Miles to Go
May 22nd, 2007The power crisis is a purpose built crisis. That’s not the problem.
The problem is a lack of a concept of enough.
The managers of this pop stand are taking the thing down in order to monopolize what’s left of the inventory for themselves.
What we don’t know is how They’ll manage the kill off phase…
Via: PBS:
Many of the cars now on America’s roads get no better gas mileage than the ones we were driving twenty years ago. Meanwhile, other country’s cars are leaving ours in the dust in terms of fuel efficiency. How did this happen, and what are American auto manufacturers doing about it?
A former auto industry engineer and NOW correspondent Jonathan Silvers goes under the hood of the U.S. car industry to look at what’s being called a colossal failure of American engineering. Does Detroit have a secret weapon waiting in the wings?
Here is a story I’ll never forget. My late uncle was a Chevy salesman in Nebraska long long ago… sometime in the forties or fifties. He recounted how some guy bought one of their cars and shortly thereafter the owner remarked how the thing hardly used any gasoline. Remember… this is WAY back when gas was next to nothing and vehicles slurped it up with a passion. Chevy sends someone down from Detroit claiming that one of their “prototypes” had slipped out, now how I don’t know but this story was told to me in the seventies, and they said they’d buy the guy any car on the lot so long as they got his back. Seems he agreed but it makes you wonder doesn’t it. And just how is it that while we can make computers faster and cheaper than ever before we can’t get engine fuel efficiencies higher than they were decades ago? Its ridiculous! Seems that all they’re busy doing is distracting folks with in-seat DVD players and crap like that all the while the engine gobbles up the same amount of fuel.
Question, seriously: was the topsoil crisis in Rome, or Easter Island or (insert collapsed society here) a “purpose built crisis” as well? Or is that just something that THEY thought of in the last 30 years or so?
Dr. Fix,
I’ve heard that story, literally, more times than I can stand to hear. Does the word “urban legend” mean anything to you?
If the big auto makers who are on the brink of bankruptcy could turn their gas guzzlers into 100 mpg (or whatever) vehicles don’t you think NOW would be the time for those babies to hit the car lots? I mean think about how well a 100 mpg SUV would sell to the American public? Half the country would give their first born to have one of those and this would save the asses of Ford and GM.
Matt, I guess my dead uncle was a liar just pulling some teenage boys leg then? If that be an urban legend… out in the sticks of Nebraska then so be it. Exactly what was there to gain by telling fairy tales?
Still, you can’t tell me Big Oil and Big Motors don’t sleep in the same bed. Thats an incestuous relationship that won’t quit. And without gubmint intervention to prop up this sad charade American auto makers would, and should, have been deep-sixed long long ago.
I lived in Japan for several years in the 80’s while working outside of Tokyo. The incredible product choices in electronics and variety of automobiles made my head spin. There were so many cool things that I kept thinking that if the Japanese were allowed to sell anything they wanted in the States that our manufacturing would have been obliterated right there and then. (But of course we’re letting a totalitarian communist state do that for us now).
Where in Tokyo I could count literally a hundred different kinds of Walkmen styled tape players in all sorts of colors and styles, back home there were maybe three of four at the local electronics store… I guess Henry Fords quote that “you can have any color you want so long as its black” holds true in the USSA.
Now I certainly couldn’t care less about having so many needless products shoved down my throat because I haven’t the mindless craving to get the latest toys. What it illustrated is that Americans are being duped into thinking they’re getting the best when they’re only getting hand me downs.
High gas prices dont seem to be stopping anyone owning a guzzler…thats if the latest sales figures for SUVs are correct and not some marketing hype…?
People ARE stupid and deserve to go broke from high gas prices.
“Big Oil and Big Motors don’t sleep in the same bed”
I think they have from time to time. GM’s number on the rail system back in the 40s helped the oil companies.
But look today. Big Oil’s stock prices are through the roof. Big Motors, ford and GM, are near bankruptcy.
As far as your uncle, I’m not calling him a “liar” but the story you told is a very popular urban legend in which Big Auto accidentally lets some 100 mpg or 200 mpg prototype out of its black vault and then has to go retreive it. I’ve heard the story, with slight variations, 1,000 times.
Read the “GM Deathwatch” (and now, Ford and Chrysler Deathwatch) editorials over at The Truth About Cars (a major online auto magazine) to discover why Detroit is a failure, or any of dozens of books on the subject that have been produced over the past several decades. Dead dumb dinosaurs who just don’t get it. These same morons are still fighting CAFE standards.
As for fuel efficiency, the average vehicle on the American road today actually weighs more than 25 years ago (see the USA Today article). All the gains in mileage have been offset by demand for bigger, faster, more powerful cars with more goodies inside, more safety features, and larger seats for bigger Americans. Diminishing marginal returns illustrated to a “T”.
Hey DrFix,
fallout11 has part of the answer right there as to why cars don’t get any better fuel economy than they did 25 years ago – consumer desires, safety measures, etc. Another part is how the emissions systems work – you can’t run the engine at it’s most efficient settings (hot lean burn) because that will produce too much NOx emissions. You actually have to run the engine “dirtier” to provide enough fuel in the exhaust for the catalytic converter to run on, so to speak. Diesels are being hamstrung by NOx requirements as well – they were designed to run in the hot lean burn cycle, and we’re having to cool them off (with heavy EGR) to knock down emissions, which knocks down thermal efficiency. That and the dirty diesel fuel here in the US, though it’s getting cleaner.
As for the 100-200mpg carburetors, the patents are all out there to peruse and modern variants are being played with by tinkerers all over the place. The only ones that appear to be long-term viable are the ones that add water and use exhaust heat to “catalytically hydrocrack” the gasoline to make methane and methanol. Even then, the catalyst needs to be changed or cleaned regularly due to all the additives in the gas designed to keep it from breaking down, etc. Part of the gain comes from using waste exhaust heat in an endothermic reaction to “bulk up” your fuel using water to add hydrogen to it, the other part comes from being able to run a higher compression ratio and/or more advanced ignition timing due to the higher “octane rating” of methane/methanol. The early tinkerers were evidently not realizing that they were cracking the hydrocarbons in their gasoline, with the metal body of the carb being the catalyst (iron is one of the cheap catalysts for hydrocarbon cracking), and got discouraged when it quit working due to the gasoline additives plating out and choking the catalyst. They also ran really lean and hot – won’t pass muster on today’s emissions limits. Modern computer control could make for an interesting system, but you’d need at least two tanks – one for water (that you have to keep from freezing) and one for gasoline, plus a tank of either methane captured and compressed during run-time or methane/propane added when refueling. Such a system will not start and warm up without a supplemental starting fuel – methanol won’t vaporize in cold weather, gasoline doesn’t have the octane rating needed to prevent detonation unless performance is severely restricted. You could use the battery to electrically heat your cracking plant, but that’s a lot of juice.
Enough technophilia for now. I’m still scratching my head as to how my ’99 Chevy Prizm jumped from an average 30-31mpg to 37mpg on the last tank, at 95K+ miles! Probably gas-station sticker shock induced right foot lightness at work…
Take care,
-cajun