Now, if you want us to think that an extra visit to the gas station is going to benefit an oil company because that means one more opportunity to sell Slurpies, or cigarettes
Except that the oil companies aren’t selling this stuff. It’s the local station owner, who REALLY feels the pinch when fuel prices go up. People have less money left over to buy “goodies”.
NYBo
That may well be true, but the fact remains that the person who stated that there is a conspiracy–to reduce the size of gas tanks on cars in order to make us visit gas stations more often–is just plain wrong.
I agree with you. I just poked another hole in the conspiracy theory.
The Dodge Dart is an EXCELLENT example of the Pre-Pollution-Control devices on cars. Mid size…6-cylinder (Slant instead of V)…You were LUCKY to get 30mph highway. My wife Lexus is BIGGER…HEAVIER…ALL THE ANTI-POLLUTION STUFF AVAILABLE…FASTER…and several trips we’ve made we get about 33mpg (EPA says 31).
Lucky you, getting 30mpg. My 2006 RAV4 was stickered at 21-28. I get 17-21. And I drive conservatively, granted not always at exactly 48mph on flat smooth surfaces with no wind, never inside a building, and I weigh more than 120lbs. And I am forced to buy an Ethanol mix and I can’t afford premium. But this is how our EPA tests? Who is serving who???
Now you’re talking! The internal combustion engine will eventually be replaced with either superbatteries or on board fuel cells. So, stop talking miles per gallon. Your 500 mpg is a fantasy figure, as I pointed out.
The on board fuel cells will need hydrogen carried on board the vehicle, and a network of hydrogen filling stations. Iceland is already starting this, since they have unlimited hydro-electric and geothermal power to produce hydrogen, and only half a million people. A very unique situation. It’s the only country in the world going “OFF OIL”.
Super batteries still have a limited range, and will likely be sold as plug-in hybrids with still a small engine on board.
Since all inventions had an economic base and rationale, it will likely take $200 oil to really kickstart a hydrogen economy; and the hydrogen will be manufactured by nulear power plants most likely. We can also make it from IMPORTED natural gas.
The electric plug-on hybrid will use off-hours electricity generated by COAL or NUCLEAR, or expensive imported natural gas. As you might have gathered by now, there is no such thing as a free lunch, and all future automotive propulsion systems will be expensive in today’s terms. That’s why with our cheap gasoline they have not been perfected yet!!
So, if you want to free yourself from oil, move to Iceland; it’s language is very difficult to learn, however.
“A Prius plug-in hybrid conversion burning E85 gets a theoretical mileage of 100 to 500 MPG of fossil fuel”.
I’m assumimg you actually went through the calculations. Are you referring to the fossil fuel burned in the power station to generate the electricity? That is likely to be coal, or in the case of Florida L&P, imported Venezuelan heavy oil & gas emulsion, called Oremulsion; there are very few power stations left that burn a liquid hydrocarbon.
In another post we calculated that the elctricity was generated at the power station with a maximum 45-50% efficiency. The fuel in the car is burned with a maximum 35% efficiency, unless it’s a diesel, then 40% is about right.
A Prius on gas power alone will get about 55 mpg average. That increases to 60 mpg max with gasoline, and will stay at 55mph with E85, if the car is not charged out of the net at home.
To calculate the maximum equivalent MPG from pure elctricity (short commutes), you have to compare the relative conversion efficiencies of eletric power generated by liquid hydrocarbons with the gasoline used the hybrid mode (60 mpg).
The simple ratio is 50%/40%x60 mpg=75mpg equivalent MPG. So even your 100 mpg is a stretch. If you are only counting the gasoline part in the E85, yes you get fantastic mileage, but the power station puts far more CO2 into the air than the car since it burns pure coal.
Agree that we should cut back on imported oil, and plug-in hybrids are a good idea. However, when it comes to CO2 emissions, only a plug-in hybrid in Washington state will be sqeaky clean.
"US automakers are laughable. Toyota, Honda, and Nissan have been eating their lunch for 20 years
on reliable, economic cars and trucks. In response, the US industy produced the GMC Suburban and the Ford Excursion which are not only ecological disasters, but also reliability disasters. Then Toyota, Honda, and Nissan produce even more economical cars in hybrid form, and the US designers respond with a few new chrome strips on already gaudy deathtraps. "
The Suburuban and Excursion ARE terrible. AND, I agree with your initial premise that no meaningful improvements have been made the past 30 years... BUT hating on the US automakers is kind of pointless. If you look at the mileage of the NEW Toyotas, Nissans, and Hondas, you'll find basically the Prius, Insight and probably the couple hybrids get really high mileage; the other Toyotas, Nissans, and Hondas do NOT get better mileage than various GM models. I'm not even counting the Aveo, that thing's by all reports a tin can, but Accord and Camry get like 20-22 city and 29-31 highway; the Malibu and Impala can match that; Civic and Corolla gets about 25/36, the Cobalt can match that.. and so on. I don't know how Ford and Chrysler are doing, and I'm not pleases that there's so few high-MPG cars available.
What REALLY disappoints me is -- look at the current VWs. You could get some just a few years ago that got mileage in the 40s. The current ones? The TDIs are off the market, they all have a five-cylinder engine that gets like 20-22 city and 29-31 highway.. even in something small like a Beetle. I bet the European ones don't have that engine! THAT'S what is killing mileage of available cars in the US -- the automakers will carefully design these high-mileage engines, then dump in a different engine at the last minute for the US-spec model "because Americans want powerful engines". SOME of the engines probably are too low-powered (a 1.0L for instance may not cut it), but I'd love to at least have the choice of a few of the more efficient engines. Oh yes. When I was in high school (mid 1990s) I had a 1972 Cadillac Fleetwod... 472 cubic inch V8, turbohydramatic 3-speed auto. 8 city, 12 highway. That thing was fun, I timed it once at 0-60 in 8 seconds, usually it was a little slower than that.. due to all that torque, even the steepest onramp didn't slow it down at all. Speed bumps, pot holes, gravel.. curbs.. heh.. You couldn't even feel them inside the car. But, it required premium gasoline and had a 27 gallon tank.. at current price it'd cost over $110 to fill up, and overall would cost just over 50 cents a mile to drive. OUCH! I hear that! I actually had a 1985 Chevy Celebrity that got 30MPG, and had a 16 gallon tank for a 480 mile range. I used that range once.. driving through Kansas on state highway 55, there's a stretch where gas stations are 420 miles apart. I gassed up.. in about 30 miles, I passed another gas station that said "last gas station for 100 miles". Whatever, I had only burned 1 gallon so that was fine... after 100 miles, there's a BURNED OUT PIT in the ground, the price sign was still there and said something like $0.20/gallon. Yeah. (This was in about 2000, so obviously the station had been burned out for decades.) 420 miles later, I finally got to a gas station, with about 3/4ths of a gallon of gas left (450 miles overall.) But in general, I must agree, I have to take a leak or stretch my legs within 300 miles anyway.. and if that car had had a 10 gallon tank, maybe it would have gotten a few extra MPG...I don’t think 500 mpg is impossible, just impossible right now. It was impossible to fly a little over 100 years ago.
Even if it was possible to convert 100% of the energy if gasoline into mechanical power, we would still need cars much lighter and much more aerodymic than anything we are accustomed to driving now, or we would have to drive much slower than we are used to in order to go 500 miles per gallon of fuel.
It’s already been done but in cars so small, cramped, and slow that it misses the whole point of a car, to beat riding a bicycle.
Today’s small cars should get better fuel economy. I’ve got a Buick Century with a 3.0L v6 that gets 28 mpg hiway and 25 mpg city. I’m happy with those numbers for the engine size. There is a “new” hydrogen injection hybrid that the company guarantees a 10% increase in fuel economy. I put new in quotes because the technology has been around since 1974. There is a Canadian company that sells this technology to the trucking industry and the Europeans have vetted their claims (http://www.chechfi.ca/) I looked at their technology and realized that since all they are using is electrolysis to separate water, virtually any hot rodder/gear head can build their own unit, for less than 200 bucks. I’d love to see if it works on the buick, but my co-pilot said something like over her dead body.
Im an Idiot does not seem to grasp the fact that in a good internal conmustion piston engine only 25% of the thermal energy of the gas is converted into useful power. If all of it could be used, highly unlikley, the very best car would still only get 200 mpg in non-hybrid form.
The laws of physics and thermodynamics do not seem to mean much to Im an Idiot. The reason pigs don’t fly is that they have no wings and are too heavy for their muscle power.
To get the 500mpg is to motorize a bicycle, as several of us have pointed out.
The Renault super diesel project pushes the limit of a usable car getting nearly 100 mpg for normal driving use.
“A Prius plug-in hybrid conversion …”
This is not a viable option. The Prius battery does not have sufficient charge density to make plug-in energy storage useful. It uses a nickel metal-hydride battery with a charge density of 70 Watt-hours per kilogram (W-h/kg). A lithium-ion battery is the next generation; it has a charge density of about 160 W-h/kg. GM plans to use a Li-ion battery in the Volt, and I’m sure that Toyota would love to use one in the Prius, too. They just aren’t available yet at a reasonable price and in mass-production quantities.
Of course, you could buy another Prius battery and put it in the trunk…
I believe Windpower is refering to a Prius with a Lithium Ion battery, such as in the Tesla. Toyota is experimenting with such a machine. The batteries (6000+) in the $100,000+ Tesla cost more than the car, so Toyota has some work to do yet. A plug-in Prius Hybrid would be a near perfect car for msor Americans, I agree. All we have to do then is to clean up the coal-fired power plants by pumping the generated CO2 into the ground, which adds several cents/kilowatt-hour to the cost of electricity.
My Hitachi cordless drill has NiCad batteries, but for $95 more that same drill is available with 2 Lithium Ion batteries. You get the picture.
I owned a AMC Gremlin for almost 3 weeks. The two trips I took it on…I got almost 600 miles. It got 30mpg and had a 30 gallon tank.
My wifes Lexus has a 16 gallon tank and gets about 33mpg. Her 96 Accord got about 31mpg and had a 13 gallon tank.
I think Nissan is now advertising that the Altima has a range of over 600 miles.
Fine then.. versus the current Honda Civic getting 5-speed manual (26 city/34 highway) or 5-speed automatic (25 city/36 highway) transmission, the Fit gets 28/34 with 5-speed stick and 27/30 with 5-speed auto. The Yaris gets 29/35 versus the Corolla getting 26/35 or 27/35 depending on model. Hyundai Accent gets 27/32 with a 5-speed manual and 24/33 with a 5-speed auto. According to the EPA web site, the "window sticker" MPG for the 1998 Civic was 32/37, and adjusted for the NEW EPA mileage test*, it would rate at 27 city 34 highway.
There you go. You get into a much smaller, lighter car, and gain virtually nothing in gas mileage, and in fact a comparable-to-1998-Civic car has not gained any mileage. I'm sure they are probably faster, but as much as it pains me to say it (I have a Buick Regal with 3.8L V6), I'd trade off acceleration for mileage.
One thing I think is important in a lower-power car, is to have proper gearing. My 1985 Celebrity I had would take about an eternity to get up an onramp, but was going at least 75MPH at the end of even the steepest onramp. It was slow but acceleration was consistent up to probably about 80-85MPH. I felt much safer in there than in a few cars I've driven and ridden in that'd seemingly rocket up the ramp but only be up to 55 or 60 at the end... (of course either is fine if there's not traffic to merge into..) The Celebrity was rated at only 85HP, not the 100+ of these current small cars.. I think with something like a Yaris, with the right gearing you could probably stick a ~60-70HP engine in there and have no sweat even on highways, and get much better mileage than it has now.
*The new mileage test for 2008 assumes realistic acceleration, more realistic highway speeds (the old test had a MAX of 55MPH, with a bunch of 45MPH “highway” driving…) and so on.
Yes it is the economy, the factory, what we want, what we refuse to live with out until the economy whacks us in the face and forces us to revisit our priorities (as many have pointed about what happened in the '70’s, and then when that was over we went back to our creature comforts and now we have to give up our guzzlers again and look for more efficiency), but it could also be, to quote the popular conspiracy theory, the workings of Big Oil and other vested interests to supress the development of such research until it is more profitable to roll it out. Some say the technology has already existed for years, but in the same vein as “planned obsolescence,” it’s been supressed/stalled/bought out/etc…by these interests, and until we as a whole get a lot more serious about conservation of our resources, we’ll continue to accept what they dole out as “new and improved” and never see real improvement until we are forced to do so (think of the mass mobilization of resources during WWII as an example of how much we could do when we had to),and at that time pray that it’s not too late, as Al Gore and others have warned. Call me crazy if you will, but it is a thought, as Rod Serling used to say, “submitted for your consideration,” deal with it as you will.
“Big Coal” was not able to keep us using steam engines after the gasoline engine came about. I also doubt that “Big Oil” is suppressing fuel efficiency and or alternative energy technology or even could if they wanted to.
The whole problem with conspiracys is that it takes the cooperation of so many people to be successful and it takes only one disgruntled employee or partner to bring it down.