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Obama wants to mandate 40MPG standard for cars. Do people really think there is some dark force that is stopping some majic engine that can somehow defy the laws of physics? Its the weight of the car and the friction of the air and calculating how much energy is in a gallon of gas that determines how many miles per gallon a vehicle can go.
Just ask yourself if this motorcycle (link below) with a 250CC engine (about 30 hp compared with 250hp for the average car) could get more than 70mph why would they not do it? Physics. If you can get a 250hp engine to go 40mpg then a 30hp motorcycle should get over 300 miles per gallon. NOT GOING TO HAPPEN! Mandate all you want but get a clue man as to what is and is not possible. Maby 40MPG on nuclear power but not gasoline... Not for a 4 person car that can go 75MPH.
Care to try for 200 MPG? It has the size and comparable performance of a mid-sized SUV. It's not only possible, it's looking to be in production within the year.
Quote:
Hypercar
This quiet, safe vehicle gets up to 200 miles per gallon
Paul Hawken / Mother Jones Mar/Apr97
The quintessential product of industrial civilization is the automobile, which, for all its convenience, is the emperor of waste. To accommodate our 200 million vehicles, we have paved the equivalent of Georgia; in highly decentralized cities such as Los Angeles, two-thirds of the land is devoted to the automobile. And when we're done with our cars we simply throw them away: Between 1900 and 1984, we junked 647 million automobiles and trucks.
If we put aside the absurd way we've designed our cities to make room for the car, not to mention the fact that we have simply too many people driving too many cars, what is astonishing about the modern automobile is that it's hardly any different from cars built 50 years ago.
The Hypercar Center at the Rocky Mountain Institute, in a project led by "reformed" physicist and author Amory Lovins and coordinated with a handful of other designers, analyzed the modern car and discovered that it is so heavy and awkward that it expends most of its energy moving itself around. In fact, a car wastes between 80 and 85 percent of the energy it generates, because of its weight and inefficiently run engine. To accelerate, the engine must be so big that it can use only a small fraction of its power for actual driving. For every five to seven gallons of fuel, only one gallon's worth of propulsion energy gets to the wheels of a car. The 15 to 20 percent of fuel energy that does reach the wheels is used up in three ways: about a third gets lost accelerating and braking during city driving, another third in air friction, and the last third in heating the road and the tires. Of the energy delivered to the wheels, 95 percent moves the car and only the remaining 5 percent moves the driver. Thus only 1 percent of the gasoline moves you to your destination.
To improve car efficiency, Lovins and other designers started from the wheels and worked toward the engine. They created an entirely new car -- the ultralight, ultraslippery, hybrid electric "hypercar," now in various stages of development by two dozen different companies around the world. The hypercar consists mostly of a superlight carbon-fiber body (safer than steel because it absorbs crash energy better), a scooter-sized engine, a gas turbine or fuel cell providing a constant source of electricity, and variable-speed reversible electric motors that can recapture braking energy for reuse after temporary storage in a battery or super flywheel. Quiet, safe, nearly 95 percent less polluting than a conventional car (engines running at a constant speed reduce emissions by 90 percent and such a light, low-drag car needs roughly one-tenth as large an engine as a regular car), the hypercar gets between 100 and 200 miles per gallon.
Hybrid electric cars will begin rolling out of the factories by the end of the decade, presaging an automotive design revolution as significant to the automobile industry as the introduction of desktop computers was to the typewriter industry.
Because the hypercar is essentially made up of modular plug-in components, much like stereo and computer systems, it's easy to service. If the engine fails, mechanics can replace it in 10 minutes. The hypercar has one-tenth as many moving parts and up to 10 times the fuel economy as a standard car. Its low cost will also make it cheap to lease or rent. In the future, we may even have cars that run on smart cards available throughout every city. When you finish, you'd just park it and leave it, just as they do with bicycles in Copenhagen.
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Last edited by prrriiide : 03-02-2008 at 09:17 AM.
“Care to try for 200 MPG? It has the size and comparable performance of a mid-sized SUV. It's not only possible; it's looking to be in production within the year.”
Well there you go, Private companies designing fuel efficient cars that are 5 times or more efficient than what some politician wants to mandate. Not subsidized by the government and just around the corner.
Problem solved.
However it doesn’t use gasoline at all it uses hydrogen fuel cells. My point is you can’t get 40mpg on Gasoline for a 4 passenger size car. We already have cars that get up to 60mpg that use hybrid-electric. My neighbor just bought a Toyota Prius. No government mandated 40mpg minimum standard law.
Here is a list of the top 10 cars now that you can buy. What I hear Obama saying is Americans won’t have the freedom to buy a big honking truck that gets 10mpg if he/she wants too.
Obama wants to mandate 40MPG standard for cars. Do people really think there is some dark force that is stopping some majic engine that can somehow defy the laws of physics? Its the weight of the car and the friction of the air and calculating how much energy is in a gallon of gas that determines how many miles per gallon a vehicle can go.
Just ask yourself if this motorcycle (link below) with a 250CC engine (about 30 hp compared with 250hp for the average car) could get more than 70mph why would they not do it? Physics. If you can get a 250hp engine to go 40mpg then a 30hp motorcycle should get over 300 miles per gallon. NOT GOING TO HAPPEN! Mandate all you want but get a clue man as to what is and is not possible. Maby 40MPG on nuclear power but not gasoline... Not for a 4 person car that can go 75MPH.
What the hell are you talking about?
40MPG is no problem to reach for cars, if it is really demanded.
Actually there are already quite a number of different cars already on the market (that can carry 4 people at more than 70 mph) that are as good or even better than 40 MPG.
__________________
"Every country gets the cuisine it deserves"
“Care to try for 200 MPG? It has the size and comparable performance of a mid-sized SUV. It's not only possible; it's looking to be in production within the year.”
Well there you go, Private companies designing fuel efficient cars that are 5 times or more efficient than what some politician wants to mandate. Not subsidized by the government and just around the corner.
Problem solved.
No its not. Not before those cars have replaced the old guzzlers.
Thats where the mandating steps into. It has worked fine with the catalytic converter as well this way.
Quote:
However it doesn’t use gasoline at all it uses hydrogen fuel cells. My point is you can’t get 40mpg on Gasoline for a 4 passenger size car. We already have cars that get up to 60mpg that use hybrid-electric. My neighbor just bought a Toyota Prius. No government mandated 40mpg minimum standard law.
Ok, you say its not possible to build a car like that...
how is it possible that one can already even buy a car like that then?
Just as example:
Granted it runs on Diesel but I bet my right hand that you can also find petrol fueled cars with more than 40MPGs
Quote:
Here is a list of the top 10 cars now that you can buy. What I hear Obama saying is Americans won’t have the freedom to buy a big honking truck that gets 10mpg if he/she wants too.
Why should they have to right to waste the fuel for nothing else than stupidity or arrogance? You do not have the right to produce a stinky car without a catalytic converter either anymore. So why should be a fuel wasting car be different?
__________________
"Every country gets the cuisine it deserves"
However it doesn’t use gasoline at all it uses hydrogen fuel cells. My point is you can’t get 40mpg on Gasoline for a 4 passenger size car.
What, are you part of the petroleum lobby? I don't give a rat's ass if it runs on jelly beans.
Here's a news flash: gasoline engines are going the way of the dodo. It's called industrial Darwinism. Get used to it.
The short-sighted dickheads in the petroleum industry are pricing themselves right out of business. The public is demanding better, and they're going to get it. It's as simple as that. The public demanded better than a horse and buggy, and they got it. No difference here. Do you think all of the livery stables closed down when the horses went to pasture? No. They started carrying gasoline and hiring mechanics.
So go ahead and sit in your shit and cry over your beloved F-350. The rest of us will buy something as big, more powerful, and uses 1/4 of the fuel.
Quote:
Well there you go, Private companies designing fuel efficient cars that are 5 times or more efficient than what some politician wants to mandate. Not subsidized by the government and just around the corner.
Yeah. Sure. The automobile and petroleum lobbys have been busting their asses to come up with something like this. Right. The only way these companies do anything other than make money the same way they have been for 90 years is by government mandate. If the government doesn't mandate it, we'll still be driving the same gas-sucking behemouths we do now, only paying $10 a gallon to do it.
__________________ Tax & Spend > Borrow & Spend
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
Every feeling you've ever felt can be found in the works of Beethoven, Bruckner, Mahler, and Wagner.
Do people really think there is some dark force that is stopping some majic engine that can somehow defy the laws of physics?
Most certainly, it's called car manufacturers and petroleum lobbyists. The industry has been buying up great alternative ideas for decades just so they never reach the market. A 40 MPG car is absolutely no problem, to claim that to do so you would have to defy physics is to claim that you are ignorant of phsyical laws.
Most certainly, it's called car manufacturers and petroleum lobbyists. The industry has been buying up great alternative ideas for decades just so they never reach the market. A 40 MPG car is absolutely no problem, to claim that to do so you would have to defy physics is to claim that you are ignorant of phsyical laws.
40 MPG cars are all either hybrids, or super light/small cars. If people want that kind of fuel efficiency they have to not only pay more for the car, but also give up performance.
I'm not saying we shouldn't move in that direction, but it's not like there aren't sacrifices involved.
40 MPG cars are all either hybrids, or super light/small cars. If people want that kind of fuel efficiency they have to not only pay more for the car, but also give up performance.
The Passat blue motion from Volkswagen I showed above is neither a hybrid, nur superlight, nor small.
__________________
"Every country gets the cuisine it deserves"
"Volkswagen is waiting for the show unveiling to confirm suspicions that this Passat BlueMotion uses a 103-hp version of the 2.0-liter diesel engine planned for the 2008 Jetta, with some adjustments. Although Mercedes' BlueTec diesels represent substantial updates in engine hardware and software, BlueMotion' s stellar figures are achieved "through the fine-tuning of the engine," VW says, "which was already extremely efficient."
A 2 liter engine on a car that weighs less than 1650 kg (A little over one tonne). I consider that super small, I guess we have different standards for what is small.
"Official claims put the 0-62mph time at 12.4sec and top speed at 118mph"
And we all know the 0-60's are always slower in real life, so 13 second 0-60.
You drive a very small car, with terrible performance, that costs a lot of money for its size and performance, and get good gas mileage. That looks like major sacrifices to me. The price is £17,260 or ~$26,000.
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