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moving is the car not the driver, less than one percent of the fuel energy ends up moving the driver. This is not
very gratifying after more than a century of devoted engineering effort. (Laughter) (Applause)
Moreover, three-fourths of the fuel use is caused by the weight of the car. And it's obvious from the
diagram that every unit of energy you save at the wheels is going to avoid wasting another seven units of energy
getting that energy to the wheels. So there's huge leverage for making the car a lot lighter. And the reason this
has not been very seriously examined before is there was a common assumption in the industry that -- well, then
it might not be safe if you got whacked by a heavy car, and it would cost a lot more to make, because the only
way we know how to make cars much lighter was to use expensive light metals like aluminum and magnesium.
But these objections are now vanishing through advances in materials.
For example, we use a lot of carbon-fiber composites in sporting goods. And it turns out that these are
quite remarkable for safety. Here's a handmade McLaren SLR carbon car that got t- boned by a Golf. The Golf
was totaled. The McLaren just popped off and scratched the side panel. They'll pop it back on and fix the
scratch later. But if this McLaren were to run into a wall at 65 miles an hour, the entire crash energy would be
absorbed by a couple of woven carbon-fiber composite cones, weighing a total of 15 pounds, hidden in the front
end. Because these materials could actually absorb six to 12 times as much energy per pound as steel, and do so
a lot more smoothly.
And this means we've just cracked the conundrum of safety and weight. We could make cars bigger,
which is protective, but make them light. Whereas if we made them heavy, they'd be both hostile and inefficient.
And when you make them light in the right way, that can be simpler and cheaper to make. You can end up
saving money, and lives, and oil, all at the same time. I showed here two years ago a little bit about a design of
your basic, uncompromised, quintupled-efficiency suburban-assault vehicle -- (Laughter) -- and this is a
complete virtual design that is production-costed manufacturable.
And the process needed to make it is actually coming toward the market quite nicely. We figured out a
kind of a digital inkjet printer for this very stiff, strong, carbon-composite material, and then ways to
thermoform it, because it's a combination of carbon and nylon, into whatever complex shapes you want, like the
one just shown at the auto show by one of the tier-one suppliers. And the manufacturing you can do this way
gets radically simplified. Because the auto body has only, say, 14 parts, instead of 100, 150. Each one is formed
by one fairly cheap die set, instead of four expensive ones for stamping steel. Each of the parts can be easily
lifted with no hoist. They snap together like a kid's toy. So you got rid of the body shop.
And if you want, you can lay color in the mold, and get rid of the paint shop. Those are the two hardest
and costliest parts of making a car. So you end up with at least two-fifths lower capital intensity than the leanest
plant in the industry, which GM has in Lansing. The plant also gets smaller. Now, when you go through a similar
analysis for every way we use oil, including buildings, industry, feedstocks and so on, you find that of the 28
million barrels a day the government says we will need in 2025, well, about eight of that can be removed by
efficiency by then, with another seven still being saved as the vehicle stocks turn over, at an average cost of only
12 bucks a barrel, instead of 26 for buying the oil. And then another six can be made robustly, competitively,
from cellulosic ethanol and a little bio-diesel, without interfering at all with the water or land needs of crop
production.
There is a huge amount of gas to be saved, about half the projected gas at about an eighth of its price.
And here are some no-brainer substitutions of it, with lots left over. So much, in fact, that after you've handled
the domestic oil forecast from areas already approved, you have only this little bit left, and let's see how we can
meet that, because there's a pretty flexible menu of ways. We could, of course, buy more efficiency. Maybe you
ought to buy efficiency at 26 bucks instead of 12. Or wait to capture the second half of it. Or we could, of course,
just get this little bit by continuing to import some Canadian and Mexican oil, or the ethanol the Brazilians
would love to sell us. But they'll sell it to Japan and China instead, because we have tariff barriers to protect our
corn farmers, and they don't.
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