserves some credit for working with the auto industry to produce 80mpg sedans, but that went largely nowhere, and then in 2002 the Bush Admin killed it in favor of its own hydrogen-cell venture. Basically moving the goal posts. And the auto industry felt little incentive to be aggressive about it when SUVs were popular and fuel prices were lower.

A bit more than 30 years ago several US organisations worked out the principles behind a transportation system that would have given cities and towns lightweight, individual electric vehicles running on flexible ubiquitous guideways. It would have given the equivalent of much more than 100 mpg in performance and the energy would have come from any electric source: Windmills, dams, etc.

The problem with any electric car is the batteries. The solution that was found then was to run those individuals cars on guideways, which would main source of electricity. The wikipedia article on this is rather good, by the way, but it omits many options like that of having the PRT cars owned by individuals or groups instead of the system.

Many prototypes of several competing technologies were built. All were abandoned before the basic tech/economic problems could be ironed out.

Detroit was opposed to PRT systems becasue Detroit is opposed to any change, of any sort, but also because there was still a lot of costly development work to be done.

To be fair, a lot of mass transit advocates also opposed PRT systems (and still oppose them) since they did not fit into their preconceived notions of public infrastructure and transport.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit

There are cars that get more'n 30mpg city. And in any case, there are very few cars that run only city. For example, my 2004 Honda Civic was getting 43 mpg when I was running freeway almost exclusively. Now that I run mostly city, it only gets 32 mpg. That's still above 30.

Or they could've mentioned the Prius which gets 60 mpg city.

Not that anything anybody else has written in these comments is wrong. We could've had mpg at least approaching 100 if we hadn't decided not to work on it.