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Environmentally Friendly Race Cars, Military Vehicles
jackelfish writes "The non-profit organization IdéeVerte Compétition has created a 'space age' race car that runs on Liquefied Petroleum Gas (propane or butane) and is lubricated with sunflower oil. Sponsored by the European Space Agency, the car recently broke the 'LPG powered vehicle' speed record of 315 km/h. The car also utilizes space technologies such as a titanium fuel tank, heat shielding developed for the Ariane launch vehicles and an EGNOS satellite navigation system to determine the speed, acceleration and position of the car in real-time." And reader gkbarr writes "Is the DoD feeling the crunch of sky-high gasoline prices or are they being overrun by a bunch of Greens? Who cares, the latest Humvee looks to be a more capable and greener machine than its predecessors."
Is it just me or is 315km/h not very impressive?
I live in Poland (where car drives you) and people often modify their cars to use LPG instead of petrol (actually the car can run on both fuels).
The car loses some of its horsepower, but I've been driving at almost 200km/h on LPG myself, so I see no reason to employ space technology to go 50% faster.
. . .are they simply not deemed as important as reducing air pollution from exhaust fumes?
.) he was stunned. He'd simply never thought of that issue. All he'd ever heard about were emmisions, so that's all he ever thought about.
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It's always easier to get a warm, fuzzy feeling by focusing intently on one small parameter, doing something about that, and thinking you've solved the problem than it is to acknowledge the whole picture.
Ignorance, after all, is bliss.
When I pointed out to a friend that part of the cost of replacing older, less "enviromentally friendly" cars with new cars was the pollution inherent in dispossing of the old car prematurely and manufacturing the new one (not to mention the pollution inherent in earning the money to buy the new car, and the pollution inherent in. .
It's almost always more 'friendly' in the long run to use existing systems until they naturally expire than it is to replace them with new systems before that time. After all, isn't that why many of us spend so much time maintaining existing code base?
Is there any research being done in these areas as well. .
Oh sure. There are people, such as myself, who give a considerable amount of thought to the issue, and put a certain amount of work into it as well, but after doing it for a few decades you are inevitably faced with an issue:
Until the skies are all thick and brown, and the oil is all gone, nobody much is going to care. It always boils down to a dietary issue with shades of laziness on top("Yo, have we got enough money for a pizza?" Cool, have it delivered").
When that time comes there will be those of us standing around with solutions that might have been, although at that point largely irrelevant because, while they would have kept the air from becoming thick and brown, won't, in and of themselves, make the air any less thick.
There's an eternal cycle of creating your own problems, than patting yourself on the back for being clever enough to wangle your way out of them, and so far as I've ever been able to determine from observation, the purpose of man as machine seems to be to incessantly worry about the future while doing nothing practical about it, all the while regreting the past.
I don't understand it, but it seems to make people "happy."
KFG