solarbird | lolwhat

and to think, all this could have be avoided if only Congress hadn't caved and let USian automakers cheat on gas-milage...

i used to have a 1988 Honda Accord. at one point (while i was out of state for 3 months) my mother let a neighbor use it for some weeks. and she knocked a hole in the radiator the of my fist. which i did not find out until i had had the car back for almost 6 months.

in all that time, not only did the car work *beautifully* (until the temp climbed to 120F), but it got over 40 MPG in the city, not on the highway - highway averaged almost 60MPG

yet i'm supposed to be impressed with cars that get 30MPG?

if all cars got what that Honda did, we'd be better off (or if we got a different fuel. i have heard that there are cars in Australia that do actually run off of hydrogen with water as a byproduct, that these are not any more expensive to make than the cars we have now... i blame OPEC for the crappy cars we have anymore)

No hydrogen here... Unless it's in a university somewhere (possible). Isn't there hydrogen filling stations in California now?

in CA?

really? have you heard that? wow...

I am in Cali and never heard of this.

The governator was all "yay hydrogen cars!" for a while, but I never heard of anything actually getting done to support the lip service.

Making car engines run off hydrogen is easy. Probably could be done with little more than a firmware upgrade of the computer and a swap out of the exhaust system for stainless steel (hot steam can be rather corrosive).

The problem is storing enough hydrogen safely to get 300 miles per fill up. Americans seem to require a magic 300 miles per stop, otherwise electric cars that get 80-100 miles per charge would be an easier sell. (This is in spite of the fact that 80-100 miles is longer than almost everyone drives on nearly any given day.)

That explains my car. It gets 34mpg or so, but only has a 8.5 gallon tank, so it maxes out at 225 miles or so (depending on where I'm at).

Also, compressed hydrogen is already less dangerous than gasoline, but the general populace doesn't know that.

and won't believe it - its damned near impossible, with studies, to get people to believe that coal factories give off more radioactivity than even nuke faculties...

34 mpg timex 8.5 gal tank = 289 miles. Thus you should be getting 35.3 mpg...I suggest you check your tires, they may be under inflated, or do you drive fast and do jack rabbit starts

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hrmm...
see, i had been told by a guy who was in graduate engineering (and was about to go off to design electric cars) that the pressure issue had been solved (and i didn't follow the explanation totally - sorry, chemistry makes my brain turn off sometimes) but that it was kind of expensive, people didn't believe it would be "safe" (despite being safer than gasoline) and that it was abandonded due to car manufacturers not being interested, supposedly because of the deals they purportedly have w/oil companies.

it is entirely possible that he was exagerating. i know he wasn't flat out lying, because he had lots of work he showed me (everyone thinks that because i can do calculus, i can follow any math. i can't). but he might have been exagerating, or might have missed a something that makes it more expensive.

either way - the real issue i have is that no one seems to really be working on it. i am not sure that electric cars are actually the answer - most electricity in north america comes from coal, and batteries aren't so great, enviro-wise, theselves. electric cars are cut, i admit - but i don't think they are the solution. but no one really seems to be working on a real solution, ya know? hydrogen could be (not necessarily *IS*)

i really really really wish Heinlein had been right about solar panels and shipstones. sigh.

I'm driving an '89 Taurus that has *massive* problems of several different sorts, and *it* is getting about 30 mpg combined for me, or close to it. One of the problems is that the gas gauge is broke, so I keep estimating it at 20 mpg, and I keep accidentally filling it up when I think I should be on empty. My combined is more country roads than in town, but some of these country roads are washboard dirt, and there are stop signs and turns and hills and such, so it's not like it's getting this on the interstate.

This is an *89 Taurus with cracked gaskets and air flow problems and a leaky transmission*. You know they could be making way more fuel efficient cars now if they tried.

yes! that is what i'm talking about! a new car, NEW wouldn't get better miliage! for the love of Pete, what the hell is wrong with cars today?!

And congress being bought and paid for asswipes aside, why did american car manufacturers resist so much on this issue in the first place? Either they were complete dunderheads or they owned stock in oil companies, because competitively it just made no sense . ..

There is no way you can tell me our gas mileage technology went *backwards* during the last 20 years . . . so they made the less-good mileage cars because they wanted to.

Only questions is WHY?

(heh, I just suddenly flashed back to this SF story I read as a kid, I think by Theodure Sturgeon, I think called "Occam's Scalpel" . . . it is appropriate.)

i am fairly sure i have read that story...
i used to live in Salinas, where the John Seinback library is, and it has (or at least had) a Sturgeon WING. back when libraries got money...

and, yes, i totally agree - they make crap because they want to. cars made 50 years ago (or more) often still run, even with original parts! i mean, not all - but a lot. the way people used to get rid of cars was to just dump them somewhere because they got bored with the car - not because it broke or anything. so why do we have crappy cars with worse gasmilage that fall apart 10 times faster?

because they *CAN* :(

wow, 30 mpg, I have a 1999 Taurus, I like it, but the best I get is 24 to 25 mpg....though as the price of gas goes up and down, my mpg goes up and down. I wonder why that is . No, I am not going to get a locking gas cap as sometime now a days if thieves can't siphon fuel, they have been known to puncture that gas tank.

Ethanol percentage varies through the year on a predictable basis; so do prices (all else equal). I suspect these factors.

lolwhat

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