Clash Looms Over Fuel Economy Standard, As Consumers Snap Up Trucks, Big SUVs

Wall Street Journal ^ | Jan. 13, 2015 | MIKE SPECTOR and CHRISTINA ROGERS

[thackney]

Auto makers are on a collision course with U.S. regulators over the timetable to achieve stringent fuel-economy standards as cheap gasoline sends consumers flocking to less-efficient pickup trucks and sport-utility vehicles.

Car companies are laying the groundwork to seek some relief when the targets come up for review by regulators in 2017, executives said at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. They are in some cases already canvassing the White House, Capitol Hill and regulatory agencies to start lobbying for possible changes to fuel economy standards that take effect in 2022.

The mileage targets, known as corporate average fuel economy, or CAFE, call for auto makers to sell a portfolio of light-duty cars and trucks averaging 54.5 miles a gallon by 2025. The fleetwide standard for cars and trucks rises in 2016 to 37.8 mpg and 28.8 mpg, respectively.

But with gas prices dipping below $2 a gallon in some parts of the country for the first time in six years, auto makers are confronted with consumers pining for larger trucks and SUVs that get worse mileage than cars. Auto manufacturers, attracted by profits on each truck that often exceed those on cars by thousands of dollars, are increasing production of the bigger vehicles.

Car companies plan vehicles years in advance, leaving them vulnerable to big swings in commodity costs, especially the price of oil, and the subsequent price at the pump. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV sold more than 449,000 Ram pickups in 2014—the best of which now gets 23 miles a gallon with a diesel engine—up 24% from a year earlier. Regulators in 2017 will review mileage targets for 2022-2025.

“All of us are going to toward a relaxation of the timeline,” ...said in an interview on Tuesday. “The question is the rate of change...

[upchuck]

I agree. Send an email to John Rob. Maybe he can do something.

[tanknetter]

You can actually put the resize code in yourself.

When using the img src= HTML tag, after the second “ at the end of the images address, put in width=800 before the closing >

[RightFighter]

Like I said, the FR code should do that automatically. If a width isn’t specified and the image is wider than 800, or the specified width is more than 800, then the FR posting code should automatically insert a maximum. They have quite a bit of error-checking code built in for other things, like checking the URL you are posting to see if it requires excerpting.

[Mycroft Holmes]

Screen Sizes

With the proliferation of display devices, screens now come in a wide variety of sizes and aspect ratios. The image below illustrates the range of screens possible. Differing aspect ratios are shown on the diagonal lines with the ratio in circles towards the lower right.

Given the wide variation in screen resolution and size when we step from mobi to fondleslab to display to HDTV it is lunacy to specify screen position in term of pixels. There is no way to know what sized screen you are imaging to so it is best to reference screen sizes and positions in percentages instead. The resulting size is the percentage of the width (or height) of the enclosing container. This is most useful when specifying positions and sizes of tables and images. The HTML for the image above looks like:

<img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Vector_Video_Standards5.svg" width="95%">

The width="95%" part sets the image width to 95% of the width of the enclosing container. We leave the height unspecified so that the computer will figure out the correct value so as not to distort the image. If you wish to distort the image you may specify a height as well.

Things that are text related, such as the whitespace around a paragraph or header and text sizes are best specified in em. One em was originally the width of an M in the current font. In a multi-lingual world where not all alphabets have an M in them, the meaning has evolved to mean the height of the current font. As the user changes the magnification on a page the size of an em changes with it. This produces a pleasing scaled effect to the eye not possible when spacing objects in pixels.

Other unit values available are in inch, cm centimeter, mm millimeter, ex x-height of a font (x-height is usually about half the font-size), pt point - 1/72 of an inch, pc pica - 12 points and px pixels - a single dot on the screen. If no units are specified pixels are used by default. Best results across the broad spectrum of displays are achieved by exclusively using em and percent to specify size and distance. Try not to do anything else.