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an internal combustion engine - as used in a petrol-driven vehicle - gets around 20% efficiency

Actually, the engines themselves are 30% to 40% efficient on modern gasoline-powered cars. There are some additional losses in the transmission, which is something like 95 to 98% efficient. Running outside the optimal load range also makes the engine a lot less efficient, but that's only relevant in stop-and-go traffic, and hybrid electric systems largely solve the issue. Even non-hybrid cars do a lot better in this respect than they used to, by automatically stopping and starting the engine at lights, and having more gears.

The efficiency of the complete drivetrain of a new ICE vehicle is 20% (standard) to 35% (efficient hybrid) for stop-and-go, and considerably better on the highway.

That's 6.189km per kWh, or about 162 grams of carbon dioxide of emissions - using worst case carbon generation - per km travelled.

Electric cars aren't 100% efficient, either; total up the losses in charging and discharging (86% efficient), power conversion (97%), and the motor(s) themselves (91%), and the total efficiency of the drive train is more like 76%.

An electric car? The infrastructure is already in place; there is negligible marginal cost in getting the power from the plant to the car.

That's not true. Even in the USA, grid transmission is only about 94% efficient. (It's much worse in developing countries; for India it's estimated at 70%. The huge difference is because building and maintaining reliable, efficient power transmission and distribution is not cheap, and some places are too poor to do it well.)

So best case, with a diesel S-class vehicle, you're about one third better than the Model S; worst case (5+ litre petrol engine), you're 50% worse.

We must adjust your 162 g/km estimate upward by 40% to account for the EV inefficiencies that you ignored, which gives us a revised estimate of 227 g/km - worse than all but the most over-powered of the four Mercedes models found in the document that you linked.

Another factor to consider as well is the cost of transporting the fuel: trucks have to carry that fuel (diesel, petrol, etc.) to the station, and you have to drive to the station to refuel.

You can't pretend this is a useful or fair comparison if you only consider the supply chain for the contents of the ICE car's gas tank, and ignore everything else. Mining and moving coal has a substantial environmental and economic impact as well. So does mining Lithium for batteries, or refining and doping Silicon for solar panels, etc.

There are really only two reasonable ways to estimate the true environmental impact of a product:
1) Start from nothing but labour and raw natural resources (think minerals still in the ground, not steel) and work your way up every stage of the production, supply, and maintenance chain - you can't assume trains are moving coal, until you've figured out the full impact of making and running trains from scratch.
2) Or, assume that the selling price of an item already accounts for its environmental impact (partially true).

(1) is probably more accurate, but if you're going to do it you need to do it for everything, or at least apply

WTF? The Charger is a huge car, and has a back seat just like any other police car. Have you never seen one?

And if that's not good enough, call for a van like the other poster said.

I guess according to you, none of these police cars exist.

They also tend to rely heavily on advertising and faux patriotism to sell the Korean designed, Mexican manufactured cars in the US because Ford/Chevrolet is 'Merican.

What's the name of the worst Jeep model produced in the last two decades, a 2007 newly designed car that it was so bad Chrysler considered not releasing at all? Jeep Patriot of course. I kid you not.

Not to mention the early 90s Chrysler prototype racer supposedly powered by cutting edge technology, which was introduced with vast fanfare and hype but vanished silently and invisibly “due to egos in senior management wishing to lay claim to the program, poor engineering decisions ..., and corporate politics” http://www.allpar.com/model/pa... (and was actually built in Britain, ironically).

Now the only question is how long before carbon fiber vehicle construction becomes as common as aluminum?

And just how mainstream are all aluminum bodied cars? There are several that have hoods and trunks that are. But for the most part only higher end cars make use of it. The Z06 corvette uses an aluminum frame with some carbon fiber body panels. The ZR1 also uses an aluminum frame with more carbon fiber. Nissan NSX used aluminum bodies. As far as I know , those are the cheapest cars you can get that are aluminum. Carbon fiber after market parts are very mainstream already. I see all kinds of cars that people replaced the stock hoods and front, rear bumper covers with carbon fiber.

While not main stream, the Consulier GTP was the first production carbon fiber car. Actually it was a carbon fiber monocoque body. ANd built in the late 1980's/early 1990's. It was panned as being one the the ugliest cars built. But I would have loved to have owned one.

Indeed. He also ignored the core reason for having said bandwidth - you have X amount of data to move in Y time (at under Z cost); what's the best way to do so?

As such, a 'packet' on the freeway system is rather expensive, so you don't want to be putting multiple station wagons on the system if you don't have to. Figure the driver costs $20/hour, the vehicle itself $.50/mile(gas, maintenance, insurance, tolls, etc...), and you're looking at 300 miles in 10 hours. For a single packet you're looking at $350 for that single 'packet'. If a single station wagon doesn't do it, perhaps a cargo van would, which doubles the capacity of the packet while only raising the cost $50, to $400. Still not good enough? Upgrade to a 'package van' like UPS/Fedex trucks. Next step would be a Semi.

In any case, I'd say that you could fit 25TB into a motorcycle today - 3 TB drives are fairly common now, and I can fit 10 into my saddlebags easily. Heck, I can get 1.5TB native tapes, about the same size as a HD. Padding it's dimensions up, it's 11 x 11 x 3 cm = 363 cm^3, or 2,755 per cubic meter.

A 2008-11 Dodge Grand Caravan Cargo van - 143.8 cubic feet = 4.07 cubic meters, giving me room for 11k 1.5TB tapes. 16.5k TB, in 10 hours, if I have a single cargo van. Ouch. Disregarding media cost, that's ~$400.

Do this daily, we're looking at 1.5 terrabits per second. Don't know of any connections that fast.
Monthly, we're down to ~50 gigabit (rounding down). I can guarantee that a 50 gigabit connection will cost more than $400.
Annually, it's 'only' 4 gigabit, and I pay more than $100/month for my megabit class connection, which ISN'T utilized 100%, unlike my calc.

You don't normally need to figure out the bandwidth of the freeway because:
1. Generally 1 vehicle 'packet' is sufficient, and due to the high marginal cost per said vehicle, you normally only want to send one.
2. The roads are used for more than data shipment, which would be like trying to figure out how much bandwidth you have available for VOIP by looking at total circuit bandwidth.

Don't need to ship that much? You should be able to ship about 30 of them for $60, second day air. That's 45TB, or about 140 Mbit of 100% saturated traffic for a month. BTW, during my calcs for paying fedex to ship them, I think that weight might actually be enough of an issue to increase gasoline consumption - but I think I've established that even $800 would be cheap if you need to ship that ridiculous of an amount of data.

And if you trust Consumer Reports' methodology, you have less than half a brain.

http://www.allpar.com/cr.html
http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/2011/03/consumer-reports-admits-reliability-data-was-scarce-for-chrysler.html
http://www.truedelta.com/pieces/shortcomings.php

There are plenty more articles out there explaining the problem.

The Plymouth Satellite came a bit after tail fins. It is still cool classic.

Oh really? Minivans can be pretty damn heavy, especially after you put a few hundred pounds of sports equipment and seven or eight passengers in them.

The Dodge Grand Caravan SE and SXT, and Chrysler Town & Country LX, Touring, and Limited (basically the same vehicles underneath all the extra features) have V6 engines ranging from 170 hp 3.3L up to 251 hp 4.0L (2008, http://www.allpar.com/model/m/2008-minivans.html).

The F150 comes in sizes ranging from a 4.2L 202 hp V6 up to a 5.4L 380 hp V8 (2001, http://www.fordf150.net/specs/engines.php).

A top-end minivan has a bigger engine than a low-end F150, and in any case I’d say the margin of safety should be large enough for the minivan to easily stop the truck in just about all of those cases unless maybe you’re pitting the smallest minivan against the most powerful truck.

My guess is that he's thinking of a Polyspherical 318 (A-series) engine, however it could have been a 315 Hemi. although that would have required an engine swap.

The real grate of it all is that I didn't catch the 318 Hemi on the first read. I guess I'm slipping.

Show me a car that can win the Indy 500 and is the most fuel efficient of all cars.

While your analogy is silly I'll point you to the Consulier GTP was getting 21/27 mpg in the 1990 version and was banned from most if not all racing circuits it was in because it always won. Not being "pretty" enough was it's downfall.

http://www.allpar.com/cars/adopted/consulier-gtp.html

http://fueleconomydb.com/specs/1990/CONSULIER/CONSULIER%2520GTP

The newer sheet metal bodies aren't made thin as hell because steel is ridiculously expensive, but because there is a great need to reduce weight and expense due to all the required plastic and electronic bullshit.

Interesting, I hadn't thought of that but you raise a good point. And I agree with you that fuel economy isn't the primary concern, considering the slant-six (released in 1960) could get 30 mpg and could survive hundreds of thousands of miles.

This mirrors what koiransukiaa posted in reply to you and is also off topic but I feel compelled to reply. You link to an article on a website http://www.allpar.com/news/index.php/2009/01/chrysler-has-fewest-recalls-among-big-six-automakers/ in order to back up your claim that Chrysler has great quality because it has the least amount of recalls. I went to the site, and it is very enlightening. It is not a statistical study spread out over a long period of time. It is the number of recalls by manufacturer in the last year, 2008. That is not a very good foundation for an argument using numbers. Also, if you read the article carefully (which is not hard, it is only about as long as this post) you will see that while Chrysler had 360,000 in the year 2008, making it the best of the auto manufacturers listed in terms of total recalls (not recalls as a percentage of how many vehicles sold or vehicles being driven mind you) it also states that Chrysler had 2.2 million in 2007, making it 5th in 2007. Please review your sources more carefully, and learn how to read deeper before making blanket statements. Oh wait, this is Slashdot.

What quality? Toyota has had to buy back cars because they were rusted beyond repair, and now they're covering up recalls. Hell, Chrysler actually has the fewest recalls out of all major manufacturers, not Toyota or Honda.

Seriously, how are you welding it shut? MIG? TIG? TORCH?!?!?! Every one of those is a capsule-smasher in its own right, and every single one of them will ruin what you're trying to do, from the contaminants they squeeze through the closing gap to the heat they generate to the ions they impart to the ozone they inject to the magnetism they could have to the Godzilla eggs they could lay.

Seriously, though, welding a steel container shut is as retarded an idea as can be devised. How do you suggest the container be opened? Moreover, how do you suggest ppl 25 years from know know WHERE to make the incision so as to avoid hurting the contents?

This idea is as shortsighted as the '57 Plymouth you can find easily enough.

THICK polymer, bevel-cut, glued together, wrapped in pre-preg Kevlar will keep out Everything and not hurt the contents.

I read something a few years ago about spinning up a whole bunch of crazy composite ceramic flywheels under the hood and then tapping their kinetic energy. Of course, a 300lb flywheel spinning at 150,000rpm could do some damage in an accident.

Googled a bit, found this: http://www.allpar.com/model/patriot.html

There are a few interesting critical pieces on CR car ratings. I am not overly experienced in statistics, so I have no idea if any of this really means much. It is interesting reading though.

http://www.allpar.com/cr.html
http://www.truedelta.com/pieces/shortcomings.php
http://www.truedelta.com/pieces/newdots.php

"Tranny fluid" -> http://www.allpar.com/eek/atf.html (Changing Automatic Transmission Fluid) "tranny problems" -> http://townhall-talk.edmunds.com/direct/view/.ef10 937 (CarSpace Automotive Forums) "Tranny" and "Chicks with dicks" -> uh... forget about it ;-)

Wow, I didn't know aerospace borrowed drivetrain technology from cars. I thought it was only the other way around.

True, the 10k RPM is indicative of larger turbines. While car-based turbines may be a bit higher (double?) than a large turbine, I can't see it being "thousands of revs per second".

Even 1 thousand revs per second would equate to 60,000 RPM's, and I seriously doubt that a small gas turbine engine would come anywhere close to that.

I could see 20k RPM, maybe 25k max, but nothing higher. Gyroscopic precession, the fact it's not going to be running in a vacuum, etc., will limit the high end speeds that are possible. For that matter, higher isn't necessarily better, as boundary layer effects, etc., will become problematic at uber-high speeds. After all, we're talking about something large enough to create a reasonable amount of power, not an academic exercise.

Ramp that up to even 2k revs per SECOND, and try and turn the car that it's mounted in... that's a LOT of force we're talking about, and if it lets go, it's not going to be pretty.

Even the work done to date on turbine powered cars (you may find this interesting: http://www.allpar.com/mopar/turbine.html ) don't go above 20,000 RPM.

That's only 333 1/3 revolutions per second... nowhere near "thousands".

That was the only point I was trying to make...

You need extremely high compression ratios, and ridiculously high tempuratures entering the turbine. Show me a 50% effecient turbine which can fit in a car without a ton of casing.

Chrysler was reaching peak efficiency over 80% (but not average efficiency, just peak) in the sixties: http://www.allpar.com/mopar/turbine.html. And another tasty tidbit from the same page: "The present performance and economy of the Turbine are comparable to a conventional car with a standard V-8 engine. The engine will operate satisfactorily on diesel fuel, kerosene, unleaded gasoline, JP-4 (jet fuel), and mixtures thereof. And, even more interesting, it is possible to change from one of these fuels to another without any changes or adjustments to the engine. The users of the cars also will appreciate the many other advantages of the turbine engine." A lot has changed in turbines in the last forty years... for the better.

Also a company called capstone has a CARB-certified (california air quality review board - those of us on the left coast have to care about such things) turbine: See bottom of http://www.microturbine.com/news/photos.asp?id=2. The engine puts out 30 kW and has excellent emissions. 30kW is only about 40 horsepower, but consider that when you are cruising on the freeway in a typical car, you're using 25 horsepower or less (depending on speed and aerodynamics.) A small battery pack is enough to provide regenerative braking and buffer turbine power, since they do have spin up/down time.

capstone's engine doesn't use a system like chrysler's motor did to recirculate heat into the intake, which can improve efficiency (as you suggest.) Turbines can today achieve 40+% electrical efficiency @ full output (http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/proceedings/ 02/Hybrid/Hybrids2Treece.PDF (PDF)... capstone also has an engine with two primary modes, a 300kW mode for passing power (~400HP!) and a 100kW mode for cruising power... (http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=12070 8&p=irol-newsArticle_Print&ID=931851&highlight=) clearly this engine is meant for buses and trucks as passenger cars don't need so much power, although it is fun.

Since I've never even mentioned fuel cells, this is 100% straw man.

We've discussed the reasons batteries aren't practical; I'm moving on.

damned near anything that will burn under compression can be burned in a turbine engine.

The same goes for a diesel engine... It's the conversion that makes it impractical. So what's the advantage now?

The turbine has one moving part. Your proposal to use multiple flywheels means there are several moving parts - all of which must rotate at turbine speed or better. It also allows you to use liquid fuel, which has substantially higher energy density and in fact has a higher energy density than the theoretical limit on a chemical battery.

Flywheels have major repercussions for crash safety. Of course, so do liquid fuels - although if we took safety as seriously in average driving as we do in racing, we'd all be a lot safer because we'd have racing fuel cells (tanks) instead of the cheap bullshit stamped sheet metal crap we use now. And this continues to be an option and probably one that would be taken more seriously if you had a hot turbine engine in the car.

Higher speeds also mean more inefficiency due to loss.

Higher speed is no less effecient than m

Ma Mopar was close to running turbine motors down the assembly line in the late seventies. What I've read and head about the decion not to use them was the fact that they couldn't get better mileage than the standard Lean Burn equipped LA small bock.

got an article about it here http://www.allpar.com/mopar/turbine.html

While the German car industry has come up with fuel injection, ABS braking and constant four wheel drive over the past 20 years

Actually, electronic fuel injection (not mechanical) for automobiles was pioneered by the Chrysler Corporation and Bendix in the 1950s:

"One of the first electronic fuel injection system was developed by the Bendix Corporation and introduced on the 1958 DeSoto Adventurer, arguably the first production (throttle-body) EFI system. The patents were subsequently sold to Bosch." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_injector#Pre-emi ssion_era

http://www.allpar.com/cars/desoto/electrojector.ht ml

And American Motor Cars released a full time four wheel drive car for the 1980 model year - approximately the same time or earlier than the first Audi Quattro:

One of our neighbors had one of these in the early '60s.

http://www.allpar.com/mopar/turbine.html/

You speak as if the government has an endless supply of cash. The money we are spending on the war on terrorism is being spent to prevent a much larger and more costly conflict in the future so that our posterity might live without the fear of a sudden attack from a foreign power ending their lives through terrorism or war; this is money that we do not have, so when the war on terrorism is over and Iraq and Afganiskan are stable democracies where people grow up happy and free, the money that we are spending is not to be spent, so do not look at raising the national debt as a way to fund your pet projects.

By the way, biofuels are still carbon based and switching to them should not lower carbon dioxide emissions; the entire idea of biofuels is to eliminate dependence on foreign oil. If you want to lower carbon dioxide emissions, the only way to do it is to switch to nuclear power and stop burning coal. Doing so should also have the pleasant side-effect of reducing cancer rates through enormous reductions in radiation emissions as coal is full of radioactive elements that are put into the air when it is burned. We could use the excess energy from the nuclear power plants when load on the power grid is low at night to generate hydrogen, making it an extremely inexpensive fuel that could be used in hydrogen powered cars that would further lower the amount of oil the nation uses.

Until then, the government could get Chrysler to start selling cars with turbine engines. If it was not for the government, Chrysler would have started selling turbine powered cars in 1979 as back then, the engine was ready for mass production and consumer use:

http://www.allpar.com/mopar/turbine.html

That would allow us to reduce dependence on foreign oil. It would also allow politicians to say they did something to combat global warming when in reality the only thing they did was switch from one carbon based fuel to another carbon based fuel with little to no effect on carbon dioxide emissions.

Alternative fuels might be good for many reasons. But why not also change the engine at the same time? Turbine engines are used in trucks since a long time http://turbinetruckengines.com/index2.html and even Chrysler invested into turbine engines for cars http://www.allpar.com/mopar/turbine-photos.html . Turbine engines have many advantages. Combined with an electric motor-generator concept, like in the Toyota Prius (w/ old piston engine, sigh), things become really interesting. Adding fuel alternative is easy with turbine engines.

I think they should recreate what is described in the "Impressions and Notes" section at http://www.allpar.com/model/dodge-diplomat.html

"...electrically powered tourist cars in Cordoba..."

WELL, my Cordoba is powered by good ol' gasoline. Chrysler four barrel 360 engines don't run on anything else. Besides, I know that mine's better. Chicks dig the Fine Corinthian Leather(tm).

I can't believe that Ricardo Montalban went from a Cordoba to a Reliant .

And... Neon makes the faster car.

and posted on the web - like this site [allpar.com] eg

and posted on the web - like this site [allpar.com] pr

It probably handles like a Tomahawk.

I have a 2005 Dodge Magnum RT, so a lot of the ricer-type "upgrades" don't apply to my car. I need a balance of old-school stuff (bigger exhaust, cold air induction) with new-school stuff (reprogrammed PCM). Unfortunately, a lot of the upgrades for the Hemi engine in the Dodge Ram pickups don't work with the Hemi engine in my Magnum.

So my question is, does this book cater to the pocket racer crowd or will I find any good information for my 347 cid hot rod station wagon?

I have a 2005 Dodge Magnum RT, so a lot of the ricer-type "upgrades" don't apply to my car. I need a balance of old-school stuff (bigger exhaust, cold air induction) with new-school stuff (reprogrammed PCM). Unfortunately, a lot of the upgrades for the Hemi engine in the Dodge Ram pickups don't work with the Hemi engine in my Magnum.

So my question is, does this book cater to the pocket racer crowd or will I find any good information for my 347 cid hot rod station wagon?

I'm willing to advance the automotive art slowly... after reciprocating engines, I'd just like a turbine engine ... a 120hp engine with 450 ft-lb of torque available at 0 rpm ... hold on!

Hard to say - for a while it looked like they'd put this into full production, that is, makea bout a hundred of 'em. I'd guess with the ME-412 supercar - embarassingly to Mercedes designed in record time by Chrysler using mainly American suppliers, though Mercedes itself has been unable to come up with anything as market-leading - the Tomahawk will be allowed to fade away, wtih just the Neiman-Marcus ones produced. But ya never know. For publicity, it'd make more sense to do a Hemi version - esp if the rumored 6.1 comes out.

Hard to say - for a while it looked like they'd put this into full production, that is, makea bout a hundred of 'em. I'd guess with the ME-412 supercar - embarassingly to Mercedes designed in record time by Chrysler using mainly American suppliers, though Mercedes itself has been unable to come up with anything as market-leading - the Tomahawk will be allowed to fade away, wtih just the Neiman-Marcus ones produced. But ya never know. For publicity, it'd make more sense to do a Hemi version - esp if the rumored 6.1 comes out.

THIS is a motorcycle.

is the closest we will see in our lifetimes clicky

I firmly disagree. Lots of dealers are dishonest or incompetent - there's no shortage of evidence to back me up there. Lots of independent mechanics are far more skilled. (Indeed, a study showed that the best-trained and most-experienced mechanics are LEAST likely to work at a dealer). Dealer mechanics get poor pay and often poor treatment. Why should they put up with it? Modern car computer are incredibly good at diagnostics. Even the aforementioned Chrysler vehicles that show codes, though, have some codes you can't get with the key-turning method. That information is pure gold to a good mechanic - or a home mechanic who doesn't want to pay $90 per hour for someone else to work on his car. (The labor rate in my county varies from $50 per hour at local garages to $90 per hour at the dealerships.) I prefer to work on my own car because (a) I found my local dealers to be incapable of using their computer code readers and (b) frankly, most of these sensors that go bad take abuot five minutes to replace. If I buy the sensor myself from Pomoco in Virginia, I get a good discount off list; if I buy it from the local dealer, I pay double list. If I install it myself, 10-15 minutes; if I go in and have them do it, $90 plus I spend about an hour going back and forth. Gee, I agree, only the original manufacturer can really fix it. Oh, and I must be disreputable, too, for wanting to save time and money!

Darned straight. Though some credit goes to CAD and such, and better materials (Dodge Neon was the first with a plastic intake manifold that is now common - easy to make without restrictions! Nice and smooth...), computer control is essential to the combination of fuel economy and power. And sometime people forget that the muscle cars, mostly built before 1972, were measured in GROSS horsepower while today cars are measured in NET horsepower. That said, there are lots of people who have hot rodded their cars by fooling the computer - Gus Mahon and his turbo minivans and 12 second Dodge Spirit is one example. He did it all on a budget that would shock many in the 12-second-Civic crowd - and could use his drag car as a daily driver (seating five in comfort). Still got very good mileage as I understand it - and passed the emissions tests. (I think you can find examples of how to hot rod computer controlled cars at http://www.turbovan.net)

What is listed at http://w ww.allpar.com</a> is not reverse engineering. Chrysler made these codes public - you can find them in any service manual. Some other companies did the same in the past - you can get GM codes on some models by using a jumper, and Nissan for a while had their codes available via LED, though you had to take out the computer and go through an odd process first (no odder than the key-moving of Chrysler, Dodge, Plymouth, and Jeep vehicles!).

I think the main reason for Chrysler to make their trouble codes so visible was their issues with the Lean Burn system. It was the first on-board computer control system in a car (unless you count electronic ignition, which Chrysler also invented), starting I think in 1974, and had lots of problems. So the Huntsville engineers who developed the fuel injection control computer made sure it would be easy to figure out anything that went wrong with the new system...so it wouldn't be bypassed, junked, or give the company an awful reputation (which they got anyway from the 1989-1994 four-speed automatics and 1995-98 Neon head gaskets).

jzv and posted on the web - like this site [allpar.com]

cht

and posted on the web - like this site

"So you can get more horses if you sacrifice efficiency. Note also, the Dodge viper and the Dodge RAM shared versions of the same V12 engine. One tuned for high horses, other tuned for high torque."

Something else to keep in mind before making this assertion is that while the engines might be the same design, the implementations on other aspects might be wholly different. Specifically, Chrysler has a habit of using cast crankshafts in some applications and forged ones in others. The Cylinder Heads on the truck engine were probably not the same as the ones on the Viper's version. If different pistons were used, I wouldn't be surprised to find the viper using H-Beam rods with the truck using I-Beam rods, even if they are the exact same length. Pistons would probably be different too, so that the compression on the Viper is naturally higher than it can be in the truck.

So, while the LA-Derived V-10 might have the same block castings, dimensions, and some components, I wouldn't be surprised if the really important stuff is so different as to make it hard to make a stock truck engine turn a Viper's performance without risking ruining the engine.

Heh. I just dumped a 1989 Toyota Corolla wagon and bought a used '66 Plymouth Fury III.

History of the Fury....

C bodies forever!

bet ya this bike tomahawk will beat those bikes and well the ferrari's, porche's, tzero,sheesh all exotics...,

It was a Chrysler, but I believe the Pontiac Phoenix was the Pontiac version of the Chevy Nova.

Wrong. Ford, like other vehicle manufacturers, sell what is most profitable. SUVs were comparatively cheap to make, and sold for a nice premium. That they were in vogue only helped to make that market segment the most profitable for them. However, if you ask the average American, buying an unsafe, gas-guzzling automobile is probably not what they want. However, that is what they get when they buy conventional SUVs.

So those millions of people that own an SUV don't really want one, they're just forking over 350-400 per month for no good reason?

We'll start here. 'Unsafe' is subjective term, like all accident data. If I'm going to be in a head on accident, I'll take an explorer over my own S-10 (which garnered only 3 stars according to government crash test data). Same goes for side impact. You are statisically more likely to be hit than to hit someone. If you're being hit, then no, I'd rather not get hit by an SUV. I'd also not want to be hit by a semi, Fed-EX truck, Special Ed. Bus, or any other heavy vehicle that sits higher than my own car.

SUV sales are still brisk, although larger models such as the expedition, and lincoln's new aviator have fallen off, mostly due to the deservedly poor reviews. Strangely enough, the fastest selling vehicle in the first half of this year has been the H2 hummer.

Why then did Ford and other automakers suddenly announce fuel-cell cars, and hybrids? Because someone actually started selling hybrids to the American public - cars that weren't styled too strangely or overpriced (due to low production volume.) Can you say fear of the Japanese again?

Have you looked an a honda insight? It looks strange and is horridly over priced considering it's functionality. great gas milage, but as a family car it falls short of even the accord or camry.

Kudos to Toyota and Honda for actually putting THEIR money where the market is. Boo on Ford for announcing a hybrid Escape well over a year ago, and (evidently) pushing the release date back by another year... AGAIN.

If by market you mean "sell a few hundred cars so our PR people can get in good" then yes, you are correct. the closest data I couple find comes from an insight fan site here. 2001 sales of 4726 and 2002 sales of 2,216 don't consitute much of a market. That includes a one-time $2000 IRS Clean Fuel Vehicles tax credit on top of regular honda incentives. those sales put it behind even the Pontiac Aztec, a spectacular failure in comparison to most cars and SUV's

The 'sudden announcment' of hybrid vehicles; could just be reaction to our glorious and fearless leader's announcment that there was government (read: free) money in them thar hills for the development of fuel cell and hybrid vehicles?

'Alternative fuel vehicles' have been under continuous development by the big three automakers since the dawn of the industry, and long before it was fashionable. It's called innovation. if there is a chance to make money by being unique, someone will try it. Steam powered and electric cars have been around sinces the turn of the century, back when they were as functional as the early gasoline engines. through the 50's and 60's Chrysler had been doing work on turbine engines, only to see the program die without fruitition in the late 70s. the Ford and GM electric car programs have all but died at the hands of the fuel cell vehicle.

The hybrid Escape hits the market in the middle of next year to coincide with the release of several newly redesigned vehicles (including the mustang, getting it's first ground up redesign since 1977). Escape hyrbids will enter fleet services this year. The main delay in getting the escape to the streets has been the mandate from Bill Ford jr. that the hybrid vehicle's performance be as close to that of a regular escape as possible.

Hybrid vehicles are a niche market car in the US. In Europe or Japan

Efficient, yes: the bike would burn less fuel than an SUV. But clean? No. 2-stroke engines spew far more smog-producing hydrocarbons per unit of work done than even the biggest, ugliest SUVs.

it would be a bitch to bunny hop with a 6 banger between your knees.

V6 bikes are for weenies. Straddle an 8-liter V-10.

Wow... Cryptoheaven sure is great. Now I don't have to mess around with OS X Mail client, or use bad Mac ports of Windows IM products.
I believe there's a huge market for a product like this.
On another note, doing some research, I found that there were several interesting ways of achieving secure e-mail connections in OS X.