An Alternative to Alternative Fuels and Vehicles

markmcb writes "While the world is working to solve energy and environmental issues with today's petroleum fuels, some vehicles simply don't have good alternatives, namely off-road platforms. For those not willing to give up their gas-guzzling habits, Matt Vea offers an innovative alternative. Using the OBDII interface in his Jeep, a laptop, and the infinite power of Excel, Matt conducts some performance tests and uses the results to tweak both his vehicle's engine and his personal driving habits for optimal fuel consumption both on and off road." Rigorous testing and good use of available technology; nice work.

Comments

Best way to conserve energy:

[Pink Tinkletini]

Move to the city, man's natural habitat.

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[grozzie2]

This is one of those fallacies that the city dwelling greenies would love to make everybody believe. Moving to the city doesn't reduce your energy consumption, it just shifts it. Sure, you may walk to the grocery store, but those groceries didn't grow in that store, they were shipped in. Your energy consuption is now being done by the supply chain that feeds the city, so the energy is being consumed by proxy on your behalf.

In the grand scheme of things, you may believe that reducing a commute to work makes a big difference in the energy consumption equation, but, it's not your major source of energy consumption. When you turn the heat off, living indoors at ambient outdoor temperature (same for the air conditioning), and stop eating, then you'll make a BIG difference. As long as you eat every day, and keep the heat/airco turned on, a little bit of driving is not the big energy consumer.

It's really trendy here on /. to whine about SUV's in terms of energy consumption, but, the fuel burned by an SUV pales beside what a semi full of goods headed into the city burns. If city folk REALLY want to make a difference, it's easy. Turn the heat off, turn the airco off, turn the lights off, and stop eating. When they all do that, the world's energy problems will be solved. Until then, you are just as much a part of the problem as everybody else.

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[cperciva]

Sure, you may walk to the grocery store, but those groceries didn't grow in that store, they were shipped in.

It is much cheaper -- and more fuel efficient -- to transport 2 tons of food in a single shipment than it is to transport 2 tons of food in a thousand 2kg shipments inside separate vehicles. Yes, the food you buy from the grocery store had to be shipped there, but economies of scale apply to the pre-grocery-store shipping.

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[nostriluu]

Sounds like you've got your own agenda there. ;)

Of course, it's best to buy local, but is there a comparison of the costs of eating shipped food (eg a city dweller who walks everywhere but must "import" their food) vs living in the country, driving everywhere, and eating more local food? (of course, country people still eat lots of non local food, unless you happen to be growing your own coffee &c). I'd also suspect a lot of country folk are buying whatever is cheapest at the local store, which may not be local.

It would all depend, but having some facts would help, otherwise its one generalization vs another.

As well, it's more than just food, services can also be concentrated in a city, that must be an overall benefit.

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[martinX]

but then i'll be cold and hungry. where's the fun in that? i'd better blog this.

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[Dr. Trevorkian]

I can't imagine what the person who modded your post as Offtopic was thinking. I found this a fascinating read. Thanks for sharing it.

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[A Nun Must Cow Herd]

... and stop eating. When they all do that, the world's energy problems will be solved

Indeed! Although, there might be options that don't kill off the human race in a couple weeks...

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[Foerstner]

Sure, you may walk to the grocery store, but those groceries didn't grow in that store, they were shipped in. Your energy consuption is now being done by the supply chain that feeds the city, so the energy is being consumed by proxy on your behalf.

Firstly, very few people actually live anywhere near food-growing land. Most people in industrialized countries live either in the suburbs, or in cities. Given those options, city life (including at least moderate use of public transportation and non-detatched housing) is clearly the less-energy-intensive option.

Second, people in the country get almost all of their food from supermarkets, too. Local farmers markets can't supply food out of season, much less things that can't be grown locally. And even country bumpkins drink Coca-Cola and eat frozen pizza, Oreos, and other mass-produced foods.

Only, in their case, the nearest supermarket might be 10-20 miles away. And of course, it uses the same distribution network that the major cities use, except the trucks have to travel even farther.

In the grand scheme of things, you may believe that reducing a commute to work makes a big difference in the energy consumption equation, but, it's not your major source of energy consumption.

In the United States, "Transportation is the greatest single use of petroleum, accounting for an estimated 67 percent of all U.S. petroleum consumed in 2004". (source: DOE) Yes, there's more to transportation than the daily commute, but that's hardly insignificant.

When you turn the heat off, living indoors at ambient outdoor temperature (same for the air conditioning), and stop eating, then you'll make a BIG difference.

I'll stop eating if you will.

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[Anonymous Coward]

I love living in the city. No fucking way I'm raising children in the city until they can cleanse the schools of all of the ghetto thugs with gold chains shooting dice in the bathrooms and swearing at teachers and not being kicked out due to quotas imposed by the state. I had the misfortune of going to a city school and seen that shit first hand.

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[Orangejesus]

so ok, the groceries you buy in the country just magically apear on the shelves then i guess.

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[JourneyExpertApe]

Sure, there may be more violent crime, more pollution, more stress, and a generally lower quality of life, but at least you can sleep at night knowing that you, personally, have contributed less to global climate change. That is, if you can ignore the gunshots and incessant car alarms and horns honking. ;)

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[Martin Blank]

They did when I was a kid, but my parents never taught me the right spells to make it happen at my apartment.

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have a SUV and get irritated about people complaining about it - just keep shut up. I never heard of such stupid arguments before. Get an introductionary class on macroeconmics. Energy is not free, there is a cost associated with it. Others explained it well here. The only thing which said made sense was regarding use of heating/cooling - yes if you are not at home, there is no need to crank up heat to 70 or leaves the light on.

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[Ecks]

Actually this is only partially true. While the energy costs for living in the city are higher than living in the country without a car it's really hard to counterbalance the inefficiency of using a 3000 ~ 4000 lb vehicle to transport a 180 lb of cargo. Unfortunately that's exactly what the average person does when they jump in their car to run an errand. On the other hand a fully loaded semi trailer carries 80,000 lb of cargo. Even if the tractor and empty trailer weigh 80k lb then they are doing alot better than the individual person getting groceries in a car.

If I make the assumption that the cost of a useful Kj is constant across electricity and gasoline then your math doesn't add up. I just switched from driving to work (gasoline) to using light rail (electricity) and that has reduced my monthly energy bill by 75%.

-- Ecks

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[tylernt]

but those groceries didn't grow in that store, they were shipped in

I think you're misunderstanding some basic principles of capitalism and a market-based trade. In order to maximize profits, costs are cut to the bare minimum. The reason goods are shipped to the cities is because it's cheaper than doing everything locally (try growing corn in Alaska, for example). See, it's cheaper to have one massive shoe factory in Chicago that ships to all the other cities than it is to put a little shoe factory in each city. If it was cheaper to put one in each city, it would have been done already because the business owners would go after the additional profit.

If the price of transportation goes way way up then you do reach a crossover point where it is cheaper to have little factories all over the place. But we're a long way from that point. Heck gas is more than $5/gal in Europe, but you don't see them having any problems with their trade-based economy.

So, with all due respect I dispute the reasoning behind your post. However I do agree with your suggestions for energy conservation. That's why I keep the A/C at 81*F in the summer and the heat at 68*F in the winter, have compact fluorescents everywhere in my house, and drive a small diesel powered car.

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[Anonymous Coward]

It's really trendy here on /. to whine about SUV's in terms of energy consumption, but, the fuel burned by an SUV pales beside what a semi full of goods headed into the city burns.

Why don't you start your own food distribution company then? Instead of employing one semi full of goods to ship food from a port into a store in a city that people can walk to, you can load up thousands of SUVs at the port and deliver food direct to peoples' doors. Fucking moron. What's next? Are you going to get rid of trains and just pave over the tracks so you can have SUVs deliver tons of raw materials, since they're obviously more efficient than those pig locomotives?

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[DarryDoo]

a fully loaded semi trailer carries 80,000 lb of cargo

Not true.

A fully loaded 18-wheeler has a Gross Vehicle Weight of 80,000 lbs. The vehicle itself weighs at least 32,000 lbs. (for a highway tractor with sleeper, and a standard dry van trailer). Most weigh lots more.

Assume 45,000 lbs. or less of cargo in a fully-loaded 18-wheeler.

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[kannibal_klown]

Don't get me wrong, the city has great advantages: public transportation being "key" in my opinion. Another is being able to walk anywhere you need (like the grocery store down the block). But your argument fails to take in the complexity involved in delivering the food across a major city (like NYC) as compared to delivering food across a couple of suburbs.

Sure, getting into and around New York (state) fairly easy, but once you get into New York City it becomes complex and time consuming. I'd say that it takes more time and energy (per person) to ship food into the city than the suburb. While the number of people in a major city dwarfs the number of people in a suburb, each grocery store probably serves close to the same number of people as in the city they are scattered around.

Take my suburb, the edge of the town is about 1/2-1 mile from the highway. A transport truck merely hops off the highway, delivers to the 2 or 3 grocery stores in our streets with no traffic and very few lights. Then drives to the next town via the highway again or a main road (again, no traffic and few/no lights). So a couple of transport trucks can cover x grocery stores supplying y people fairly easy: less gas, less planning, less time.

Try to do that in the city. Driving into the city is enough of a pain for a truck, but then getting to each store on the route is also tricky. You have the traffic, the lights, the parking, etc. Besides the gas it takes to drive around it becomes a logistics nightmare. Sure, you have multiple stores closer together in the city, but it probably takes longer to get to them.

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[andphi]

I live in a place where the "ambient outdoor temperature" can kill people. If the daily high climbs above 100F and stays there for more then a few days, some of the less-prepared elderly start dying of heat exhaustion. In fact, a lot of people live in places where the ambient outdoor temperature can kill - either from heat stroke or from hypothermia. That is the whole point of climate-controlled homes, offices, and vehicles.

"Everyone live like you're outdoors" addresses energy conservation in the same way that "Everyone stop having sex" addresses the AIDS crisis.

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[dubl-u]

It's really trendy here on /. to whine about SUV's in terms of energy consumption, but, the fuel burned by an SUV pales beside what a semi full of goods headed into the city burns.

The average SUV weighs 4242 lbs and gets 19 MPG. Larger ones like the Escalade are rated at 13 MPG in the city. The cargo for your average grocery store trip is, let's say, 100 lbs. A tractor-trailer rig is somewhere around 25,000 pounds empty, gets 5-6 MPG when loaded, and carries up to 40,000 lbs cargo. Let's assume that the average is half that. If I did the math right, moving groceries by semi is then 57 times more efficient.

As a kicker, truckers use 13% of fuel purchased in the US versus 63% for cars and other light vehicles. So you're right about the "pale" part, but it appears to be the other way around.

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[b0s0z0ku]

Sure, you may walk to the grocery store, but those groceries didn't grow in that store, they were shipped in.

Economy of scale: it costs less energy to ship in bulk than seperately. Plus, cities have shorter distances, so they'd be perfect for use of electric vehicles. Unload goods from an electric train at the freight terminal. Use an electric "milk float" type truck that can plug in to a ubiquitous charging station whenever parked and has regenerative braking to deliver the goods to customers. How to make the electricity? Nuclear, hydro, geothermal, wind, solar - plenty of "clean" options...

If city folk REALLY want to make a difference, it's easy. Turn the heat off, turn the airco off, turn the lights off...

Guess what? City folk usually live in smaller spaces than their suburpan brethren. Smaller spaces take less energy to heat and cool. And, by "city", I'm not necessarily meaning something as overwhelming as NYC. There are plenty of smaller towns/cities that are walkable, and where the average house isn't a 4000 sq. ft. McMansion.

The McMansions are a real problem because they're huge and often really cheaply built, making for poor efficiency. If houses were a bit smaller (~1200 sq ft avg) and incorporated architectural features that made them capable of passive climate control - areas of glass in the appropriate place to catch the sun in winter and passive air circuation in the summer. As I said before, we had a beach house in NJ with a broken furnace. I went there during the coldest part of winter in 1996 - it was about 10 deg. out for a few days and the indoor temperature didn't drop below 55 deg. The large glassed front porch caught the sun and trapped heat - the masonry floor stored that heat and radiated it evenly through the day. In summer? The windows could be opened or removed, and the house was pretty comfortable, even without A/C.

-b.

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[b0s0z0ku]

Try to do that in the city. Driving into the city is enough of a pain for a truck, but then getting to each store on the route is also tricky. You have the traffic, the lights, the parking, etc. Besides the gas it takes to drive around it becomes a logistics nightmare. Sure, you have multiple stores closer together in the city, but it probably takes longer to get to them.

This is why a city would be a perfect application for an electric truck or hybrid truck in electric mode. Distances are fairly short, so distance-on-a-charge isn't as much of an issue. And regenerative braking can recoup much of the energy ordinarily lost driving in stop-and-go traffic.

-b.

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[Bob Uhl]

However I do agree with your suggestions for energy conservation. That's why I keep the A/C at 81*F in the summer and the heat at 68*F in the winter, have compact fluorescents everywhere in my house, and drive a small diesel powered car.

Ha! I don't even bother running my AC (Saturday was 100F here in Denver); in the winter I keep the heater at 56 most of the day (raising it to 64 in the morning, 'cause 56 is miserable when getting out of the shower); I drive a 15-year-old car which gets 35 mpg. Oh, and I normally cycle to work (in fact, I recently completed a month without driving to the office).

I'm like the Green Avenger or something. Only thing is they won't let me into the local environmentalist meetings since I always vote a Republican/Libertarian mixed ticket:-(

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[Bob Uhl]

"Everyone live like you're outdoors" addresses energy conservation in the same way that "Everyone stop having sex" addresses the AIDS crisis.

I agree with what you wrote but not what you meant; both are excellent solutions. You complain that the outside temperatures where you live regularly exceed 100F, and that this can be deadly. Yes, it can--and yet somehow man has been living there for quite a long time. In fact, man has lived in a low-tech fashion just about everywhere from the Arctic to the equator. Now, one can't dress like a New Yorker in Arizona without modifying one's environment, true. But where is it written that one must follow Yankee fashions in the desert? Why not try dressing like a Berber or one of the Masai?

Yes, a Colonial-style home is very poor in Arizona (or here in Denver). What about a thick-walled adobe? What about a yurt? We carry assumptions on housing from a country with lots of cold, wet winds--those assumptions don't hold when living where it's hot, dry and still. Rather than trying to live like Englishmen, Europeans or Yankees, why not try living like natives of our area?

I'm not actually arguing for a duplication of aboriginal or primitive clothing and living arrangements; I'm arguing that we should study them and learn therefrom. For example, I really can't see many modern Americans living in cloth-walled dwellings, simply because solid homes are too deeply ingrained in our culture. But I can imagine more intelligently-designed homes becoming fashionable; I can even imagine more locally-appropriate clothing becoming the thing. Even now clothing styles vary between LA and Minnesota; why could they not vary still more?

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[andphi]

You have some interesting points. It would be interesting, trying to live more like the Pueblo, the Kiowa, or the Navajo. For example, how much more energy efficient would a longhouse-style building be than the cookie-cutter homes now springing up wherever there's a housing boom in Texas? And yes, the longhouse/hogan concept belongs more the Five-Nations Confederacy, but I think some of the farmer/fisher nations of East Texas used similar structures, if not the same materials.

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[SeattleGameboy]

Even if it takes 100 times more energy to deliver a truck to NYC, it would STILL be more effecient than the suburbs.

A typical grocery store has thousands of customers. In a typical suburb, an average customer may drive 1 to 5 miles (both ways) to shop. When you multiply that by the number of customers, the delivery truck would have to drive hundreds of miles and spend ALL WEEK for the energy consumption to equal NYC grocery store where almost all customers either walk or take a subway/bus.

A mere mile or two saved by convenient access means NOTHING when you have to factor in the number of customers (which are MUCH larger).

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[Skynyrd]

On the other hand a fully loaded semi trailer carries 80,000 lb of cargo. Even if the tractor and empty trailer weigh 80k lb then they are doing alot better than the individual person getting groceries in a car.

I understand what you're saying, but your math is way off.

A loaded truck cannot weigh more that 80,000 total pounds (yes, you can get exceptions, but it doesn't happen for regular cargo). An average tractor and trailer weighs about 45,000 pounds, leaving about 35,000 pounds of cargo.

If you haul heavy things, like beer, cola or water, the trailer will hit max weight long before it's full. If, on the other hand, it's full of toilet paper it's easy to haul a second trailer.

I worked in a warehouse as a truck loader for a while. We drove 9,500 pound forklifts (6,000 lb truck & 3,500 lb battery) that carried two pallets of beer at the same time. The load was 3' deep, 6' high and 7' wide. There were 210 12 packs in a pallet, and weighed 2,200 pounds. Fully loaded we were close to 14,000 pounds and would drop 20 to 30 pallets in each trailer (lighter trailers hauled more, and some pallets were lighter than others).

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to account for the two pallets you placed directly into your buddy's pickup truck every friday. You remember, when the boss was away...

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[winnabago]

Get out of the farmland-reducing, culture-obliterating, white diaspora known as your subdevelopment much?

Re:Best way to conserve energy:

[Annwas]

Thank you for the link, that was an excellent read!

Works for a limited audience

[CRCulver]

Since such a large portion of SUV consumers are suburbians who go everywhere on well-paved roads and never use their vehicle's off-road capabilities, I think choosing a more economical car the next time around would be a better way to conserve fuel.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[johnlcallaway]

Or....if one finds that only a low-milage SUV is needed for one's recreational pasttimes, maybe finding another recreation would work best.

Nice piece though, I must commend the author for at least trying to provide a non-biased look at what impacts fuel economy.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[Burdell]

I didn't buy an SUV (a 1997 Honda CR-V that gets about 22MPG around town) to go off-road; I bought it because it was an economical vehicle that can seat 4 adults comfortably and has good cargo capacity. I only own one vehicle, so it has to be able to handle everything I need. I certainly couldn't get another vehicle that can seat 4 adults as well for the price I paid.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[fm6]

Said suburbians buy SUVs as steel security blankets — being in a big vehicle that's high off the ground gives them a sense of safety. That's an illusion, of course, but American carmakers have always relied on illusions to sell their products.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[Jeff Molby]

maybe finding another recreation would work best.

Nah, you can't tell someone how to spend their free time and disposable income. It would be nice if we could convince some of them to do the math though. There's no way it makes sense to spend five extra digits (nevermind the mpg cost) on a vehicle just to haul a boat/atv/etc a handful of times per year. I'm sure you could rent something when you need it and save a few bucks. What they're really paying all that extra money for is the convenience of not having to call Hertz each month. With gas firmly at $3, I imagine that this pool of people is already shrinking. I'm sure it'll dry up pretty quickly when cruise by $4.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[MustardMan]

uh, how about an old station wagon? you can pick up a domestic wagon on the cheap that easily hauls 4 comfortably and has more cargo capacity than a tiny cr-v.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[Martin Blank]

Rental contracts almost always specifically state that you may not take the vehicle off-road. While they are often willing to overlook things if you're on a dirt road that is maintained or at least well-used, if you do any damage to it, they may see it as damage while violating the contract, and hence insurance may not cover it.

I've occasionally rented SUVs when going out to the desert for recreational purposes, but when I do, we're pretty well stuck in one spot. If you want to do something like follow the Mojave Trail, or general four-by fun, a rental just isn't going to cut it.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Huh? Can't a standard minivan comfortably seat six adults? And provide more cargo space?

Re:Works for a limited audience

[IANAAC]

... you can pick up a domestic wagon on the cheap that easily hauls 4 comfortably and has more cargo capacity than a tiny cr-v.

And gets 6-8 miles to the gallon.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[Anonymous Coward]

CBS-- putting the BS back in news.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[YrWrstNtmr]

Key word old. What's the gas mileage on that old wagon?
SUV's have replaced station wagons in the marketplace.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[Jeff Molby]

No doubt. If you do a significant amount of off-roading, it probably makes sense to buy your own. I was following up on the assumption that most SUV owners don't take their vehicles off-road. Most simply use it for the occasional tow.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[killjoe]

I aleays thought they bought those cars so that there would be no survivors when they hit the smaller cars. It cheaper to pay off a dead guy then to pay for a lifetime of medical care and juries tend to give higher awards to injured people. Nobody is going to wheel a dead guy into the court to elicit sympathy but an injured child is a sure bet.

Those SUV are great for making sure the other car gets completely destroyed and the occupants killed.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[Anonymous Coward]

Big SUV safety an illusion? Are you joking?

Ok, you get in a small, fuel efficient car. Oh yes, be sure to put your wife and two small children in there with you too. I'll take my big fat Ford F-350 pickup truck with the crew cab and 400 lb. aftermarket front bumper. Just to be fair, I'll put my family in it too.

Now, in a game of chicken, who's your money on?

Don't bother arguing. It really happened, head-on at highway speeds. My family walked away without a scratch. The poor unfortunate mother in the other car, who wasn't watching what she was doing and drove her family car right into my path, died instantly. Fortunately her children survived, after a lengthy stay in the hospital.

I have nothing but sympathy for that family, but I won't put my children at risk with all the bad drivers out there. When I look at my kids and compare their value (to me) to all the dumb drivers on the road, believe me, I wish I could find a bigger, heavier car to drive. Even at $6/gallon gas, I wouldn't drive anything less.

Now, if some moron who doesn't know how to drive gets a high CG vehicle and tries to drive it like a go-cart, well, that's his own fault. My heavy guzzler is definately a defensive vehicle.

Oh, my truck is also a diesel and averages 18 MPG. (the new truck, that is) That's what the on-board computer tells me. I leave it on all the time so I can adjust my driving habbits according to the instantaneous mileage calculations. Everyone should be driving a modern diesel engine. Gas engines are just stupid. (lower mileage, takes more energy to make gas vs. diesel, Diesel can be made from vegetable oils, turkey guts, etc...)

Re:Works for a limited audience

[FLEB]

Nobody is going to wheel a dead guy into the court to elicit sympathy

There's another contingency plan to put in my will, if only for the media circus.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and maybe if you weren't driving that locomotive on tires you could have maneuvered to avoid the accident altogether.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[DuckDodgers]

The CRV actually has an impressive 140 cubic feet of total interior volume - better than most station wagons available today and just a bit behind smaller minivans like the Chevy Uplander, the short wheelbase Dodge Caravan, or the Mazda MPV. An old, gas guzzler Buick Roadmaster or Chevy Caprice has more interior room. A Mercury Sable Wagon has about the same. The Ford Focus wagon, Volkswagen Passat wagon, Subaru Legacy Wagon, Mazda6 wagon, Chevrolet HHR, and even the Dodge Magnum all have less. Look up the numbers for yourself at Yahoo Autos, if you like.

Plus, the CRV gets its 22 mpg with all wheel drive, which was not available on many station wagons a few years ago. It can't stand up to real off road use, but it's quite handy in slippery conditions. We have a sloped driveway, and I need to shovel the entire length to get my front wheel drive sedan in and out in the winter. That's true even though I use Michelin IceX snow tires. The CRV can handle the incline with eight inches of snow without problems on regular all season tires.

Last but not least, as of 2003 the CRV got the highest score in every US crash test in use at the time. It was one of the safest vehicles for its size available at any price, let alone its ~$17,000 base MSRP. The National Insurance Institute (hwysafety.org) added a side impact test with tall vehicles, which the CRV rated very poorly. Honda modified the model for 2005 to ace that test too. It really is a very practical family vehicle. Most of the available station wagons that have nearly as much interior room cost quite a bit more.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[DuckDodgers]

Your vehicle has a higher rollover rating, and it also won't fare as well in an impact with a stationary object or barrier.

F-350 versus Camry in a crash, there's no question that you win. F-350 versus Camry in a high speed emergency maneuver, and there's a good chance you'll flip a few times. The Camry almost certainly will not flip. If you both run into a concrete wall at the same speed, the occupants of the Camry are likely to fare better. It has superior crumple zones to absorb the impact, while the average truck has a more rigid structure that passes more of the impact forces to the occupants.

Ideally, you want a very large vehicle that has excellent crumple zones but is also quite low to the ground with an equally low center of gravity. Then you have the advantage of mass but also a low rollover risk and better crumple zones. The Maybach 62 sedan is 20 feet long and 6300 pounds - just a few hundred pounds lighter than your truck. That's a spectacular choice. If only I had a spare $400,000.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[Burdell]

Minivans cost more and get lower gas mileage. Also, I didn't want a large vehicle (it is easy to parallel park a CR-V in small spaces).

Re:Works for a limited audience

[DuckDodgers]

Well, if you only use its off-roading or tow capacity on rare occasions, then you probably don't need a high quality vehicle. Get a beater. (I'm using Chevy as an example, but this applies for any brand.) Instead of a $45,000 2006 Chevy Suburban, get a $20,000 2006 Chevy Impala and a $2,000 1985 Suburban. The old Suburban won't be as nice as a brand new model, but there are $23,000 reasons to prefer it. Just use it when you need it.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[fm6]

Sound legal logic (when you hit somebody with your car, always remember to back up and finish them off!) but not the way most people think. Thank God for small favors!

Re:Works for a limited audience

[zxnos]

not to mention the emissions. you can smell the unburned fuel coming out of the exhaust.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[fm6]

Your argument assumes that (a) all accidents consist of simple collisions and (b) SUVs are no more likely to get in an accident than ordinary cars. I'm not even going to bother with (a). As for (b), there's the notorious tendency of SUVs to roll over. (You did follow my link before arguing about it, didn't you? Sorry, stupid question.) Plus there's the fact that most SUV drivers just don't have the expertise to drive trucks — and SUVs are trucks — safely. (They really should have the same licensing requirements as other trucks.) By the time you add up all the dangers that you get with an SUV, any safety advantage you get by the fact that you have more metal than the other guy (assuming he's not driving an SUV too!) is more than wiped out.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[Thing 1]

Those SUV are great for making sure the other car gets completely destroyed and the occupants killed.

So, those people who choose air travel expect to cash in on their life insurance plans (as opposed to their medical insurance) in the event of mechanical failure?

And those people who drive cars instead of motorcycles expect to destroy and kill the drivers of those motorcycles they hit?

How'd you get insightful from a troll/flamebait?

Re:Works for a limited audience

[Undertaker43017]

Try finding a rental company that have SUV's or trucks with hitches, none of them do. I unfortunately had to try and find one, when my transmission went. U-Haul is one of the few, if you have a class I-III type trailer, if you have a fifth wheel, forget it, their pickups are all 1/2 tons and no fifth wheel.

Rental companies aren't interesting in helping out recreational types, they put too much wear on a vehicle to be worth it for them.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[Ihlosi]

So, those people who choose air travel expect to cash in on their life insurance plans (as opposed to their medical insurance) in the event of mechanical failure?

Whoa, that's a far stretch. What cloud are you on, and what are you smoking ?

And those people who drive cars instead of motorcycles expect to destroy and kill the drivers of those motorcycles they hit?

Ok, that's better. And the answer is: No. Because you can hit a motorcycle with pretty much anything (other motorcycle, small car, large car, truck) and expect the rider to be seriously injured or killed. How badly depends largely on how fast the motorcycle was going, not what it got hit by.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly,

I WANT my wife to drive over or thru any obstacle she might encounter in order to save her and my kids life on the highway.

The "lets both get hurt equally" arguement is total sh*t for brains.

Yeah, you are right, dead right.....

Re:Works for a limited audience

[Ihlosi]

The "lets both get hurt equally" arguement is total sh*t for brains. Actually, it's "lets both of us not get hurt", but that seems to totally contradict the American "me first" mentality and is therefore distorted into a complete strawman.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[b0s0z0ku]

There's no way it makes sense to spend five extra digits (nevermind the mpg cost) on a vehicle just to haul a boat/atv/etc a handful of times per year.

Why is an SUV needed to tow a boat or ATV? The average ATV is probably under 1000 lb. Unless your boat is huge (and probably then you store it at the marina) it'll be under a tonne. My car (Volvo 240 wagon) is rated for a towing capacity of 3300 lb (actually, closer to 2500 lb if you observe safe tongue weight limits) and makes 30 mpg on the highway with a 5-speed manual gearbox. Someone just needs to produce a similar car today with a slightly more aerodynamic body and a Diesel engine - I'm sure that it could get 45 mpg while having the tow capacity of an SUV.

Closest thing I can think of is the 1998-2005 VW Passat 4Motion. Unfortunately, the diesels were front-drive-only, which isn't good for towing, and the new Passats have a crappy front-biased AWD system.

-b.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[b0s0z0ku]

... you can pick up a domestic wagon on the cheap that easily hauls 4 comfortably and has more cargo capacity than a tiny cr-v.

And gets 6-8 miles to the gallon.

Nah. I had a 1992 Chevy Caprice wagon for a while. The car got around 27 mpg on the highway, was big, comfortable, and moderately fast. Current car is a 1988 Volvo 240 wagon that can seat 4 and their crap easily, gets 28-30 mpg highway, but is sadly not even moderately fast :(

-b.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[b0s0z0ku]

Key word old. What's the gas mileage on that old wagon?

30 mpg highway in my case from an OLD Volvo 240DL. Not great; not horrible. If I'd have bought an old Mercedes diesel wagon (probably would have cost $2500 or so) I'd have been getting closer to 45 mpg.

-b.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[smellsofbikes]

Wall Street Journal had an article about this two days ago. Sales of SUV's have dropped about 25% in the last six months, with specific makes (Jeep Cherokee, Ford Explorer) dropping more like 33%. What people are buying instead are large sedans, the Ford LTD kinds of things that can carry 6 people, and, as it turns out, as much or *more* weight than many SUV's. I got interested in the latter point a couple of years ago and found a Consumer Reports list of net/gross vehicle weight. A Ford Taurus was rated to carry more weight than a Ford Explorer. Remember all those dangerous exploding Firestone tires a few years back? It turns out those Explorers were only supposed to be carrying 1000 pounds total weight. With full tanks (240 pounds) and five adults (200 pounds apiece) they were over their design load. Since then they've greatly increased the Explorer's net/gross ratio.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Since such a large portion of SUV consumers are suburbians who go everywhere on well-paved roads and never use their vehicle's off-road capabilities

Not true! They just use them in unexpected ways!

True Story. I know someone whos boss asked them about getting a tax break when he was buying a Honda CR-V. The tax laws allowed one to get a big break for vehicles that were not "designed and constructed for the purpose of travel by road." Now, the CR-V is an SUV, ergo offroad, ergo tax break. You savvy?

Now that law had been brought in, basically to give farmers purchasing tractors and other heavy equipment a tax break. And here we have the very person who was no supposed to benefit from it, getting a big tax break despite having purchaced a more expensive vehicle. Can you say loophole?

Needless to say, it's rather obvious that the CR-V was "designed and constructed for the purpose of travel by road.". But do you think that matters a danm? CR-V owners will just wave out the window calling "SUV! SUV! Offroad! Non Taxable! Non Taxable!! You Saaaavvvvvvyyyyyy!!?!" as the taxman runs after them thrashing his documents in the air impotently. And of course, his next move will be to turn around scowling at my scooter engine equipped compact and tax the wheels off it.

So you see, while SUV owners may never actually go offroad, they often get good use of the vehicles offroad capabilities. And the rest of use will end up footing the bill.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[HolyCrapSCOsux]

I want carmakers to quit with the 140 cu ft total volume. I want to hear about USEABLE volume. Don't count the unoccupied driver's seat. don't count the volume under the seats, don't count the volume above the front dash. It would be easy to build a car wit 500 cu ft total volume, with less than 50 cu ft that is useful for cargo.
Get a pickup truck. INFINITE cargo space. 4 feet x 8 feet x however tall you can stack it before the springs break. Pack it full of really tall refrigerators!. that's 256 cu ft of volume. put in a tarp and fill it with water!, just a tad under 80 cu ft.

Let's get a metric that means something!! not how much water you can pump into an empty vehicle through the sunroof...

--End Rant--

Re:Works for a limited audience

[raptorjb007]

It is not the large vehicle owner's fault that it is more dangerous to drive in a small vehicle. It is simple physics, and a risk you choose to take when you became the owner of a small car. Full size sedans and Full size vans are among the safest vehicle's one can travel in. So if anyone has safty concers, SUV owner or comcact car owner alike, should consider those type of vehicles instead.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[Mr 44]

And better hope that $2,000 suburban doesn't break down on you 20 miles offroad in the desert.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[Anonymous Coward]

Full size sedans and Full size vans are among the safest vehicle's one can travel in.

I thought full size vans had *higher* roll-over rates. I've seen this a number of places including http://www.cars.com/go/crp/buyingGuides/Story.jsp? section=Van&story=fullvanSafe2006&subject=stories& referer=&year=New

Re:Works for a limited audience

[LunaticTippy]

Surely there is a point where it is the owner's fault.

Let's say I drive a truck jacked up so the bumper is at typical head-level. Anyone that I crash into gets bumper through their windshield. Or say I put a 20' pole sticking out of the bed of my truck, unflagged, right at eye level. Perhaps I'll simply drive a tank, taking up 2 lanes.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[lazarusdishwasher]

Do you have bridges where you dirve?

14'-6" (4.42 m) Absolute minimum
16'-6" (5.03 m) To be provided over all roadways if possible and mandatory for new construction over interstate highways

http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=2&q=http://ma nuals.dot.state.tx.us/docs/colbridg/forms/des.pdf& e=15206

The problem with measuring storage space is determinig how to handle odd spaces. I would suggest that if storage space is that important to you take test objects to the dealership and see if they fit, or maybe a tape measure.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[lazarusdishwasher]

Because you can hit a motorcycle with pretty much anything (other motorcycle, small car, large car, truck) and expect the rider to be seriously injured or killed. How badly depends largely on how fast the motorcycle was going, not what it got hit by.

The "lets both get hurt equally" arguement is total sh*t for brains. Actually, it's "lets both of us not get hurt", but that seems to totally contradict the American "me first" mentality and is therefore distorted into a complete strawman.

if the idea is "lets both of us not get hurt" why does a motorcycle hitting another motorcycle mean you expect serious injury or death?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momentum
Momentum is defined as p=mv. Unless you can change this fact the only helpful way to come up with more momentum is higher mass. Higher speed gives you more momentum but that won't help if the car can't handle absorbing the impact.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[cloudmaster]

My '95 Chevy Caprice wagon averaged 22 MPG with 100K miles all the way up to when the transmission burned up completely at 120K (original owner apparently never changed the fluid). Several owners I know with Roadmasters/Caprices get 25+ MPG. You've gotta get the '94-'96 models with the LT-1, though, not the '91-'93 models with the TBI 350.

Just FYI. I also know people with wagons that run 13s in the 1/4 and still get nearly 20 MPG...

Re:Works for a limited audience

[Thing 1]

What cloud are you on, and what are you smoking ?

Okay, ad hominem, good to know what kind of brain I'm debating with.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[toddestan]

Well, if you were really concerned about your wife and kids, you wouldn't have some big SUV that's harder to control and more likely to roll over. Fact is, they would be safer in a Volvo than a Suburban.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[Jeff Molby]

Maybe you don't need an SUV for those things. I have no idea; I've never tried to tow anything. I just know that a lot of people the towing capacity as a justification.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[fm6]

Notice my sig? Don't confuse ad hominem attacks with simple name calling. The AH fallacy, simply put, is that the validity of the argument depends on who makes it. If somebody says, "You're an idiot, therefore your argument is bullshit", that's ad hominem. But if somebody says, "your argument is bullshit, therefore you're an idiot", there's no fallacy of any kind — the argument is perfectly valid. Of course, a valid argument isn't necessarily a true argument. Your homework assignment is to explain why. Please don't cite Wikipedia as a source.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[raptorjb007]

They do have higher roll-over rates due tot he higher center of gravity, however they have among the highest survival rates. My only guess is due to the amount of open space inside such a vehicle. Wish I could find the data I used so I could back up my statement.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey ASSHOLE! Why don't you drive one of these or a Peterbilt so you kill the entire family next time? Everyone would have probably survived if you would have just been in a big car. Have fun when your lack of maneuverability in your big ass truck causes you to hit something stationary or one of the few vehicles that are bigger than your mobile penis extension. It won't absorb and dissipate the energy so your internal organs will slam against your skeleton. But don't worry. Your little angels' heads will whip around like a tetherball and their guts will turn to jelly just like yours. All the really bad drivers have the same idea and someday they will careen into you. Enjoy the rollover jackass.

These vehicles are for people who need them for work: transporting 3+ men and lots of equipment or trailers to a job site. Not for a scaredy cat suburbanite's commuter vehicle. But since most people don't buy them for real work, they should be included in a firms CAFE averages, be subject to "I have more money than brains" tax at the time of sale, and the drivers be required to pass a yearly driver's exam to prove they know how to drive it (that will eliminate most of them). Until then, I will laugh whenever I see a SUV or a commuter in a big ass truck filling up with fuel. The House of Saud thanks you

Re:Works for a limited audience

[ksheff]

but if it do, it won't be hard for someone to fix it. the 1985 model certianly won't have all the gadgets and other crap that GM tacked onto it after it became a status symbol.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[ksheff]

The GM vehicles with the 3.8 V6 get good mileage too (27-28). My family has had at least 3 of them in the recent past (dad, mom, younger sister). The transmissions will go to hell long before those engines will - they should last at least 250K.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[ksheff]

don't forget dorky looking. even the manufacturers of the little SUVs like to give the impression that they are going for the adventurous, outdoorsy type young buyer.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[killjoe]

I think that if you kill somebody in an accident and you were driving a small car then you should be charged with homocide or negligent homocide or something. If you were driving an SUV then you should be charged with murder. You chose to buy a huge car, you bought it because you figured it would save you at the expense of the other passengers in the car you hit.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[fm6]

Where did I say anything about assigning fault?

Re:Works for a limited audience

[DuckDodgers]

Thanks for the info. I did not realize the LT1 Caprice was that fuel efficient. My father had a used 87 Cadillac and my brother had a used 93 Mercury Grand Marquis, and even after tuneups their fuel economy was disappointing. About 18 and 13 mpg, respectively. My 2001 Impala gets in the high 20s even after 110,000 miles.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[HolyCrapSCOsux]

Ok. they chould make a bunch of 1x1x1 foot boxes. Then publich how many of those boxes fit in the vehicle excluding the driver's seat, pedals and gearshift area.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[Anonymous Coward]

What a one track mind you have. Could anyone possibly buy an SUV because the need to haul around a lot of people or possibly so the could use their daily car as a utility vehicle? They can tow a boat, carry camping gear, haul around family or go to the lumber store and pick up a few sticks of lumber. The purpose of the government is not to inflict punishment on a group of people because they don't like what they drive. Remember this type of statement when the government comes to tax you, imprison you or charge hefty fees on you when you do something another group does not like.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[killjoe]

"Could anyone possibly buy an SUV because the need to haul around a lot of people or possibly so the could use their daily car as a utility vehicle?"

Lots of vehicles can do that. Station wagons, vans, minivans etc.

"The purpose of the government is not to inflict punishment on a group of people because they don't like what they drive."

No, of course not. I am not saying that it should be. I am simply saying that if you bought an SUV, then killed somebody with it then you should be held responsible for it. What's wrong with personal responsibility?

"Remember this type of statement when the government comes to tax you, imprison you or charge hefty fees on you when you do something another group does not like."

Nice rant but I don't get it. That's what happens now. Why can't a gay person get married? Because some other group doesn't like gays.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[cloudmaster]

The, IMHO, cool part about the LT1s is that they're built like tanks. With little more than regular fluid changes and general care, they'll run for 300K miles. The 4L60-E transmission, however, will usually need rebuilt somewhere in the 150K mile range if the fluid wasn't changed every 50K or so. And there are quire a few options, from retired cop cars that run around $1.5K up to the Buick Roadmaster and Cadillac Fleetwood (same platform - all '94-'96 Fleetwoods and wagons (caprice + roadmaster) are LT1s) which will run somewhere in the $5-$7K range for a fairly luxurious car - and you can still spend $10K or more on an impala of the same vintage, which boils down to a cop car with leather seats. Make sure it's an LT-1 and not the smaller version, though. The emissions sticker under the hood should say 5.7 liters, and Caprices (as well as the other sedans, IIRC) will have an option code sticker on the bottom of the trunk lid. It should have LT1 in the list. And note that the civilian Caprice didn't get all of the same goodies as the other models - specifically, the dual electric fans make a little difference in mileage potential, and the aux transmission cooler seems to really help reliability.

I'm partial to the '95s, since there were some minor reliability changes between '94 and '95, and then in '96 they switched to OBD-II. So you can get a '96 scanned for check engine light at Auto Zone for free, but it's a lot cheaper to get software to scan and program an OBD-I '94-'95 yourself than it is for the '96.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[cloudmaster]

Indeed. The 3800 V6 was one of the best things GM ever did. :)

Re:Works for a limited audience

[DuckDodgers]

Thanks, but it's way too late now. Both cars were sold off.

I will definitely keep that in mind in the future.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[DuckDodgers]

Thanks very much for the info. I will definitely keep an eye out. I'm not in the market for the moment though. My 2001 Impala is boring but fuel efficient and (thus far, 113,000 miles) quite reliable. One bad wire connected to the coolant sensor at 42,000 miles has been the only unscheduled maintenance.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[DuckDodgers]

But they stopped updating it. In 2000 the 3800 had already been making 200 peak horsepower from its 3.8 liters for several model years. The 3.4 liter V6 in some sedans and minivans was rated at 180 peak horsepower. The current GM vehicles that use the 3800, the LaCrosse, Lucerne, and Grand Prix, all still have the 200 horsepower version. This summer, Saturn starts selling the new Aura sedan. In XE trim, it will have a 3.5 liter pushrod V6 engine that makes 224 horsepower.

If GM had put a proportionate amount of work updating the 3800 as they did the 3.4, it might be making 243 horsepower today. Not class leading, but still much more competitive than 200.

Re:Works for a limited audience

[cloudmaster]

I almost bought an '01 Impala before I bought my last car - a Pontiac Grand Am GT SC/T with the "ram air" 3800. After less than six months when I decided to get rid of the G/A (for various dissatisfaction-related reasons), I almost bought a black '05 Impala SS (the supercharged 3800 is less than boring, and they look especially cool in black when the windows are tinted) before I decided to go with the Grand Marquis. I decided against the first Impala because of the boring factor, and the second time I decided against it because the speedometer broke (started reading 45MPH too high) while testdriving. And the Grand Marquis just has a better build quality "feel" to it, though I know the W-body Impalas actually are quite reliable cars as you have found. I can't understand how the cops can actually use them for "pursuit" vehicles, though, after I test drove a few. The Ford panther platform cars aren't rockets, but they sure *feel* a lot stronger...

The Grand Marquis/Crown Victoria don't hold their value very well for the first year or two, so even the top-of-the-line "Ultimate Edition" like the one I got is relatively affordable when a couple years old. I think I gave like $17K with 27,000 miles on the clock, which I think is pretty good for a car that was about $38K new two years ago. After adding a Dynomax UltraFlow muffler, it sounds like a big V8 RWD car should (nearly silent under normal usage, adequately angry when pressed). And I don't expect to trade this one real soon, so I'm not real concerned about it losing even more value. Getting a "certified used" Mercury puts it under warranty until just about 100K miles and something like 7 years from now, too. I still really like both of my LT1 Caprices, but this Ford product really is growing on me. :)

An alternative to alternative Fuels

[Horatio1337]

Petroleum!

Re:It's still pollutive crap.

[Toba82]

Great idea. Let's burn coal to power our cars instead of oil.

Huge improvement, sir. Or at least it is if we have clean coal power.

Somewhat obvious conclusions

[lixee]

While the experiment in itself deserves a hat off, what he concluded isn't really a surprise.

Changing driving habits introduce a profound effect on fuel savings for any vehicle. In brief, the following tips collectively save gas in the long run.

* slower acceleration
* reduced top speed
* proper tire inflation
* using cruise control
* proper vehicle lubrication
* correct transmission gears
* using air conditioning only when necessary
* reducing aerodynamic drag
* removing excess weight

Duh!

Re:Somewhat obvious conclusions

[Martin Blank]

A lot of people would do well to learn these basics. I have a Camaro that, when I drive in the city, I tend to keep below 2000 RPM. It moves along in normal traffic just fine, and my mileage doesn't suffer too terribly much. The occasional teen in an overdone Civic does get put in his place, but generally speaking, I'm fairly easy on the gas. This changes when getting on the freeway, as I tend to open up during acceleration, but since most of my freeway runs are fairly lengthy and run using cruise control while in sixth gear, and I did buy the car to enjoy it, I don't feel very guilty about it. :)

Re:Somewhat obvious conclusions

[eggoeater]

I've always felt that gearing (and the required engine torque) has been overlooked in increasing efficiency. My wife's new Accord only runs at 2300 RPM at 70 miles an hour, which is the lowest I've ever seen for a 4 cylinder engine in a mid-size car.

I also have a friend with 99 vette. He can put the cruise on 70 mph and, as long as it's in 6th gear, the tac runs around 2k and gets 36 mpg! This is almost totally due to the very high gearing and unbelievable amount of torque the engine can produce.
I am totally bewildered that a mid-size v8 can get better mileage than a small hybrid.

Re:Somewhat obvious conclusions

[tylernt]

* reduced top speed

Ok, so I have a question. If I reduce my top speed, then it will take me longer to arrive at my destination. Right? So I'm burning fuel for a longer period of time, thus I may be burning more fuel than I save by traveling slower. I.e. I think it's more efficient to travel 60 miles in 60 minutes than it is to travel 60 miles in 80 minutes, as the extra 20 minues of fuel burn time will eat up any savings made by reducing RPM and wind resistance.

What nobody ever seems to talk about is the crossover speed -- above what speed is it more efficient to slow down, though you will be traveling longer, and below what speed is it more efficient to speed up, to reduce the amount of time you're burning fuel?

Re:Somewhat obvious conclusions

[Ihlosi]

I.e. I think it's more efficient to travel 60 miles in 60 minutes than it is to travel 60 miles in 80 minutes, as the extra 20 minues of fuel burn time will eat up any savings made by reducing RPM and wind resistance.

Then you're basically thinking rubbish. The real world disagrees with you delusions.

Re:Somewhat obvious conclusions

[tylernt]

So why did everybody run out of fuel on their way out of New Orleans during Katrina? Guess going 5MPH is below that crossover point, eh?

Re:Somewhat obvious conclusions

[Ihlosi]

Guess going 5MPH is below that crossover point, eh? No. In order to push it below the crossover point, you need to add a few factors like:

* Repeated stopping and accelerating. Eats gas like crazy. * Non-distance-related energy sinks like air conditioning.

Of course, you can build a car that that has an insanely high crossover point (poke a few holes in the gas tank, for example).

Re:Somewhat obvious conclusions

[Otis2222222]

From TFA:

Thus far, the ECU itself is often the culprit behind why engine modifications do not have a lasting effect on efficiency. [...] Direct manipulation of the ECU will likely void any warranty by the manufacturer.

And from the Headline:

Matt conducts some performance tests and uses the results to tweak both his vehicle's engine and his personal driving habits for optimal fuel consumption both on and off road."

After reading the rather lengthy article it read more like a primer on how an engine's ECU manages fuel and airflow rather than - as the headline suggested - " An Alternative to Alternative Fuels and Vehicles".

I was kind of expecting to read that the guy reflashed his ECU and got amazing results and bumped up his mileage some percentage. To read that much and then have a bunch of obvious statements like "drive slower" and "accelarate slower" was kind of a waste of time.

Re:Somewhat obvious conclusions

[tylernt]

I don't think you need holes in the gas tank to have a reasonable crossover point. Can someone check my math here?

Distance 100 Mi
Speed1 55 Mph
Speed2 65 Mph
Time1 1.82 Hours
Time2 1.54 Hours
BurnRate1 3 GPH
BurnRate2 3.5 GPH
TotalBurn1 5.45 Gal
TotalBurn2 5.38 Gal
Time Saved 0.28 Hours
Fuel Saved 0.07 Gallons

It's approaching immorality at this point...

[plasmacutter]

Look.. back in the early 80's my uncle, a doctor, used to keep an SUV for cases when emergencies demanded he trundle off through snow bound michigan streets to see critical patients, but in today's age more than half the vehicles on the road come with all wheel drive and traction control, and luxury sedans now have the option of adjustable suspensions to increase ground clearance. He has one of these now and it serves him better.

Further, fewer than 1% of SUV owners actually take their cars offroad. Most people now buy these things for their own vanity and nothing else.

Meanwhile, while they guzzle fuel at 3mpg, they drive the price of this increasingly limited and taxed resource to the point where there are news reports of the working poor having to pawn off household objects merely to make it into work.

At this point this activity is approaching immorality. I know of few other activities (besides lobbying) which actively make other people poorer for no reason.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[Warshadow]

Meanwhile, while they guzzle fuel at 3mpg

Say what? Maybe if they've got a 1400hp 600ci V8 in them. Granted it's still not great but many of the new mid and large SUV's are now getting 20mpg or better now. Yes it's not great, but it's a far cry from your over-exaggerated 3mpg crap.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[Kohath]

I know you're morally superior to everyone else because of your vehicle choice. But...

Further, fewer than 1% of SUV owners actually take their cars offroad.

How many drive them on snowy roads? Everyone who owns one and lives where it snows, I bet.
How many people need to tow something? Not a huge percentage, but they won't be doing it in a honda civic.
How many people have a couple of kids and have to fit a car seat? A lot. Sure they could drive a minivan, but the mileage isn't too much different in a lot of cases.

Most people now buy these things for their own vanity and nothing else.

Um, so what? You're using energy to post on Slashdot. No vanity there?

People should buy the cars they want. For everyone that makes a "wrong" choice, there are hundreds who would make a better choice for thier own situation than some government car-choosing authority would make for them. People understand their own lives better than anyone else -- enough even to understand which car they should choose.

Meanwhile, while they guzzle fuel at 3mpg

Which new SUV gets 3 mpg?

...they drive the price of this increasingly limited and taxed resource...

...that they are apparently still readily able to afford...

...to the point where there are news reports of the working poor having to pawn off household objects merely to make it into work.

Yeah. News reports. Never exaggerated. Never over-emotionalized. Always a good gauge of exactly what's going to happen to you and everyone you know.

How's that case of the bird-flu BTW? Have you died of that yet?

At this point this activity is approaching immorality.

Yes. Tut-tut. We'll have no more of that choosing your own car. It's not seemly. It's not fashionable. It's against the natural order of things and it will cause the downfall of civilization, I tell you.

I know of few other activities (besides lobbying) which actively make other people poorer for no reason.

Did your senator vote to help those people get cheaper gas by allowing oil drilling in ANWR? Or did he choose the convenience of caribou over the well-being of these poor people? How about drilling off shore? How about cutting the gas tax?

How about ethanol? Ethanol costs more than gasoline these days. So mixing it into gasoline raises the pump price. What about the poor guy on the news who has to sell his kidney for gas money to get to work? Did the Ethanol boosters think of him? Are they immoral then?

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[plasmacutter]

How many drive them on snowy roads? Everyone who owns one and lives where it snows, I bet.
How many people need to tow something? Not a huge percentage, but they won't be doing it in a honda civic.
How many people have a couple of kids and have to fit a car seat? A lot. Sure they could drive a minivan, but the mileage isn't too much different in a lot of cases.

did you read my post at all?
all wheel drive and adjustable suspensions handle snow, when we moved from detroit to atlanta we towed trailers beind *surprise* a mazda 626 and an oldsmobile cultass sierra. cars have gotten peppier since the 80's.. a honda civic has decent torque now compared to its puny 1992 counterpart. as for kids.. my mother used to take my brother, my cousins, and myself (4-5kids, her, and my grandmother), trick or treating through multiple neighborhoods in a station wagon which had fold down seats in the trunk. You don't need a minivan.

Um, so what? You're using energy to post on Slashdot. No vanity there?
yes.. energy which would be produced for the powergrid weather I used it or not, and energy produced from more plentiful resources than gasoline, which now costs upwards of $3.15 a gallon, and arguably would be cheaper if suv's were only drivin by people with actual demonstrating use of their offroad capacity (read park rangers, the army, construction workers, loggers, and people who actually participate in offroading as a sport)

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[Martin Blank]

Meanwhile, while they guzzle fuel at 3mpg

Which new SUV gets 3 mpg?

For that matter, what old SUV gets that? My dad has a 1990 Sierra 3500 Dually with the camper, trailer, and off-road packages, and it's admittedly a fuel hog, but even it gets about 10 MPG, and when he had an over-cab camper on it, it still got about eight.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[kklein]

It's kind of unfair to say (hyperbolically, even) that these cars get 3mpg. Due to a lot of innovation in engines, the efficiency of some of these SUVs is comparable to older, much smaller cars. A couple years ago, my brother decided to buy a Toyota Harrier (sorry, I can't remember the US name for that--Lexus letters-and-numbers--it's the Lexus SUV with the clear taillights). I gave him the standard liberal anti-SUV lecture. He pulled the mpg stats on the Harrier and on my older Camry and emailed them to me. That SUV was a more economical car than my little sedan. I had to admit that it was ME, with my liberal/Buddhist "who needs newer stuff?" attitude that was actually doing more damage to the environment and to the geopolitical landscape. Oops.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe a HUMVEE with full armor plating is that low... if I recall the commercial Hummers were around 7MPG or so. Horrible gas mileage, yes. But I thought that pissing off greenies was half the fun of owning one...

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[Anonymous Coward]

more than half the vehicles on the road come with all wheel drive...

while [SUVs] guzzle fuel at 3mpg...

Do you make up numbers for a living, or is it just a hobby?

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[Kohath]

What's the dividing line between moral and immoral, BTW? Is 20 MPG immoral where 21 is godly (or the secular equivalent: "enlightened")? I want to know if I'm a sinner or not and the news won't tell me.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[More Trouble]

How many drive them on snowy roads? Everyone who owns one and lives where it snows, I bet.

I always get a charge when it snows here, and the SUV drivers in the no-season tires think that all you need is the latest Ford behemoth. I drive a '92 Mazda Miata. Yes, a tiny little roadster, but with snow tires. Until the snow is higher than the undercarriage, a Miata with good snow tires can't be stopped. Driving past SUVs in the snow is a blast, but I do feel bad when I see them flipped over.

:w

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[Anonymous Coward]

Which new SUV gets 3 mpg?

Ah yes, you have to remember of course, to multiply everything Mr. Plasmacutter says by five. Er, it's nothing he can help, you understand. Apart from that he's perfectly all right.

(Apologies to Monty Python)

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[PeeAitchPee]

At this point this activity is approaching immorality. I know of few other activities (besides lobbying) which actively make other people poorer for no reason.

Great, so let's try to legislate *your* opinion of what's morally right / wrong, huh? 'Cuz that's worked so well before (gay marriage ban, prohibition / drug war, abortion debate, etc.).

If someone comes up with a solution that doesn't involve taxing the living shit out of everyone or passing assanine laws which don't do anything but boost politicians' poll numbers, then perhaps great numbers of people will take it seriously. Until then . . . people will drive whatever they want until it's, well, too expensive.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[dasunt]

I always get a charge when it snows here, and the SUV drivers in the no-season tires think that all you need is the latest Ford behemoth. I drive a '92 Mazda Miata. Yes, a tiny little roadster, but with snow tires.

I drove an older Beretta as well as an older Grand Am in the winter, both front wheel drive, both with snow tires. I lived 20 miles out of town, at the end of a 2 mile dirt road that was the last one plowed, and I had no problem in the Minnesota winters.

Lightweight FWD cars can go through an amazing amount of snow with the right tires. If I was still in Minnesota at the same place, I'd have the same setup for myself and my wife for winter.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[plasmacutter]

in case you didn't notice, i've been ignoring your cynical and over the top right wing jags.

to answer your question, the dividing line exists at the point at which the resources you use are needed more by economically disadvantaged than by you, but you consume them anyway and drive the price over that at which they can sustain their daily lives.. lives which include working bitterly hard, feeding their kids, and keeping small and still leaky roofs over their head.

There exists a thing called social responsibility. I'm not here to dictate to you that you can and cannot do things, but I am entitled to point out that it's immoral to do certain things which actively cause others to sink further into the mire of poverty strictly for the sake of your own edification.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[Anonymous Coward]

>>yes.. energy which would be produced for the powergrid weather I used it or not,

umm.. nope.. energy won't be produced on the grid unless it's used, don't use the electricity and that portion will never be generated.. basic physics.. conservation of energy.. electricity isn't magic that defies physics..

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[Zaphod2016]

I am no fan of SUV's myself, but credit where credit is due: many GM and Ford SUVs and trucks offer flex fuel (E85 compatibility). If you need a bigger vehicle, and are located near the "corn belt" I suggest you take a look.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[plasmacutter]

Did I say anything about legislation?

you can't legislate morality.. it doesnt work, but you can still point it out and call a spade a spade.

I'm not saying youre evil for having a pool, or evil for having a big screen tv, or evil for having a 20,000 square foot manhattan estate, but when you consume vast quantities of something as basic as gas for your own vanity while there's a supply crunch and contribute to through-the-roof price hikes that push the impoverished into bankruptcy, you've just crossed the line.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[Akaihiryuu]

SUV's are overrated for off-road anyway. Sure, 4-wheel drive helps, but it's a lot more complex than that. Even though they're built on truck frames (for the most part), they have messed with the suspensions so they don't really handle like trucks, nor are they capable of doing what heavy duty trucks are capable of. If Billy the construction worker needs a truck to carry all his tools around and such, it makes sense to have an F-350 or something along those lines. For soccer moms that do nothing but go to the grocery store, having an SUV that's basically built on the same frame as that F-350 is a ridiculous waste. They don't really have all that much more room inside, it's mostly hype. If you have to carry lots of people around, get a VAN! Not a minivan, a real van...they don't get the gas mileage of efficient cars, but they do a heck of a lot better than SUV's. Personally speaking, I haven't had ANY trouble in heavy snow/ice in my Prius (which is just FWD). I'm averaging 55.4mpg this week so far, with a 4-mile trip to work. Even driving lots of other places, I maybe have to put gas in my car once every two weeks, and sometimes not even that often (and it's got a 10-gallon tank). I saw a video of someone trying to off-road a Hummer H2...it wasn't really severe off-road like you see with custom built 4x4's either, and it managed to break both axles and just about fall apart. SUV's are cheap consumer grade vehicles sold at a premium because they know people will pay it. The off-road capabilities and "safety" are just a myth perpetuated so they can continue to make money. If you need off-road, get a REAL off-road vehicle, don't expect an SUV to do it for you. If you need to carry a lot of people around, get a real van, which is designed to handle it.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[djbckr]

I own an SUV --start the flames!!-- A Ford Expedition. I own it for two reasons: Size and height.

No, it doesn't get very good mileage (19-MPG on average). Yes, it may have a tendancy to roll over more than your sedans. But for comfort for me and my family, it can't be beat. When we want to, we can haul my family, and my in-laws on long trips, with all of our bicycles mounted on the receiver in the back... and we're still comfortable. Can't do that in a minivan.

I appreciate you other people who feel that driving a small car is a better thing to do. In fact, I do have a small car that I drive when I don't need to carry everybody else.

Am I still a high-and-mighty Suburbanite? If you want to feel that way, fine. I have my reasons...

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[Lt.Hawkins]

Until the snow is higher than the undercarriage, a Miata with good snow tires can't be stopped.

A car that you can't stop in the snow is a bad thing ;)

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[Anonymous Coward]

but I do feel bad when I see them flipped over

not me

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[mgblst]

I hate 4WD (SUVs) as much as the next person who doesn't own them. Sure they use up a lot of resources, but more directly because a lot of people can't drive them properly, and because they are safe, don't even see the need to learn. OK, so I am extra careful when I see them. I wish they weren't there, but there you go. Complaining about some poor people who can't afford to drive to work is just silly. These people should be able to find another way to work, without driving, or get a closer to home job. This would do a lot to solve the problem of disappearing resources as well, stopping people from driving who don't need to.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[EnglishTim]

How many people have a couple of kids and have to fit a car seat? A lot. Sure they could drive a minivan, but the mileage isn't too much different in a lot of cases.

Why would you need a SUV or a minivan just to fit a couple of kids in the car?

The vast majority of cars can easily transport five people.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[hey!]

How many drive them on snowy roads? Everyone who owns one and lives where it snows, I bet.

Brilliant! And everyone who owns a 2WD and lives where it snows use them in the snow.

I learned to drive in a primitive, pre-energy crisis, rear wheel drive behemoth with bench seats, nearly 300 HP under the hood and ball joins that had seen better days. And I have owned a number of different cars of different designs and driven many more over the course of the years, all of them including driving in the snow. The only time I have ever lost control of a car in the snow, it was driving a 4WD vechicle. I was fortunate; I could have killed somebody, but it was in the wee hours of the morning, and I ended up in a nice, soft snow bank.

I learned an important lesson from this about 4WD: with 4WD your mishaps are potentially more serious. When you do bog down, you are further from the road. When you do spin out, you are going ten or fifteen miles faster.

Which new SUV gets 3 mpg?

The M1 Abrams. This is what is known to sophistcated users of the Internets, a "typo". I think the poster meant 13MPH. You have to buy a particularly primitive and crappy SUV to get this kind of mileage, but you certainly can: e.g. the Yukon Denali (13MPH). The H2 is estimated by GM to get "10-13 MPG", meaning I suppose that it gets Yeah. News reports. Never exaggerated. Never over-emotionalized. Always a good gauge of exactly what's going to happen to you and everyone you know.

Except Fox, of course.

Yes. Tut-tut. We'll have no more of that choosing your own car. It's not seemly. It's not fashionable. It's against the natural order of things and it will cause the downfall of civilization, I tell you.

Well, the natural order of things is that civliations, like anything else, do come to an end. On a geologic timescale they're like mayflies, the current one included. While I don't expect it will happen in my or my children's lifetime, if you look at the things most likely to cause the end of our civilization, causes might include: stocks of a criticla resource being outpaced fast enough to create political and economic shockwaves; climate change; environmental degredation; or a combination of the above. Furthermore, the shock of these things may not be enough to end civlilzation, but if they trigger war, civil discord, economic dislocation, and these in turn trigger pestilence and famine, then you might have enough.

Even if these aren't enough to end civilization within the proverbial seven generations, there's no doubt in my mind that the further we stay from there, the happier the human race will be.

And it doesn't take much to move away from that direction. It can be as simple as learning that small, elegantly engineered and efficient can be more desirable than sheer bulk.

Did your senator vote to help those people get cheaper gas by allowing oil drilling in ANWR?

Why should he, when idiots are going to burn it up hauling their fat cans around in trucks that use 3x as much fuel as necessary? Eventually, global growth in demand and soaring prices will force us to be more efficient. Far more efficient. I say, leave it in the ground until that day. When we do take it out of the ground, each BTU of energy that represents will be used more efficiently, producing more economic value, and less pollution. Improved technology and higher economic value will allow it to be extracted in a more enviornmentally benign way. It makes more sense to me for our country to keep ANWR in reserve for a day when it might have an impact on our economic destiny, not to achieve a short term blip in energy prices.

How about ethanol? Ethanol costs more than gasoline these days. So mixing it into gasoline raises the pump price. What about the poor guy on the news who has to sell his kidney for gas money to get to work? Did the Ethanol boosters think of him? Are they immoral then?

How did Ethanol and kidneys get into this dis

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[jnelson4765]

Did your senator vote to help those people get cheaper gas by allowing oil drilling in ANWR? Or did he choose the convenience of caribou over the well-being of these poor people? How about drilling off shore? How about cutting the gas tax?

For God's sake, please, please, PLEASE stop dragging ANWR out as a "hippie-killer" - "see, you care more about caribou than children". It's a particularly ludicrous strawman.

This report from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, puts the amount of oil extractable from ANWR at a range of 5.7 to 16 billion bbl, with a mean of 10.3 billion bbl.

From the testimony of the administrator of the Energy Information Administration, our 2004 daily oil demand is 20.8 million bbl/day.

Basic math gives us the result of: ANWR reserves, at the most optimistic review by professional geologists, 770 days of oil at current consumption rates.

The mean reserve calculation gives us 496 days of supply. And that won't come on line for years, as the infrastructure needs to be built from scratch.

Find another strawman.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[myth246011]

"to answer your question, the dividing line exists at the point at which the resources you use are needed more by economically disadvantaged than by you"

Then someone who opposed extracting more of those scarce resources would be equally immoral then?

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[garwain]

How many drive them on snowy roads? Everyone who owns one and lives where it snows, I bet. Uh... I live in the frozen north, and have had no problems with the snow in my Civic Hybrid. Sure it's low, but with snow tires, and good driving technique, I can get just about anywhere I need to go, just as fast as the SUV can. Sure there are some cases where a SUV is useful (ie pulling a camper/boat/trailer/whatever when you have passengers... some people need a vehicule that is good for off-roading. I see people all the time saying how the SUVs are a huge waste. What about pickups? When I walk through the parking lot at my office, I can usually count 15-20 pickups that have never had anything in the box that couln't fit into a trunk, or the back seat, and have never been off the highway, and never pulled anything. Are these any better? People with money always want what the status symbol is. How many of use /.ers have palm pilots, cell phones, mp3 players that are not essential? I know a lot of us work on call, and need the cell phone for work, and the palm comes in handy at times, but if we work a 9-5 job at the same desk everyday, couldn't the outlook calendar and office phone accomplish the same thing?

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[zacronos]

You got taken in by a logical fallacy -- I think ad hominem. If your argument to him was "you should have gotten something that has better gas mileage than the SUV you just bought", and his response was "yeah, well my SUV does better than your car does", then he really didn't address your point at all. The fact is, he probably made one of the least fuel-efficient choices possible for the price he paid (excluding expensive, old, collectible cars). And the choices you have made and your reasons for them don't change that a bit.

Granted, it sounds like he taught you something important -- newer technology has the capability of being more efficient, so perhaps you should consider buying new things for that reason. But, I bet if that's your reasoning, there will be many better choices than buying a brand new SUV.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[elrous0]

I know of few other activities (besides lobbying) which actively make other people poorer for no reason.

One word my friend: lotteries

-Eric

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[glsunder]

I drive about 40 miles to work, and in the winter, 90% of the vehicles in the ditch are SUVs and pickups. However, the one that stuck in my mind was one day it was snowing really bad and a young girl in a newer taurus-like car passed me and another car who were going less than 35mph on the highway (and we were going a little too fast for the conditions). About 5 miles ahead I saw her car upside down, in a ditch on the left side of the road.

Moral of the story: it's not the car you drive, it's the driver. If you drive like an idiot, you'll get in a wreck.

PS: I've notice that the worst drivers seem to drive the biggest vehicles. IMO, if you've been in 5 or more wrecks, you should have to drive the smallest vehicle made.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[Nos.]

I have an 8 month old son. When we travel to see our folks (about an hour or so away), the car is *packed* for a weekend trip. We have a '99 Intrepid, which isn't exactly a small car. However, by the time we pack the playpen (for him to sleep in), the stroller (we like to take him for walks in the evening), his chair, a strap-on high chair, and overnight bag for him, and one for us, the trunk is full. We plan on having a second in a couple years. At that point, we couldn't fit everything in the car.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[Kohath]

Did your senator vote to help those people get cheaper gas by allowing oil drilling in ANWR?

Why should he... ?

Cheaper gasoline.

My reasoning is simple: if you do the same thing you did before, but more efficiently, it has to be good.

I agree. As long as "more efficiently" takes time, money, happiness, and everything else into account. For example, spending $1000 to save $100 worth of energy isn't "more efficient". It's also not more efficient to spend $100 to save $100 worth of energy if it also makes you unhappy.

...nor may you care much about future generations...

I guess I don't see the future in such limited terms. Depriving the current generation to allow the next generation to deprive itself, so that future generations can continue to be deprived until an inevitable sad end -- it's not my view of things.

In my view, the current generation should prosper and be happy and produce technological advances that future generations will use to solve problems. I forsee a future of wealth and prosperity where everyone can afford pollution-free energy. Making the current generation artificially poor through inefficient energy conservation is unnecessary and counter-productive to that goal.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[myth246011]

"Why would you need a SUV or a minivan just to fit a couple of kids in the car?

The vast majority of cars can easily transport five people."

Taking a family of five on a trip in a compact car sucks. It's not just the bodies you have to stow but all the luggage and toys and gobs of baby stuff.

I have three kids and our family has two cars, two are in booster seats required by law for children under 8 and one is in a full size car seat required until she is 40 pounds. The smaller car is a Saturn L wagon. I can fit them in the back but it's tight. Forget it if I have join a school carpool with other parents. The Saturn is our second car, definitely not a primary car.

Minivans offer more space and a lot of flexibility. I have met quite a few parents that told me they were against minivans (They are uncool) but that after a while they broke down and got one and love it. The sliding door on the sides give great access, the higher stance makes it so you don't have to bend over at awkward angles to help with seatbelts, the large back gate makes loading and unloading stuff easy and it holds a lot, and finally, if you have to haul a bunch of stuff you can fold down or remove seats to expose a huge cargo area.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[willCode4Beer.com]

"I do have a small car that I drive when I don't need to carry everybody else"
That is the key (practical, pragmatic, intelligent) statement.
You are pointing out that one vehicle isn't going to meet every purpose.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[Kohath]

Basic math gives us the result of: ANWR reserves, at the most optimistic review by professional geologists, 770 days of oil at current consumption rates.

It doesn't matter. More (inexpensive) oil production means cheaper gas prices than there would be without that production. Period. The only question is how much cheaper.

And the fact is, they do care more about caribou than children.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[AGMW]

I had to admit that it was ME, with my liberal/Buddhist "who needs newer stuff?" attitude that was actually doing more damage to the environment and to the geopolitical landscape.

I'm not sure that's true unless your bro's vehicle of choice is one of the newest that are mostly made up of recyclable parts. The cost of making a car/SUV is enormous in energy and resources and it's entirely likely that, taken as a whole, your knackered clunker represents a greener "footprint" than a brand spanking shiney new vehicle, regardless of the respective average MPG's quoted.

I believe the tree-huggers mantra is sometimes "Re-use is better than recycle".

[oh yes ... did you mean hyperthetically?]

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[AGMW]

In much the same way as your monthly costs expand to accomodate your salary, your luggage expands to fit the vehicle. We have a two and a four seater car. We can go away for a week long camping holiday in either car, and in both situations the vehicle will be full.

Buy a larger car and hear the cries of "How did we ever cope with the smaller car". Actually, it's quite easy. You just take less stuff!

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[b0s0z0ku]

Lightweight FWD cars can go through an amazing amount of snow with the right tires. If I was still in Minnesota at the same place, I'd have the same setup for myself and my wife for winter.

Just to pick a nit: Miata is lightweight, but *not* FWD. RWD cars can do the same as long as they have good snow tires and are well balanced front to rear. Some people would even argue that RWD is better in snow since accelerating doesn't affect the traction available at the steering (front) wheels.

-b.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[smellsofbikes]

They don't buy SUV's just for the sake of vanity.
"internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills."
They also buy them because they think a high-clearance vehicle makes it easier to spot someone who is hiding on the other side of the car. I'm serious. Read the linked article. It's one of the most brilliant essays written in the last ten years.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[sg3235]

Funny, I just looked up fule mileage estimates for a full sized GMC Savana. 6 cylinder engine gets 15MPG. The same site lists the Cadillac Escalade as an 8 cylinder engine which gets 14MPG. I don't consider that "a heck of a lot better". People rail against SUVs because 'no one really takes them off road' as if that's the only reason to have one. Then make suggestions about which vehicle you should have chosen because it performs this or that task just as well as an SUV. I tow a trailer. Anything I get that can tow the weight is going to have the same sized engine as the SUV I have and get roughly the same mileage. I could have gotten a Pickup or a Van. I need more seating capacity that the pickup has and I like the way the SUV drives a whole lot better than the Van that I had before it. BTW, my SUV also sits in the garage most of the time because I don't want to spend the money on gas when I have a vehicle that's more efficient. I bought a minivan to handle the people when I don't need to tow. Bought it 4 months later than the SUV and it has 3 times as many miles on it. But I'd be willing to bet that it's not good enough for some of the eco-facists out there and I'll be called "immoral" shortly.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[Anonymous Coward]

So, if the height of the undercarriage is the limiting factor, what does that work out to in practice? Four inches? For Northern Utah (Where we get serious snow in the winter), that isn't much! I agree that correct tire selection is important, but your Miata will never be as safe or practical as a Jeep in the snow.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[Mike_ya]

3mpg? My CR-V gets 27MPG which I can deal with. No vanity here. Convenience, safety, better field of view (which would have helped me miss the dear that I hit with my Corolla) and being more versatile are some of the reasons for the choice. SUVs are not driving up the price of this 'taxed' resource. Sure if everyone would drive hybrid cars the amount of fossil fuel consumption would be lower, but that still doesn't stop it from increasing every year. As population and business increases in the US, fossil fuel demand would still increase daily like it is now. Let's not forget about the emerging countries consuming more themselves i.e. China, which is increasing its demand for oil faster than the US.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[hey!]

Cheaper gasoline.

I agree. My questions are "how much cheaper?", "for how long?", and, most importantly, "cheaper when?".

Government can certainly learn a lot from business. But there are certain ways in which the government should make decisions differently than a business would. One of them has to do with time scales for decisions.

From a business perspective, resources sitting in the ground are wasted. And perhaps this is the right attitue for businesses. If we don't go in there now and get that oil, who knows who will end up doing it?

However, for a government, it is enough that it is taken out of the ground by somebody at a time when the nation needs it most. Yes, high energy prices hurt people, particularly low and middle income people. But if we are in a future situation where the reserves are needed, the same will be the case; it's only robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Now, I'm not arguing that all resources be left in the ground. What I'm arguing is that when there are significant negative factors are involved with extracting that resource, it might be a good time to look at those resources as reserves to be tapped at a later date, when more advanced technology and higher economic value can offset those negatives.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[Bob Uhl]

Further, fewer than 1% of SUV owners actually take their cars offroad.

How many drive them on snowy roads? Everyone who owns one and lives where it snows, I bet.

An SUV does nothing for one on snowy roads--if anything, it has more mass, thus more inertia, thus slides more. Yes, many SUVs have all-wheel drive; so do many sedans & vans. Yes, many SUVs have good tyres; so do many sedans & vans.

How many people need to tow something? Not a huge percentage, but they won't be doing it in a honda civic.

Why not? It depends on what you need to tow. And certainly, if one has a need for an SUV then one should own one; my argument is that very few people need one, and that they are in fact making a mistake when they purchase one, as they are paying too much money for a vehicle which doesn't properly serve their actual needs--and are also negatively impacting the rest of us while they're at it.

How many people have a couple of kids and have to fit a car seat? A lot. Sure they could drive a minivan, but the mileage isn't too much different in a lot of cases.

You can have a fair number of kids in a sedan, for pete's sake! I think the point at which a minivan or SUV becomes worth looking at is three or more--and even then, it depends on ages, sizes and travel patterns.

I don't think SUVs should be illegal or over-taxed; I just think that purchasers need to think about what they're purchasing. Do they really need a 20 mpg vehicle for commuting in the city?

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[accessdeniednsp]

In the south (below the top half of North Carolina) there is nothing but ice. Real powder snow is rare. So the SUV monkeys driving in ice are absolutely stupid. And using SUV as the reason for driving in winter weather, in the south, is ludicrous.

No, it's vanity. And pretentioness. Elitism for the non-l33t.

The "3 mpg" was hyperbole. Compare to a Saturn SL-2 or even an SL-1, or a Toyota Camry, or Honda Accord, VW Jetta, etc. etc.

Either way, we're all gonna die. Sooner rather later, if the current war-mongering state of affairs continues.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[Abcd1234]

Well, my experience here in Edmonton Alberta (Canada's northernmost major city) is that RWD is rarely a good thing when you get a big dump of snow... this past winter we got a good meter in the span of a couple days, and every stuck vehicle I saw as a RWD. As for handling, on slick surfaces, the torque generated by the spinning rear tires can make them very difficult to drive safely, as they tend to cause the vehicle to swerve. But, in this case, I suppose YMMV... ;)

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[Kohath]

cheaper when?

Given that oil is a pure commodity and that future scarcity of oil is reflected in the price, the answer to this is clear. Drilling in ANWR will result in cheaper gas within days after the president signs the bill that allows it. The price difference might not be noticable, but it will be a non-zero difference immediately.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[LunaticTippy]

I had a Ford Escape rental once, and I was disgusted by the mileage. It was supposed to get 22mpg, but the best I ever saw was 20. (pure highway driving) In heavy traffic, it was 12mpg at the worst.

I take mileage figures with a lot of skepticism now. This was supposed to be a "small, efficient" SUV.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[hey!]

Given that oil is a pure commodity and that future scarcity of oil is reflected in the price, the answer to this is clear. Drilling in ANWR will result in cheaper gas within days after the president signs the bill that allows it. The price difference might not be noticable, but it will be a non-zero difference immediately.

So, what you are sahying is we should drill in ANWR for non-noticeable difference? in prices?

OK, that was a cheap shot, but blips in future prices really aren't worth setting national policy by. So let's stipulate that having ANWR produce 1 to 1.5 M BBL/day against a global production of 85MBbl (expected to rise somewhat) will have a noticeable affect on prices. Once the oil is coming out of the pipeline of course.

You misunderstood my question.

I'm asking when should we tap ANWR in order to benefit our country the most. It's a question of economic nationalism.

I see the net focus on trying to manipulate short term oil prices as not in our national interest. We need to look at global growth in energy production against the emergence of economies like China that are going to be bidding for that oil. ANWR is not a solution to global price rises. We are an energy inefficient country; in part this is structural. But we're making no real progress in the amount of energy we need to generate a buck of wealth. If we take steps to keep energy prices low, we delay coming to grips with that. Lower energy prices today means more profits China pours into its infrastructure and more gas we send into 10MPG H2s.

I see a day of reckoning coming. That doesn't mean the end of the world, it just means change is coming, and people, organizations and nations that are forward looking will be better prepared. The world will never run out of oil. That's not how economics works. No, price increases will cause the extinction of economies that use oil inefficiently. ANWR should be tapped before there is a crisis in our economy (which the current gas prices are not, painful though they are), but after the shape, size, and speed of the oncoming price crisis can be guaged.

I'm an environmentalist, but also pragmatist. There is no way in the coming price scenario that ANWR will remain untapped forever, not given what oil prices will be in fifteen years. But because it is going to be tapped sooner or later, doesn't automatically make sooner better, unless you have an economic interest energy inefficiency. As an environmentalist, I like the idea of tapping it when prices are higher because the increased value will offset more environmental mitigation.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[b0s0z0ku]

Well, my experience here in Edmonton Alberta (Canada's northernmost major city) is that RWD is rarely a good thing when you get a big dump of snow... this past winter we got a good meter in the span of a couple days, and every stuck vehicle I saw as a RWD. As for handling, on slick surfaces, the torque generated by the spinning rear tires can make them very difficult to drive safely, as they tend to cause the vehicle to swerve. But, in this case, I suppose YMMV... ;)

I don't know - I've driven my Volvo 240 on some pretty bad days - 6" of unplowed snow still on the roads, topped with a nice layer of ice. it handled just fine with snow tires. The advantage of RWD was that you could play with the throttle to tighten up the turns, whereas a front-wheel drive car would just plow straight and not turn. Not that I was trying any rallye-type stuff in the snow: I was going 15-20 mph at most...

The keys to good RWD handling in snow are good snow tires and 50/50 weight distribution. The problem is that many older American RWD cars and current RWD trucks are front-heavy, so the rear doesn't have that much traction and slides around. Also, good traction control (that activates near the limit of adhesion rather than hobbling the car) is a plus and can be integrated into modern ECU's cheaply, using existing sensors.

-b.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[Kohath]

So, what you are sahying is we should drill in ANWR for non-noticeable difference? in prices?

Yes. What's the downside? Irritated caribou? Let the caribou complain to their union rep or email their congressman.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[hey!]

The main downside from a human perspective is we don't have it when we need it later.

Yes, and the caribou count for something in my book. As much as people who use SUVs as personal communting vehicles, at least.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[Kohath]

Yes, and the caribou count for something in my book. As much as people who use SUVs as personal communting vehicles, at least.

...caribou count...as much as people...

That's what environmentalism is about. That's why some of us disagree with it as a philosophy. I'm a person. I'm better than a caribou (or a herd of caribou). A lot better. Every person is.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[More Trouble]

Shucks! /. ate my post. Here's a summary: modern Miatas have 4.6" of clearance. The current low end Jeep Cherokee has 8.0". Current model year of Volvo XC V70 has 8.6".

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[kklein]

No, I meant hyperbolically. As in, "saying these cars get 3mpg is hyperbole." It is exagggerrrrated to make a point. Get your head out of the maths gutter.

It's a fair point you make, but which is worse? Driving a less efficient car for 20 years or a more efficient car for 20 years? They likely had comparable initial energy costs at the outset, but shouldn't the reduced energy cost of the newer vehicle be taken into account for the OVERALL energy cost of the vehicle? Even if we didn't personally drive these cars for that long (we've both sold since then), they are going to be on the road for that long, most likely (we're talking about Toyotas here).

There is no doubt that there are more economical things than buying a new car, but this discussion is limited to those who DO.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[Anonymous Coward]

How many people need to tow something? Not a huge percentage, but they won't be doing it in a honda civic.
Don't know about the US, but over here in Australia, we have sedans that are pretty effective at towing. Several different locally made models with 4 litre engines that use half the fuel of a 4wd and probably a third of the fuel of a yanky SUV.

How many people have a couple of kids and have to fit a car seat? A lot. Sure they could drive a minivan, but the mileage isn't too much different in a lot of cases.
A good sized sedan is built to handle 2 child seats. Granted, if you've got more than 3 children or 2 child seats, you've probably got a reason to buy a decent 4wd.

But you don't have to justify your actions. Like you said, it's freedom of choice. If you choose a huge SUV, you pay for the petrol and have to accept the efficiency.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[hey!]

That's what environmentalism is about. That's why some of us disagree with it as a philosophy. I'm a person. I'm better than a caribou (or a herd of caribou). A lot better. Every person is.

Alas, another person so irony impaired he can't recognize humor.

Perhaps this will help: I'd be more upset if you killed and butchered and SUV driver for meat than if you did the same thing to the caribou. On the other hand, I'd be happier if a caribou continued being a caribou than an SUV driver remain a caribou, so you could say I'm for the extinction of SUV drivers as a species. However I'd prefer the people who used to drive SUVs can continue living their lives, just in a less selfish manner.

Environmentalism is about valuing human beings. I believe more so than your value system, although admittedly some on my side of the issue are a bit fuzzy on this.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[Warshadow]

I had a Ford Escape rental once, and I was disgusted by the mileage. It was supposed to get 22mpg, but the best I ever saw was 20. (pure highway driving) In heavy traffic, it was 12mpg at the worst.

I take mileage figures with a lot of skepticism now. This was supposed to be a "small, efficient" SUV.

You should read window stickers a bit more carefully next time. Take for example my old WRX, the window stiker says 20 city, 27 highway in big bold numbers. If you read under that is also clearly states:

Actual mileage will vary with options, driving conditions, driving habits and vehicle's condition. Results reported to EPA indicate that the majority of vehicles with these estimates will achieve between 16 and 24 mpg in the city and 22 and 32 mpg on the highway.

I'm willing to bet money the mileage you saw was well within what Ford said it would get. Please remember that small does not mean efficient. This is a mistake many people make.

Re:It's approaching immorality at this point...

[AGMW]

hyperbole vs hyperbolic ... aha ... yes indeedy.

Obviously, given the option of 20 years in a modern car or 20 years in a clunker, the modern car wins hands down, but as the clunkers are already built I think there may be a case for saying an existing clunker for the next 5 years might be "greener" than having a new car built from scratch and driving that for 5 years.

A mate has an old 5 series BMW which he converted to LPG and now runs sweet as a anything. Total cost of car + convertion is somewhere under £2000. Now the UK Gov used to have a deal where if you converted your car to LPG they'd pay for some of the conversion cost, except the numb-nuts only applied it to new cars. So if you purchased a new car and converted it they'd help, when it would actually make much more sense to apply the grant to converting old cars, which are less efficient to start with.

Even more crazy, the convertions didn't then allow you to pay less or nothing in Ken's London congestion charging, whereas a new LPG/Bi-Fuel car would do. It's all arse-about-face!

A by product of the LPG convertion is that the service intervals for the car have become even more infrequent (esp. for the oil change interval) as the LPG stuff appears to keep the engine "clean", greatly prolonging the life of the vehicle (rapidly approaching 200K miles - not stratospheric these days, but still good!).

Infinite power?

[Null Nihils]

"...the infinite power of Excel..."

<OSSzealot>
I beg your pardon? Since when does proprietary software have infinite power? I think you mean the infinite power of OpenOffice Calc!
</OSSzealot>

Re:It's still pollutive crap.

[MadEE]

Oil only funds bad guys(Big Oil and the Middle Eastern theocracies)

Don't forget Canada. Don't think I'm not on to you Canada with your clean streets and your cheap healthcare! The only logical step from that is world domination. Watch out!

And where does the electricity come from?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Reduction is a way more important first step than switching. Once people have reduced their energy needs, then current, as well as future, alternatives are more viable.

So he tuned his car?

[Zakabog]

Why is this on slashdot exactly? This guy just tuned his car and followed some tips we've known about improving gas mileage for years. This isn't a new alternative to alternative fuels and vehicles, this is stuff car guys have been doing ever since the first ECUs were put into cars (and before that they'd have to change a mechanical system to tune the car.) Normally it's to improve performance but it can be used to improve gas mileage also.

Re:So he tuned his car?

[Anonymous Coward]

High gas mileage gives some Slashdotters a chubby. And he used Excel.

Re:So he tuned his car?

[Chicken04GTO]

Used Excel? That makes him a hated M$ drone, not worthy of slashdot :)

What he did was small time, and I agree, hardly worth news.

Re:So he tuned his car?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Why is this on slashdot exactly?"

Because some people are turned on by some graphs. Zonk see pretty pictures. Zonk like pictures.

There was nothing in this article not readily known for my entire lifetime... oh... and I am old. HA!

Alternative Fuel Offroad Vehicles

[7of7]

As far as I can tell any means of electric vehicle would be an absolutely kickass offroad vehicle. The extreme torque and smootheness of electric motors are ideal for rock crawlers and other similar 4wd vehicles. It doesn't really matter where you get the electricity from. Heck, imagine one truck carries a giant fuel cell and tows the rock crawlers to the hills while powering them up too. Hybrid would be cool too, but you'd still have the gas/diesel engine to deal with.

Re:Alternative Fuel Offroad Vehicles

[NetJunkie]

We know. I'm an offroader and an electrical engine would be great. Unfortunately they don't hold enough charge and aren't reliable enough. Try dumping one in water a few times and see what happens. :) But yeah, the torque would be perfect.

Re:Alternative Fuel Offroad Vehicles

[b0s0z0ku]

We know. I'm an offroader and an electrical engine would be great. Unfortunately they don't hold enough charge and aren't reliable enough. Try dumping one in water a few times and see what happens. :)

Try sucking water into a gasser or Diesel. It'll stall if you're lucky. If you're not, bent piston rods will be the least of your worries. Remember, kids, water doesn't compress...

A brushless permanent-magnet or AC induction electric motor can be made with no exposed electrically live parts. Assuming intact insulation and sealed bearings, it'll happily run under water.

-b.

Re:Alternative Fuel Offroad Vehicles

[eheldreth]

While I agree, just a point. The problem's associated with hydro locking an internal combustion engine are slightly exaggerated. If the engine is shut off immediately it's fairly easy to get the water out of the engine. Remove a spark plug, turn the starter and watch the squirt gun like fun. A little wd40 to dry the distributer(if you have one) and you can usually get home where you will want to perform an oil change. The key is shutting of the engine/not trying to restart it once you realize you've taken on water. This won't always be possible but good drivers can usually avoid a hydro lock if they think quick enough. We have done this enumerable times with Jeeps in our club.

Peak Oil and Grasping at Straws

[Anonymous Coward]

At this point can we just admit we are all screwed?! Cheap abundant oil is vanishing and there is no plan B.

Ethanol - Not going to happen. Best case EROEI of just 34% compared to 3000% for light sweet crude???!! Ethanol is not going to happen
Hydrogen - Another non-starter. No way to store it for long periods. Negative EROEI.
Biodiesel - EROEI of 95%, still not nearly good enough to keep the interstate highway going.
Nuclear Fission - Too many enviroweenies, too specialized, too long to build a plant.
Wind - Fine for powering a small town, but no where near the power needed to run modern society.
Solar Photovoltaics - Another non starter. Not enough raw materials to make the necessary panels.
Solar Thermal - Useless above 30 degree+ lat
Nuclear Fusion - 50 years away

Re:Peak Oil and Grasping at Straws

[ElephanTS]

Tell the truth and get -1, Troll'ed. It must be Slashdot! (Or to another poster: Fashdot)

BTW, nuclear additionally suffers from 'peak uranium' which occured in 1980s. The 440 plants in the world are kept going, in part, by the decommissioning of nuclear weapons.

Re:Peak Oil and Grasping at Straws

[Anonymous Coward]

The 440 plants in the world are kept going, in part, by the decommissioning of nuclear weapons.

And viewers like you!

Re:Peak Oil and Grasping at Straws

[belg4mit]

Yes, there is a finite amount of Uranium (on the order of 100 years worth at current
consumption IIRC), however the "peak" was not in the 80's; there are many unmined
sources.

Yes, because 27.7 fucking percent of the Earth's crust isn't enough! Not nearly enough!

Re:Peak Oil and Grasping at Straws

[Zaphod2016]

At this point can we just admit we are all screwed?!

What a cowardly thing to say. I for one am not about to give up.

Ethanol - Not going to happen. Best case EROEI of just 34% compared to 3000% for light sweet crude???!! Ethanol is not going to happen

Wrong. In fact, I am currently trying to open a E85 station in Florida to coincide with the multiple new ethanol producers scheduled to open up shop in 2008. Yes, ethanol does not offer a cheaper price than gasoline in all areas right now, but if you live in WI or MN you could be using E85 and saving 10-25% of your car's fuel costs right now.

Florida is one of the USA's major sources of sugar cane, a crop that can produce nearly TWICE as much ethanol per acre than corn, which is currently our main source. In fact, most economists attribute the recent surge in ethanol prices to a jump in demand. Once our capacity has caught up with current demand, the price of ethanol will drop again. Mark my words: within the next 5 years American biofuels will be significantly cheaper than foreign petrol, and once this paradigm has shifted, the mass exodus to E85 is only a matter of time. Add hybrid technology to an E85 vehicle, and suddenly you can double the output of ethanol, and reduce petrol use even further.

It is not *we* who are screwed, it is *you* who is screwed. You have allowed frusteration to lapse into cynicism. The change *is* coming, believe me. These things always take longer than we would like them to, but the economic reality is obvious to all: oil's days are numbered.

Re:Peak Oil and Grasping at Straws

[Dantu]

At this point can we just admit we are all screwed?! Cheap abundant oil is vanishing and there is no plan B.

I'm already driving plan B: a Hyundai Accent.

Cars don't get any cheeper, it's got pleny of room unless you have kids (& more headroom than a lot of cars costing twice as much) and gets 7-8L/100km (I think thats around 40mpg for Americans). When gas gets up around $4/L ($14/Gallon) it will start to cost more than my insurance. I'm pretty sure that for that price we can find some sort of fuel for many years to come.

I realize not everyone WANTS to drive an Accent (or other small car) but really, the world won't come crashing down if gas gets more expensive. People who need a big vehicle will either have to decide they don't really 'need' it, or get a runabout for day-to-day driving and leave the F-350 in the garage when it isn't hauling anything.

Re:Peak Oil and Grasping at Straws

[e4]

the world won't come crashing down if gas gets more expensive

It's not about the price at the pump. It's about everything. Shipping. Manufacturing. Air travel. Agriculture. Medicine. Anything made from or packaged in plastic (i.e. everything). The average food item travels 1500 miles to the American plate. Many other industrialized countries are even higher.

Quick, name five things that aren't affected by high petroleum prices...

And we're not talking about gradual price increases. With China and India ramping up on the American Dream, and American usage increasing even with the current prices, demand is accelerating.

If production peaks and starts to decline (google for "Hubbert's Peak"), then you have a formula for skyrocketing prices. Falling supply + rising demand = huge price spike. If the decline is permanent, prices will only go up.

Petroleum is not infinite.

Re:Peak Oil and Grasping at Straws

[e4]

Ethanol, or any biofuel, will be hard pressed to replace oil. Petroleum is essentially very old and dirty, but efficient biofuel, stockpiled underground. A year's worth of [insert favorite biofuel source plant(s) here] will be hard pressed to replace an eon's worth of petroleum.

Here is some back-of-the-napkin stuff - mostly unit conversions. Nothing fancy. If you trust my math skills, feel free to skip to the surprise ending.

My sources are just whatever came up first on Google.

So here goes:

According to this link, there were 598 million metric tons of corn produced globally in 2002. (That was the first year I came across. Let's assume it's typical.)

598 million metric tons * (2204.6 lbs/metric ton)
...converts to 1.3 billion lbs of corn.

A bushel of corn is currently defined as 56 lbs.

1.3 billion lbs * (1 bushel/56 lbs)
...converts to about 23.5 million bushels of corn.

According to this article, a bushel of corn can produce 2.7 gallons of ethanol.

23.5 million bushels * (2.7 gallons/bushel)
...tells us that 63.5 million gallons of ethanol could theoretically be made from all the corn grown globally in one year.

According to this, a barrel of petroleum has 42 gallons. After refining, it could be made into about 19.5 gallons of gasoline.

So if we say that 1 gallon of ethanol can replace one gallon of gasoline, then

63.5 million gallons * (1 barrel / 19.5 gallons)
...comes to 3.2 million barrels.

(The 1-to-1 ethanol-to-gasoline ratio is a falacy, as ethanol will only take your car 0.8 miles for every 1 mile gas will, but this is getting too complicated. Let's just say 1-to-1.)

According to this source, the United States currently uses 20 million barrels of oil per day.

3.2 million barrels * (1 day / 20 million barrels)
...amounts to 0.16 days.

So if we can stop using corn for livestock feed, corn starch, corn syrup, corn oil, corn chips, corn stoves, corn bread, popcorn, candy corn*, corn on the cob, corn dogs, creamed corn... er... sorry, I was channeling Forrest Gump for a second...

If we use all of the corn grown in one year for making ethanol, and production is still propped up by using current (petroleum-heavy) farming practices, it would keep the U.S. running for just about four hours. Or, if you prefer, Argentina could last almost a week. Or we could supply Togo with their fuel needs for the entire year.

"Your math is wrong!" you exclaim. Not unlikely. But show me where. Am I off by an order of magnitude? Let's take it from 4 hours to 40 hours. That's almost two days! Woohoo!

"Corn is the wrong source!" you shout. Let switch to sugar. Or switchgrass. Or anything you want. Let's imagine the Fubar tree, which is 100 times more efficient for making ethanol. So now we've gone from 3 hours to almost 17 days. Woohoo!

Let's dare to dream, and combine the last two! I'm off by an order of magnitude, and there's a massive switch to Fubar tree farming. The U.S. now has over 5 months of petroleum replacement. Sorry Argentina and Togo...

Feel free to check my math. I'm sure this must be due to rounding error.

--
* - I checked. Corn syrup is an ingredient in Candy Corn

Re:Peak Oil and Grasping at Straws

[Ihlosi]

According to this link, there were 598 million metric tons of corn produced globally in 2002. (That was the first year I came across. Let's assume it's typical.)

The link refers to the "cereal", i.e. maize kernels for human consumption, not raw biomass or feed corn.

Your math might be right, but your facts are somewhat blurry.

Re:Peak Oil and Grasping at Straws

[e4]

Ok, I'll look for a better reference. Let me know if you know of one. But even so, is it off by an order of magnitude? It would take several orders of magnitude to make a serious dent.

Re:Peak Oil and Grasping at Straws

[JoeStreet]

Ethanol, or any biofuel, will be hard pressed to replace oil.

Here is an excellent analysis by Car & Driver. I don't know if there numbers support your numbers but the analysis arrives at pretty much the same conclusion.

Re:Peak Oil and Grasping at Straws

[Zaphod2016]

Corn produces about 350 gallons ethanol per acre. Sugar cane produces about 650 gallons per acre. Better still, down in Florida growers can get 2-4 seasons of sugar crane crop PER YEAR. As a result of this natural advantage, I have total faith that the state of Florida can produce 8 times as much fuel than a comparable chunk of the midwest (in terms of acres farmed).

There are two things keeping ethanol pricey: 1) ethanol is competing with other sugar products to purchase this raw crop; demand +, price +. 2) Florida lacks the ethanol manufacturing capacity required to turn this sugar cane into ethanol; the same thing happened after Katria when our refineries were taken off line and gasoline prices surged.

As I already explained, the capacity issue is due to turn around in Florida come 2008. As for the highly competitive nature of sugar cane, this is good news for farmers, but it makes ethanol nervous. This is why many great minds are currently hard at work genetically engineering crops that will produce more ethanol without competing with other crops designed for human consumption. For example: DuPont and BP are both working together on BioButanol as we speak.

Imagine a PC from 1985 being used to run a 1995 version of Photoshop. Absurd, of course. This is how we will view current American biodiesel production a decade from now: immature, but with great untapped potential.

Re:Peak Oil and Grasping at Straws

[PrebleNY]

Just to confirm the ballpark validity of the poster's numbers on production...
I highly recommend the FAO website for agricultural statistics (actually a cool website, available in 4 major languages and chock full of information)

using the FAOSTAT database (http://faostat.fao.org/)I got the following data on maize production (for reporting to the USDA/FAO (UN) maize encompasses all corn other than fresh sweet corn (reported as Green Corn), including human consumption (flour/meal) and livestock feed)

Maize
Production (Mt) by year

2002
USA 228,805,088
Canada 8,998,800
World 603,163,668

2003
USA 256,904,560
Canada 9,587,300
World 642,711,958

2004
USA 299,917,120
Canada 8,835,700
World 724,515,133

2005
USA 280,228,384
Canada 8,392,000
World 694,575,552

So the figure provided above of 598 metric ton is very close (usually there are adjustments made for a couple of years afterthe initial report is released as better data becomes available and missing data is added). You can also get information on how the crops are being utilized (feed, food, etc.) as portion of production from this website... I wont go through all the numbers, but the short story is that in most of the industrialized world we feed around 2/3s or our corn to livestock, in less industrial nations it is typically less than 1/3 for feed with single digits common.

Re:It's still pollutive crap.

[jpardey]

And as everyone knows, electricity comes from the wall! I suppose it is true that burning mass amounts of coal/oil is more effient than the small amounts in cars, but it still takes energy. In my area, we are lucky to have cheap hydro electric power, which is relativly good (I know, land use, CO2 from the decaying plants dug up from the site, etc etc). Nuclear, wind, or solar would be nice. And at least what is in the article is more efficient than the standard hummer.

Not willing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Too fucking bad, you'll have to get used to it. Sooner rather than later.

Hey look.. ! a flamer mod!

[plasmacutter]

I have to comment on the recent redshift in the mods lately.

I've seen numerous libertarian and left winged comments modded down as flamebait, offtopic, or overrated despite being insightful or otherwise interesting, presumably because the mods "didnt agree with it".

I posit that slashdot's metamod system is broken, since it allows partisan mods to anonymously troll comment sections at their leisure.

A note to these people: you dont like what's being said? well find someone who is refuting that point and mod it up, modding other people down because you dont like what they say smacks of fascism.

Re:Hey look.. ! a flamer mod!

[URSpider]

I posit that slashdot's metamod system is broken, since it allows partisan mods to anonymously troll comment sections at their leisure.

At the risk of being modded off-topic, this doesn't mean that the moderation system is broken. It WAS broken at one point, and that is why meta-moderation was introduced. If a moderator is doing what you suggest, then it should be obvious in meta-moderation, and that person will become less and less likely to get mod privileges in the future.

Post good stuff, moderate intelligently, and meta-moderate intelligently and often!

Re:Hey look.. ! a flamer mod!

[plasmacutter]

this only works under the assumption that metamoderators are any less partisan than their moderator counterparts.

granted I can't think of a better system at the moment.. but it's clear the current system is broken from behavior i've noticed.

Re:Hey look.. ! a flamer mod!

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether mods are right or left or center, the problem is that the mods take perfectly valid comments out of the discussion. Moding down almost always, especially for a comment modding up to 2, or was two by default, is an aggressive act by a person who wishes that conversation to cease. Even if there comment is faulty, it is almost always better to state the fault rather than mod down. And highly rated comments, while perhaps faulty, were clearly useful for some people, and those people would be better served to hear an opposing view rather than just have something modded overrated. How does that increase understanding?

Here is what is funny. I have had comments with way over 5 mod points. People mod my up, people mod me down. I don't really care, except that it waste mod points. Are there not other comments that supply an opposing view that are worth positive mod points. Is what I saying so dangerous that it must be squashed? I am flattered that my words are so powerful, but would it not be better to respond to a post, tell the devil-worshipping heathens why they are wrong, rather than use precious mod points to reduce visibility.

Here is really what the bottom line is. By modding down a unpopular opinion that is in general high regard, you are acknowledging that not only is that opinion largely correct, but that you do not have the basis to even begin to refute it.

Re:Hey look.. ! a flamer mod!

[ElephanTS]

Yes, I agree with you. I have noticed this myself a fair bit recently. The troll/flame system ends up being another label for 'thoughtcrime' and it really isn't fair or egalitarian a lot of the time. Especially happens with the political arguments and discussions like this which have serious political overtones.

However, I don't think it makes the system biased or broken - it is reflecting what seems to be out there in 'meatspace' from my experience. I try to use my mod points to right wrongs if I can.

Re:Hey look.. ! a flamer mod!

[Andy Gardner]

I've stopped moderating over the last 6 months or so precisely because my mods were constantly being revoked as unfair. I haven't changed my moderating style, just the usual +1 intersting/informative, +1 funny for anything that particularly tickles me. More hassle than its worth lately though.

Re:Hey look.. ! a flamer mod!

[FLEB]

I've been on the unpopular side of issues on here (pro-Copyright... anyone?), and it's not so much a matter of unpopular opinions getting the instant downmod, as much as the unpopular opinions not having the strength to rebound or gain support by nature of being cliche, badly-written, poorly supported, or over-assuming. I'll admit, a popular opinion may not have to work as hard, but if you post an unpopular opinion expressed fully and eloquently, with legitimate arguments that avoid common pitfalls, chances are it'll be either upmodded, or, at worst, initially downmodded then re-upped by more level-headed mods.

In this instance, it's just the matter that the "damn SUV drivers" shout has become overworn. Perhaps it is true, but it has no motive action. Firstly, it's been overdone into the ground and is just cliched claptrap ten times over. I'll grant that's no reason to keep a good idea down, but it helps.

The argument is also, by virtue of nature and of common use, seen as simple confrontation and snark. The anti-SUV sentiment really has evolved to become more of a slogan, an emblem, of a certain breed of environmentalist argument. Too many people waving the anti-SUV banner just throw it in the face of "the enemy" in simplest form, not taking into account the obvious nuances, like how a new SUV can be more efficient than an old car, or the question of "I already own it, what the hell'm I supposed to do?" At this point, it's not an argument, it's just a brand that can easily be used to shrug people off as "eco-nuts" or "gas-guzzling assholes".

The anti-SUV argument, as legitimate as it may or may not be, has little to no use as a tool for dialogue or change. The people who do little more than shout the same tired arguments will (and in my opinion, should) continue to be "modded down" until they realize that legitimate calls to action must not only be correct, but must be palatable to the recipient, both in substance and delivery. Nobody's going to just discard a multi-thousand-dollar machine. Likewise, it's been shown over and over again that status-seekers and frightened suburbanites consistently behave as they do... they buy trendy SUVs. It should be obvious that a "Stop buying SUV's, you assholes!" course of argument is futile. It only clouds the waters and solidifies disagreements, and it doesn't even do it in a novel way.

Hence, downmods.

(I'm not even talking in regards to the GPP and this specific case, but I do seem to see a lot of this "Slashdot Groupthink is killing unpopular opinions" talk.)

Re:Hey look.. ! a flamer mod!

[Anonymous Coward]

the problem is that the mods take perfectly valid comments out of the discussion

Nobody takes the comments out. They just change their score.

Re:It's still pollutive crap.

[Anonymous Coward]

Great idea. Let's burn coal to power our cars instead of oil.

You burn coal to produce electricity? What century are you from? Next you'll start telling me that your country used slaves for labor-intensive work or some such nonsense.

aeordynamics, mass, and speed

[fermion]

This is a good and interesting analysis, and really demonstrates the physics that most people do not understand. For example, not everything can be blamed on the vehicle. The vehicle is what it is, and the vehicle by itself is not necessarily good or bad. Rather, it is the application of the vehicle that is good or bad. Now the american manufacturers have a good bit of bad on their side as they built many vehicles that do not perform well at high speeds or in the city, but the owners have to take some responsibility and not just whine all the time about how high gas is.

For instance, when driving one has to impart some amount of KE into the car. KE is mv^2. What this means is that a car going 85mph has twice twice the KE as a car going 60mph . Now, if a car is light, like a roadster at 2200 lbs, one could go 85 and not gain any more than a Pilot going 60. And yet every day I see these huge cars going 90 mph, while I am going 70, and all these people complaining about gas consumption? It makes no sense. If they were truly concerned, they would go slower than me!

I really applaud this guy. He really tried to maximize a solution using reasonable constraints. If everyone did the same, instead of whining that they are being crunched by the price of gas, we would be in a much better place.

His recommendations are good. Accelerate slowly, especially if you have a massive car. Any physics or engineering person knows how much this helps in energy expenditure. Keep tires inflated well, and if you car came with improper tires, buy new one. You SUV is not a car, and should not drive like one. Don't drive fast, especially if you make frequent stops. The energy profile will be against you. This is why hybrids are do good for the city. Do not drive fast period. Not only does it waste gas, but if imperils all other drivers.

The day that I see most SUVs in the right two lanes, going 5-10 miles under the speed limit, is the day I believe that gas prices are too high. Right now gas prices are just inconvenient.

Re:aeordynamics, mass, and speed

[e2d2]

Yes but also don't forget the variable PAS or people are stupid.

On a side rant, everyone bitches about the SUVs, like somehow the SUV has caused gas prices to rise dramatically, while ignoring the obvious growing population, ignoring social aspects of the middle east and south america, and ignoring the cartels that control said oil and the companies unwilling to allow prices to drop. And it's always the guy in the humvee the guy in the humvee! Where the F is this guy? I hear about him all the time but I never actually see him! Apparently he is the one causing all of the problems. It's not those GOOD PEOPLE(tm) in their more eco-conscious cars burning the same gas. It's those other people, yeah that's it!

Want to cut gas consumption in half? Start by clearing up the traffic people sit in every day. There, billions saved. It's a start.

Re:aeordynamics, mass, and speed

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have to agree with clearing up the traffic. Unfortunately for myself, I live about 10 miles from my job and it usually takes a good 45 minutes to an hour to get to work. I'm just outside of NYC, but don't commute into NYC. I wonder how much fuel is wasted everyday with people just idling the traffic.

Re:aeordynamics, mass, and speed

[dbIII]

The mass is the obvious point - you don't need some massive truck as a personal 4WD, I used to have a little Suzuki 4WD that was good on steep dirt roads and on sand. The point about driving it like a truck is well made - if it is geared like a truck you are better off driving it that way (engine braking etc) even if it is smaller than some cars. Another example is that Land Rovers bodies are made of aluminium so they are lighter than they look.

Then again I'm paying $3.70 US dollars per gallon for fuel at the moment - so a humvee looks just a little bit silly.

Re:aeordynamics, mass, and speed

[DuckDodgers]

Let's say you drive 15,000 miles in a year. If your average speed is 55 mph, that's 272 hours in a car. If your average speed is 75 mph, that's 200 hours in a car.

Like it or not, most people would gladly pay an extra 30% in annual fuel costs in return for an extra 72 hours of free time.

Re:aeordynamics, mass, and speed

[Calroth]

Want to cut gas consumption in half? Start by clearing up the traffic people sit in every day. There, billions saved. It's a start.

Want to cut gas consumption in half? Put two people in your car instead of one. That will clear up traffic queues, which as above, will probably cut gas consumption in half again...

And yes, many readers already do this, good stuff. But next time you're stuck in traffic, look at all the cars around you, and imagine if all the cars with one person were carrying two instead, and those with two were carrying three.

Re:aeordynamics, mass, and speed

[boingo82]

Yes -
The People are Stupid clause..

I used to post a lot on an automotive forum, and some guy came on asking how he could improve the mpg in his new Navigator. At the time, fueleconomy.gov had it listed as the 2nd-worst vehicle for fuel economy. Of course, this might've been a good thing to consider before buying the vehicle....
As it happens, the Navigator also doesn't do well in terms of depreciation. At the time, you could expect your brand new Navigator ($55,000, approx) to lose about $23,000 of value in the first two years.
I calculated the gas price at the time, and the average gas mileage, and figured out that in order for the fuel costs to even approach the depreciation, you'd have to drive 90,000 miles. Per year.
Compared to the depreciation on his vehicle, the amount of money lost to fuel mileage is paltry.

If your new-SUV buyer thinks nothing of tens-of-thousands-of-dollars of depreciation, why should they care about an extra $20/week on gas?

The people hurt by the gas prices are used car buyers. Unfortunately, we're generally stuck with the crap that was popular 5-10 years ago - gas guzzlers.

Re:aeordynamics, mass, and speed

[Just Some Guy]

On a side rant, everyone bitches about the SUVs, like somehow the SUV has caused gas prices to rise dramatically

It has. You can't double the average fuel consumption per person-mile in a country and not expect the law of supply and demand to kick in. I'm an economic conservative - I don't care if you drive a spotted owl oil fueled Escalade - but it's ridiculous to think that bigger vehicles with higher consumption won't drive up prices for everyone.

If you're a construction worker and have to drag your tools around in a half-ton pickup, fine. Need a Suburban to haul gear back and forth to the ranch? No problem. Drive a Yukon to pick up the kids from school? You're a sociopathic asshole who doesn't understand economics or government crash test results. It's currently your right to do such things, but don't be surprised if you don't get any love for it.

Re:aeordynamics, mass, and speed

[Cyno]

Want to cut gas consumption in half?

I don't believe that has ever been the goal..

Americans just want cheap gas. We would run our cars on water, but people would laugh at us, so even if it might be possible we'll settle for cheap gas. It smells good, is a multi-purpose cleaner, and is fun to set on fire.

No, really, even if we could run our car on recycled garbage or water we'd never do it. It would be too embarrassing to admit we didn't have to fight all these wars for oil now that we've won.

Re:aeordynamics, mass, and speed

[Cyno]

Now imagine they were passing a blunt around between them.. no really, cuz that's the kind of hippie bullshit you're talking about.

Why carpool when I could just do all my work from home? Because we're too capitalist to promote telecommuting. Seriously.

This is a social problem, not something that can be solved by the individual. It has to be talked about on TV before people will think about it.

Think about it.. what causes rush hour? 8-5.. so why not pass a law forcing all government businesses to run 24/7 for starters.. split the day up into 4 hour segments of work and let people choose the hours they want, etc..

There are other alternatives, once our society decides we want to look at the alternatives.. Work doesn't have to be work. We could work smarter, not harder, if we (management included) choose to..

Re:aeordynamics, mass, and speed

[e2d2]

Actually here in the Washington D.C we have high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes that can only be driven on by a car with 2+ passengers, motorcycles, or bus. So it defintely is advantageous to carpool. I personally drive a few miles now then get on the train and ride all the way in then catch the subway to my job. But I'd rather not travel at all. IT workers are in a unique position to telecommute. My hope is that as traffic in the area gets worse, housing costs continue to rise, and gas prices sky rocket that it becomes more cost effective and attractive to allow more tele-work.

Re:aeordynamics, mass, and speed

[toddestan]

Lets say that you drive 15000 miles in a car that gets 25MPG at 55mph. You'll burn 600 gallons of gasoline in a year. At 65MPH it would get 17.5MPG at a 30% penalty. You'll burn 857 gallons of gasoline in a year. A difference of 257 gallons times $3/gallon is $771, which is a sizable chunk of change. However, a 30% penalty for increasing your speed from 55 to 65MPH seems pretty steep unless you're driving some behemoth with terrible aerodynamics - I'm guessing the actual additional fuel costs for driving faster is lower for most people.

Re:aeordynamics, mass, and speed

[DarkDragonVKQ]

As a person who is currently working summers in D.C. I have to agree somewhat. HOV lanes help out alot here. But you still got idiotic drivers on the Beltway that slow it down for everyone.

But I take the metro so >.>

What route do you take?

I go walk-->ride on (yep I'm MoCo) --> shady grove --> Metro center --> Mcpherson --> walk

Reverse it to go home.

Re:aeordynamics, mass, and speed

[e2d2]

I'm in frederick MD so I take the marc to Union Station, then subway to L'enfant, my office is right there. It takes a while but it beats driving in. Now if I can just convince them that I can telecommute..

Re:not a bargain

[nacturation]

For the price of the laptop, Excel, and his time, he could have bought enough extra fuel to last years.

And for the cost of raising him, his parents could have not had kids and saved hundreds of thousands of dollars... enough to buy all the fuel that his non-existent self will never need!

Re:Abiotic oil rules! / The world is awash in oil.

[ElephanTS]

Abiotic oil is a silly fantasy. Seriously.

And don't link it to the 911 truth movement - you'll become victim of an ad hominem attack.

And 30+mpg in the hybrid SUVs

[attemptedgoalie]

Rather than give a small bonus to people who buy SUVs, I'd like to see a massive penalty charged to people who don't.

Are hybrids the answer? Not to the final exam, but they are for the mid-term. The answer to the final exam will need to be electric vehicles with locally generated wind/solar electricity.

Leave oil to the 18 wheelers that keep the country moving, that would drop the price to the point that the small operators can still move equipment around the country while a better way to make a fully electric 18 wheeler hits.

Re:And 30+mpg in the hybrid SUVs

[Warshadow]

Rather than give a small bonus to people who buy SUVs, I'd like to see a massive penalty charged to people who don't.

Are hybrids the answer? Not to the final exam, but they are for the mid-term. The answer to the final exam will need to be electric vehicles with locally generated wind/solar electricity.

Leave oil to the 18 wheelers that keep the country moving, that would drop the price to the point that the small operators can still move equipment around the country while a better way to make a fully electric 18 wheeler hits.

Yes, hybrids. Ask a group of hybrid owners the actual gas mileage they're seeing and let the chaos ensue.

A much better choice for vehicles of that size if actually what GM calls Displacement on Demand, I forget what Chrysler calls it, but they use it also. At part throttle the motor will only run on 4 of 8 cylinders, stomp on the gas and it fires up all 8. The see a decent gas mileage increase.

Hybrids are more fluff than anything. While they're a neat idea on the whole they don't really deliver.

Re:And 30+mpg in the hybrid SUVs

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll take my 50-60 mpg actual mileage from my Prius over my 16-17 mpg that I get from my Jeep Grand Cherokee. The Jeep stays in the garage as much as possible. Funny how my actual mileage matches what the manufacturer says...

Re:And 30+mpg in the hybrid SUVs

[b0s0z0ku]

Leave oil to the 18 wheelers that keep the country moving, that would drop the price to the point that the small operators can still move equipment around the country while a better way to make a fully electric 18 wheeler hits. Agreed. And minimize the use of 18 wheelers at all by investing in electrified, improved, freight railroads. Instead of the massively long freight trains of today, use automated (maybe single-person-operated) short trains of self-powered freight cars that can quickly be switched and routed in the most efficient fashion. If the unions don't go for it, put forth the argument that more jobs will be created controlling, maintaining, and building the things than will be lost by a move away from "traditional" railroad practices.

Long-haul truck drivers? Too bad for some, but there'll always be some market for trucking heavy goods that need to be moved *right now*.

Local delivery can and should be done with either hybrid trucks or fully electric trucks (that can be recharged at each stop). The British have done this for the past 50 years or so with electric "milk floats", and battery tech has come a long way in that time.

-b.

Excellent article...

[MeatFlap3]

The recommendations have direct bearing on some of the newer fly-by-wire cars. I have a 2003 Nissan Spec-V and it is all FBW. By experimentation I have found that keeping the RPM's between 2000 and 2500, depending on the gear and speed, I can get up to 33 MPG on the highway... and yes, the ECU does learn your driving habits. Now, if we could just disconnect the black box lie-detector...

Re:Excellent article...

[kurtdg]

...some of the newer fly-by-wire cars...

You mean, like KITT?

Change engine sizes

[bod1988]

How about we just stop making car engine sizes so big? The average European engine size is somewhere around 2l, why do north Americans think they "need" engine sizes in excess of 4l?

Lower the engine size some, that'd save fuel.

Re:Change engine sizes

[Stickerboy]

Some of us like to take our automobiles to the track on weekends and have fun with it. In that case, 2L engines don't really cut it.

You know all those BMWs, Mercedes, Jaguars, and whatnot cruising around the Nurburgring at high speed in their car commercials? I can promise you they don't have 2L engines.

Hey, I have an idea - why don't we regulate computer power consumption to a certain low level? How much power do you really need to check you email and browse the Web?

Re:Change engine sizes

[jawtheshark]

Hmmmm... I have a 2000 Audi TT which has a 1.8l engine. I most certainly have fun with it. Can it compete with a Porsche, high-end BMW or Jaguar? No, but it's still fun.

I also think that the 2l average for European cars is probably a tad bit high. In my (close) family there is noone that has a bigger engine than I have. Pretty much all cars we own have 1.4l engines, but of course, this is just anecdotical evidence.

Re:Change engine sizes

[nmg196]

> The average European engine size is somewhere around 2l

I seriously doubt it's even as high as that. Most cars in Europe are around 1.4 or 1.6 litre. 2.0 litres is only common on largish exec cars like BMWs. A lot of people drive compact city cars which are typically 1.0 or less (eg Daewoo Matiz, Smart Car).

One thing I've noticed that if you drive a really heavy American car such as a Ford Taurus, it performs REALLY badly with an engine close to double the size and twice the fuel consumption of a similar sized European car such as a Ford Mondeo (OK, it's a little smaller, but not a huge amount). Why don't they engineer their cars to be as light as a European or Japanese built car? Then they wouldn't NEED such ridiculous engine sizes.

The 3 litre V6 Taurus I drove was MUCH slower than my 2 litre Ford Focus and handled incredibly badly while turning or stopping (I nearly hit a toll booth barrier the first time I drove a US car, because I didn't realise I needed to give 2 weeks notice in writing for it to stop).

Thankfully in most parts of the US, the yanks seem to take things much more slowly and seem a lot more chilled while driving, so the poor braking performance and handling isn't as much of a problem as it would be if you drove around in Europe. Besides, the roads are mostly wide, straight and long and I only saw about 2 roundabouts in 2000 miles of driving around the west, compared with the several hundred you'd encounter if you did the same mileage in the UK for example.

Re:Change engine sizes

[Ihlosi]

Why don't they engineer their cars to be as light as a European or Japanese built car?

It's not just the weight, but also the grade of the gasoline. Most European cars nowadays run on "super" (95 octane roz) or even "super plus" (98 octane roz), while pretty much any American car runs on 91 or less octane roz stuff.

Re:Change engine sizes

[jawtheshark]

Most European cars nowadays run on "super" (95 octane roz) or even "super plus" (98 octane roz)

Not really. I have a car that should get 98oct, but the manual clearly states that I can safely use 95oct with a small performance hit (at 225HP, a small performace hit isn't going to be noticed much). The car manual also states that it can be used with 91oct, but only when nothing else is available. You should not do this for a prolonged time. I used to drive my car with 95oct for a full year, with no problems at all.

As for smaller non-turbo charged engines: most run fine on 91oct. I know this from the manuals of my moms car and my dads car. Both rated 95oct, but they should run fine on 91oct.

It's close to impossible to find 91oct gas where I live. I know one gas station that has it, and I've never seen anybody buy it....

Also, beware comparing octane ratings in the US with European octane rates. 87 oct MON is the equivalent of 95 oct RON (source) In conclusion: we have the same gas, but our ratings are different and our cars do run on lower-rate octane levels.

Finally, (at least) 50% of the cars sold in the Europe have diesel engines. In that case, octane doesn't matter at all. There is however a big difference between US and European diesel: US diesel is typcially high-sulfur and European diesel is typically low-sulfur (except for trucks, afaik, but I wouldn't bet on it)

Re:Change engine sizes

[Ihlosi]

There is however a big difference between US and European diesel: US diesel is typcially high-sulfur and European diesel is typically low-sulfur (except for trucks, afaik, but I wouldn't bet on it)

US diesel is pretty much piss compared to its European counterpart, as far as impurities etc go. A buddy of mine works on diesel fuel injection pumps ... this difference is one of his main headaches.

Re:Change engine sizes

[b0s0z0ku]

Some of us like to take our automobiles to the track on weekends and have fun with it. In that case, 2L engines don't really cut it.

Drive a 1990-1993 1.6L Mazda Miata or Toyota MR2 through some twisties. Then get back to me please... If you're talking about drag racing, there's no skill involved in that boring sport. Rev up, dump the clutch, and go straight. So boring.

Thanks, -b.

Re:Change engine sizes

[freakmn]

I had to laugh when I read this comment. I know that my experience is very skewed, and that it isn't at all like the rest of the world. I have 2 cars right now. One from the US, one from Europe. I have a 1997 Geo Metro with a 1.0L 3cyl engine. My other car is a 1979 Porsche 928 with a 4.5L V8. It seems to me that it's not the area that the car is made, but the market that the car is aimed at. I'm sure the culture around influences greatly the types of cars manufactured in a certain area, but there's a little bit of everything everywhere. I don't know about Europe as much, but in the US, your car is a status symbol. It's a competition, like so much of everything here. I can't take full credit for this idea, as it's based on a friend's blog post about eating as a competition, but it seems to fit. I can't play innocent, as I drive my Porsche around, never bringing it up to top speed, and usually even following the speed limits. It's wasteful, but it seems to be part of our culture. Personally, I'm indecisive about whether that's a good thing.

Re:Change engine sizes

[Anonymous Coward]

BS 2.0L is plenty to have at the track andhave a good time. I run 10 sec range in the q/m run. That is with a 3000lb vechile and only 2.5L(was a 2.0 liter to start but I upped it a little for it could still be driven on the street and not trailered to the track.) I wipe most V-8 asses and this is with a factory block(not an aftermarket block)Now my enigine did come with a turbocharger system from the factory and I still have one. I am currently using a He-351CW(turbo off the 2004.5 and newer dodge rams diesels) on it now with a MS-2 controlling the engine tune. If you need the displacment to make the power then you are not a real builder. Your just a dick without a head.

Why an 'old' station wagon?

[FatSean]

Ford Taurus comes to mind. V6 mid-size sedan plus a big trunk. Does better than 22 MPG!

But it's not as cool.

Re:Why an 'old' station wagon?

[planetmn]

Except that every Taurus I've driven (way too many as rentals) has gotten worse mileage (by 3mpg) than my Escape V6 AWD gets.

-dave

Re:Why an 'old' station wagon?

[AGMW]

Does better than 22 MPG!

Wow. Better than 22MPG eh! I have two sports cars (a 2 seater and a 4 seater - both convertable as I really like the extra headroom it affords) and neither does under 40MPG even when I cruise at 90MPH+.

If you think 22MPG is good there's something wrong! 22MPG is an insult to the poor trees that died to make the petrol!

And I'd much rather be in a small nimble car paying attention and be given the option to avoid an impact than drive around in some thinly veiled armoured half-track on the off chance that some bozo is going to make a beeline for me when I'm half asleep.

Re:Why an 'old' station wagon?

[b0s0z0ku]

Ford Taurus comes to mind. V6 mid-size sedan plus a big trunk. Does better than 22 MPG!

Taurus is out of production as of 2006, in favor of the boat-like Ford 500...

-b.

Re:Why an 'old' station wagon?

[Anonymous Coward]

What now?

CRVs are cool?!

LOL

Re:Why an 'old' station wagon?

[ksheff]

that's ok. the original poster said to get an old one, so it doesn't matter if they're still in production. there are gobs of Tauruses around, so parts will be plentiful for the time being.

Re:Why an 'old' station wagon?

[AGMW]

OK, call me old fashioned, but a discussion about alternative fuels/best fuel consumption/etc/etc and a post about how it is odd that people in the US consider 22MPG to be "good" seems to me to be rather more "on" than "off", topic-wise.

Now if I'd ranted on about the apparent IQ of the moderator, perhaps compared it to a house plant, mentioned "single figures", "room temperature", that sort of thing. You know, sandwich short of a picnic, lights are on but no one's home. Maybe "mouth breather"?

Now for something like that, yes, then I could see an off topic mod being justified.

Oh, sorry, this is the "Off Topic" Room?
I wanted the "Enlightened Moderator" room. next on the left you say. Many thanks.

I wonder if he thought to clean his injectors.

[FatSean]

ECU fuel milleage is calculated by the duty cycle of the fuel injectors. The ECU assumes optimum flow...but flow doesn't stay optimum. The closed loop O2 sensor can 'trim' the system by a crude guess at un-burned fuel in the exhaust.

It looks like the margin of error of his experiment pretyt much makes his numbers a wash.

Re:I wonder if he thought to clean his injectors.

[Anonymous Coward]

what the hell does your post have to do with the one you replied to?

Re:Abiotic oil rules! / The world is awash in oil.

[heinousjay]

But there's no point in attacking a crazy idea. Crazy people, on the other hand, are ripe targets.

A good model of auto fuel consumption

[Latent Heat]

This dude http://sitemaker.umich.edu/mhross has a report titled "Fuel efficiency and the Physics of Automobiles." You have to wade through a lot of formulas and SI units for otherwise familiar quantities, but I have put those formulas into an Excel sheet, and they are amazingly predictive of steady-state highway gas mileage.

The fundamental assumption is that just about all gas-engined cars run the same thermodynamic cycle and about the same compression ratio these days, so the non-ideal Otto cycle runs about 38 percent efficiency. Ross then presents an empirical model of both the manifold vacuum pumping loss and the mechanical friction losses in an engine as a function of speed and load; he also assumes that the transmission is 90 percent efficient, and there is a fixed power loss from engine accessories. Throw in the rolling resistance of a car, the aerodynamic drag, and voila, you get the steady-state highway cruise no-wind fuel economy.

Crunching the numbers on my 97 Camry 2.2 litre, using gas with 115,000 BTU/gal, 80 deg F air temp, no wind, I should get 41.7 MPG at 55 MPH, 40.1 at 60 MPH, and 37.5 MPG at 65 MPH. By comparison, I did a road test both ways on a short section of freeway at 55 MPH and averaged 41.1 MPG on a fuel mileage meter connected to the OBD-II, and I get about 36 MPG on trips where I travel 65.

You would think that the dominant loss at highway speed is the air drag, and going from 55 to 65 you are increasing in speed by 20 percent so your gas mileage should take a 40 percent hit. Well it does not, in large measure because the friction in your engine along with part-load manifold vacuum "pumping loss" in large measure tend to dominate. One way to manufacture vehicles with better highway mileage would be to use smaller engines turning over at slower speeds, and the formulas show that if I put a 0.8 litre engine in the Camry, I would get 47 MPG at 65 MPH but I would not have any reserve to climb a hill without downshifting.

The EPA has their Test Car List Data web page which gives car weight, engine displacement and final drive ratio, and drag coefficient values from which one can try out this model and make predictions of the steady-speed mileage of various cars. They give a coast down time from 55 to 45 MPG in seconds and they also give a dyno drag model of the form F = A + B V + C V^2 where A, B, C are numbers in their table and V is speed in MPH.

The funny thing about their A B C numbers is that some cars have anomolously low C numbers (the V^2 air drag) but suspiciously high B numbers (viscous drag of the transmission in neutral in a coastdown test?) and similar cars (like the Ford Taurus with two different 3 litre engines) have widely different ABC numbers and even noticably different coastdowns. I suspect the whole EPA testing procedures would not hold up to rigorous error analysis -- I wonder if anyone has done any sensitivity/numerical conditioning analysis on their procedure determining the ABC numbers used to program the dyno -- but like legislation and sausage making, you probably don't want to know what is going on.

Best way to save slashdot.

[Anonymous Coward]

"It is much cheaper -- and more fuel efficient -- to transport 2 tons of food in a single shipment than it is to transport 2 tons of food in a thousand 2kg shipments inside separate vehicles. Yes, the food you buy from the grocery store had to be shipped there, but economies of scale apply to the pre-grocery-store shipping."

So slashdot IS saying that distributors are necessary. What next? Publishers are too?

Re:Best way to save slashdot.

[TheDugong]

I do not think may people here are against the existence of publishers and distributors, just against them using money to achieve a legal block to consumers seeking alternatives.

Re:Best way to save slashdot.

[tylernt]

I do not think may people here are against the existence of publishers and distributors, just against them using money to achieve a legal block to consumers seeking alternatives.

Agreed. Also, digital distribution is a whole different ball of wax than physical distribution, so we're kind of comparing apples to oranges here anyway.

No, smacks of poor rhetoric

[ScentCone]

modding other people down because you dont like what they say smacks of fascism

Either you don't quite know what "fascism" means, or you think that some government agency is modding down comments you like. Neither of those positions is any more lucid than you would appear to think the modders' opinions are.

You combat uninformed contrary opinions (in mod format or otherwise) by making unassailable, rational, non-whiny points. If you can't rise to that standard, then perhaps moaning about the mods is the more comfortable venue. Better, though, to work on the subject at hand, than to blame the audience for how poorly some comment landed on the thousands of people here who will see it.

Re:No, smacks of poor rhetoric

[plasmacutter]

You combat uninformed contrary opinions (in mod format or otherwise) by making unassailable, rational, non-whiny points. If you can't rise to that standard, then perhaps moaning about the mods is the more comfortable venue

a serious accusation, but then again only your opinion

considering how over the top, intellectually dishonest, and downright false most of your posts against my points have been, I don't consider you an authority on this at all.

Re:No, smacks of poor rhetoric

[ScentCone]

but then again only your opinion

Your opinion: The slashdot mods are a vast right wing conspiracy

My opinion: Weak posts deserve what they get, and even the largely left-leaning slashdot audience calls BS when they see a nonsensical comment or one that makes their philosophical camp look bad.

I'd say the mod system (including its meta-mechanism) work extremely well, considering the local demographic.

I don't consider you an authority on this at all

Since when does anyone need to be considered (especially by you!) an "expert" when simply pointing out that more speech is the cure for bad speech, and that members of a community forum disagreeing with you are not "fascists" (what are you, twelve?). Come back after you look up that word and realize that trotting it out in a lame attempt to shout down a opinion other than yours just makes you sound shrill and erodes your credibility.

Re:No, smacks of poor rhetoric

[plasmacutter]

Your opinion: The slashdot mods are a vast right wing conspiracy

ahh.. there goes the irrational "scentcone" again.. putting words in my mouth and ideas in my head. Yet another intellectually dishonest argument stemming from your over-reactionary and extremely right-winged interpretation of what I say rather than what I actually say.

members of a community forum disagreeing with you are not "fascists" (what are you, twelve?).

Ah look again, an overgeneralization, and a dishonest one.. again. I did not call people who disagree with me fascists, I called people who censor me because they disagree with me fascists. That is a major characteristic of fascism.. a minority which censors people for having differeing opinions.
Oh and was that another ad hominem attack?.. isnt an ad hominem attack the last resort of a person with no counterpoint?

Come back after you look up that word and realize that trotting it out in a lame attempt to shout down a opinion other than yours just makes you sound shrill and erodes your credibility.

Come back after you look up that word and realize my point is valid, and that not everyone who "trots out" this word is some tinfoil hatted wacko.
The word has basis in a factually recurring system of government which can arise and has arisen from free societies in the past.

And once again, another overgeneralization... "anyone who includes fascism in their post is a wacko!111oneone one"

Re:No, smacks of poor rhetoric

[ScentCone]

Your opinion: The slashdot mods are a vast right wing conspiracy

>>putting words in my mouth and ideas in my head

Actually, it's a lot more fun, and just easier, to use your own words. You were the one referring to "redshifting" in mods that countered leftier-leaning posts. You are the one that doesn't like a debate that cites, for example, "only" my opinion, while actually typing sentences like this yourself: "despite being insightful or otherwise interesting, presumably because the mods 'didnt agree with it'." Nice mind reading there! How is it, given only the fact of the mod, that you're able to make presumptions about the basis for the mod? You're imagining/projecting behavior and thoughts without any basis for the conclusions you draw. Out of curiosity, do you draw the same conclusion when, say, an idealogically opposing perspective is modded down? You're unhappy about "redshift," but you probably only notice such mods because they are the abberation, and don't fit into your comfort zone. Just open your eyes and notice that the wide majority of opinions expressed on this board are lefter-leaning than not when the topic invites such positioning, and the wide majority of mods support those sentiments. Your choice of words, which you put in your own mouth, include referring to the mod system "broken" and allowing "partisan trolling" - but you only refer to that in the context of "redshift." Just what conclusion were you expecting readers to draw, other than that there is a particular orientation and mod pattern of which you approve (shifting away from "red"), and another of which disapprove. Who's partisan, now, exactly?

I did not call people who disagree with me fascists, I called people who censor me because they disagree with me fascists.

OK, so you've established that you do call people fascists, despite the word involved having nothing to do with open debate and communication in a forum such as this. I shouldn't be surprised that the very next word you so spectacularly get wrong is "censor." Since it's too much trouble for you to look it up on your own, just go ahead and read it now. See where you're going wrong on both counts? What's missing from your use of both words is the context of authority and force. Mods on slashdot don't have any more authority than you do. Rob Malda doesn't plow through comments as a government-like agent, shaping the presentation of the responding comments. It's the users - your peers - that do so. The same peers that routinely mod up and down across the entire idealogical spectrum, without any of the government-powered authority that's central to actual censorship. It's very telling that you consider peers empowered with the same authority you have to be "censors," but only when they disagree with you. When a neutral system like slashdot's mod engine is used to mark a "redshifted" comment down, do you call that left-leaning modder a fascist? By your standards, you should - but in terms of what the word actually means, that's just as absurd as your use of it against people who disagree with you.

Oh and was that another ad hominem attack?

No, it's called sarcasm. I'm guessing you're at least a little older than 12, but I'm pointing out - with apparently more subtlety than your radar can pick up on - that you are using ad hominem attacks by invoking inflammatory terms (like "fascism" and "censor"), knowing that you're using those terms incorrectly. Lack of nuance, and tantrum-like name calling with evil-sounding (and classically mis-applied) labels are hallmarks of immature discourse. By missing the point (which was a succinct identification of that behavior on your part through the use of a sarcastic observation), you're actually just reinforcing the truth of that observation. Reflexively grabbing at the term "ad hominem" just because thing

Re:No, smacks of poor rhetoric

[plasmacutter]

Actually, it's a lot more fun, and just easier, to use your own words.

If by taking my words out of context or blowing my words entirely out of proportion then I suppose you do.

For example.. a valid complaint about a red-shift in mods becomes a "the end is near" proclamation of a "Vast rightwing conspiracy!11oneone!" under the amazing scentcone. Talk about undermining your own credibility. My statements are meant to say what they say and no more, they are not open to interpretation like nostradamus or the bible.

Out of curiosity, do you draw the same conclusion when, say, an idealogically opposing perspective is modded down?

I dislike it when I see outright/inexcusibly partisanship mods in the other direction yes, but I don't see it nearly as often as i see it from the right. I would put the comparative rate of incidence at 1 leftist mod-down per every 5 rightist mod-down.

OK, so you've established that you do call people fascists, despite the word involved having nothing to do with open debate and communication
every occurrance of fascism so far has involved a minority oppressing the majority (although for sake of argument neo-fascism seems to be fascism in which the majority oppress the minority), and one of the major forms of that oppression is surpressing open debate and communication through censorship. Make no mistake that downmodding people is censorship. Mod-downs diminish/remove their voice on the forum.. censorship. This is accepted for offtopic/outright trolls, but not for coherent opinions you "disagree with".

What's missing from your use of both words is the context of authority and force. Mods on slashdot don't have any more authority than you do.
They have the authority to add/remove points from comments arbitrarily and virtually unchecked. I have had modpoints (and I don't mod down for partisan means), and when I have them I get more authority than you, but I don't abuse it..

It's very telling that you consider peers empowered with the same authority you have to be "censors," but only when they disagree with you.
I'd like to take the time to point out this is as a specific example of you overgeneralizing and jumping to conclusions. I have yet to answer your "out of curiosity" question, but you seem to have answered for me. Telepathy? Oo;;
again youre putting words in my mouth, enough with the intellectual dishonesty. I have complained before for the sake of other people on this forum. I don't complain often because it is off topic to do so.
I defend people's right to speak, even if I don't like what they say, so long as they say it honestly.

you are using ad hominem attacks by invoking inflammatory terms (like "fascism" and "censor"), knowing that you're using those terms incorrectly.

You seem to misunderstand what an ad hominem attack is. An ad hominem attack as an attack agains the person rather than a point or a behavior.
I called downmodding censorship, which is an accurate description as it deminishes/removes their voice, and said it "smacks" of fascims because censorship is a characteristic of fascism. They are correct uses of those terms, fascism and censorship are not born in the severity you see in places like china overnight, they evolve that way gradually, to call someone's correct use of fascism "dishonest" just because you don't like how evil it sounds is not a point, and again not everyone who uses those words has a tinfoil hat.

You however have used ad hominem attacks. Most of your posts i've read against my points have been attacks against me. (specifically my age, my sanity, etc etc). These type of attacks may work in politics, they may even garner you mod points, but they don't actually carry valid counterpoints to my positions. That said.. you seem to have a long way to go yourself conforming to that "standard" you introduced earlier. On that point, if a point is unassailable, it probably means it is of no substance as well, since any

Heinlein's Steel Tortoise

[Anonymous Coward]

Robert Heinlein had a nifty idea in "Coventry" - a 1940 short story. He called it a Steel Tortoise:

"..The vehicle he had chosen was not an unreasonable substitute for burros. It was extremely rugged, easy to operate, and almost foolproof. It drew its power from six square yards of sunpower screens on its low curved roof. These drove a constant-load motor..."

Maybe someone could work on one of those...

Re:Gas Dependant Hobbies

[kullnd]

How can you say that someone should find better recreation just because YOU don't feel that it's worth the cost? I really wish that it was not necessary to use up so much of our limited resources to do what I enjoy, but I'm not about to give up all of my hobbies just because they are not good for the oil crisis.

Myself, I take part in many of these fuel consuming activities. My favorite activity is skydiving, talk about waisting fossil fuels for fun, we burn gallons of jet fuel per person everytime we go up, and we do this multiple times a day. It's my money, my free time, and I'm gonna do whatever I enjoy! I also enjoy speed boats (fuel hogs), and like the author, 4x4 offroading.

I enjoy having a great time, and I have faith that we will adapt and overcome before we run out of oil. At least I hope we do, because solar powered planes are gonna be a bitch on cloudy days.

Earth First, we can drill the other planets later ;)

Construction equipment needs it too!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think I've seen anyone comeup with an alternvative for Construction Equipment yet.

What are we to use for bulldozers, cranes and what of the machines in the logging and mining industries etc. when we run out of petroleum? Seriously.

And to cover all my bases before there's a +5 Funny reply.... before anyone thinks of mentioning it, I know of some construction equipment that used Energon cubes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructicons. But the brand that was making it was Evil. We wouldn't want to rely on them.

Re:Construction equipment needs it too!

[belg4mit]

Biodiesel (typically a 30% blend) and vegetable both burn well in diesel engines.
though neither is the solution for the whole fleet of ICE transit, they'd be great
for bulldozers etc.

Re:Construction equipment needs it too!

[Patented]

Biodiesel works fine in warm climates, I understand that it can gel at temperatures over 40*F/4.5*C, and most in the cooler climates have simply mixed approx 30% of petrol diesel to prevent this reaction. I would love to see a biodiesel blend replace straight petrodiesel here in the states, and more autos built for this technology instead of the seeming industry reliance on E85, which takes energy to make (as it is a distilled product). Biodiesel dosen't require an excessive amount of energy to produce, as it is really just lipids seperated from glycerine with a reactionary compound blended then siphoned off.


I am surprised more /.'ers are not biodiesel zealots. I grew into a DIY'er from linux, to homebrewing beer, what's more DIY than making your own diesel fuel for your car?

Hmm... He May Save More Gas...

[Greyfox]

But I'm expecting gas to hit $8 to $10 a gallon shortly when Israel really gets serious about blowing up the middle east (They're just getting warmed up on Lebanon.) The minute they really get pissed off and nuke someone you may as well just park your car and fill it up with mothballs.

Re:Gas Dependant Hobbies

[johnlcallaway]

Chill out dude...If you can pull out of your little flame there, and re-read, I said 'perhaps finding a different recreation would work best'. I never said 'no one should use SUVs to take a little kayak to some isolated stream somewhere'. I thought if someone is concerned enough about the environment to expend all of the effort the author did, maybe searching for a way to reduce their consumption to 0 would be another consideration.

Have you ever considered a very large ACME slingshot yourself??

What a crock.

[backdoorstudent]

That article is full of errors, misinformation and fallacious arguments. Here are just a few of many reasons why NYC is not the utopia presented in that nonsense. NYC has the highest asthma rates in the country. Cyclists and pedestrians are killed by motor vehicles at a weekly rate. One is hard pressed to find any grass that doesn't have excrement and garbage all over it. And the "middle class" has been completely eviscerated in NYC - a family of 3 with an income under $100,000 per year have to live like refugees.

Re:What a crock.

[KnightStalker]

Come on, it's not that hard. Read through the whole article! You might find acknowledgements such as "Presumably for environmental reasons, New York City has one of the highest childhood-asthma rates in the country, with an especially alarming concentration in East Harlem." The author also points out that there is a conflict between adding green spaces and keeping the efficiency of the high urban density. I don't know what you mean by "live like refugees" but if you mean they need to live in what Phoenix residents would consider cramped quarters, that is the whole point of the article. Jeez, I've only read a third of this. You obviously didn't get that far.

As for your second point, there is the perennial proposal to ban non-commercial autos entirely from Manhattan. I have never been there, but if the sub-10MPH speeds I've heard of are actually typical for Manhattan streets, something like pedecabs would probably be faster (just because they're smaller). That probably solves your asthma problem as well, along with at least half the noise problem *and* opens up parking garages for a more productive use.

Re:What a crock.

[b0s0z0ku]

Cyclists and pedestrians are killed by motor vehicles at a weekly rate.

NYC has 8 million people. People will die in traffic accidents. Do you suppose that no cyclists and pedestrians get hit by cars in a given week in the state of New Jersey, which also has a population of about 8 mil? If anything, NYC drivers are more respectful of cyclists than arseholes in the suburps - all of the crap like honking, opening doors, and having bottled pegged at me, hasn't happened in NYC!

And the "middle class" has been completely eviscerated in NYC - a family of 3 with an income under $100,000 per year have to live like refugees.

Maybe in Manhattan this is true. Manhattan is not all of NYC. Also, incomes for the same type of work are substantially higher in NYC than in the rest of the region.

-b.

Re:What a crock.

[Fallen Seraph]

Errr, I'm going to assume that you're NOT a New Yorker. Because anyone who lives there can refute damn near everything you just said.

The high asthma rate is mostly due not to Manhattan itself but to the borough of NYC called Staten Island, which was used as a gargantuan landfill for generations. The landfill has since closed though and the problem is becoming less severe. However, another cause is believed to be the factories on the Jersey shore which blow all of their pollutans east over the southern boroughs of Staten Island and Brooklyn.

The cyclist problem is one prevalent in many large cities in small geographical areas. However, in recent years many more New Yorkers have given up even owning a car due to parking problems and the issue is resolving itself for the most part.

As for the point of excrement-less grass, have you ever even SEEN Central Park? Or Battery Park? Or any of the parks in any of the boroughs? Yes there's a great deal of trash but it's hardly the pig-stay you pretend to know it to be. The only incredibly filthy place I can think of is the subway, and that's usually manageable.

And finally, as for your comment on the absence of a middle class... First off, you misused the word eviscerated; unless everyone in the middle class has been systematically disembowled that is. And second, that's not true. The middle class has mostly moved from the city to the outlying surburbs on the other boroughs, and not from financial difficulty, but mostly from the desire to "escape the clutter of living in the city." As a single adult living in a city is great, but it's not always the ideal place to relax/raise a family in.

It's mostly a matter of the fact that a large portion of the city is composed of highly commercial zones and since the city proper, that is to say, the island of Manhattan (which most people think of when they think NYC) has limited room since it's actually the smallest of the 5 boroughs. Supply and demand.

Besides, all the boroughs are connected through widely available mass transit anyway.

Granted NYC is not some sort of paradise on Earth, it's still by far beats living in most other places, speaking as someone who's been to many parts of the US, as well as many other countries, and is a native New Yorker.

Re:What a crock.

[backdoorstudent]

Errr, I'm going to assume that you're NOT a New Yorker. Because anyone who lives there can refute damn near everything you just said.

Wrong.

The high asthma rate is mostly due not to Manhattan itself but to the borough of NYC called Staten Island, which was used as a gargantuan landfill for generations. The landfill has since closed though and the problem is becoming less severe. However, another cause is believed to be the factories on the Jersey shore which blow all of their pollutans east over the southern boroughs of Staten Island and Brooklyn.

That's only a hypothesis. And probably a wrong one. Plenty of people live near landfills and don't get high asthma rates. The rates are higher in upper manhattan anyway. The most luckly culprit is the sulfur-laden deisel exhaust reacting with the particulate matter. But the cause is still unknown.

The cyclist problem is one prevalent in many large cities in small geographical areas.

Yes.

However, in recent years many more New Yorkers have given up even owning a car due to parking problems and the issue is resolving itself for the most part.

And the streets are still lined with parked cars. Their opening doors are a common hazard to cyclists - especially since the bikes lanes are sandwiched between the parked cars and traffic. This problem is not resolving itself: http://www.transalt.org/

As for the point of excrement-less grass, have you ever even SEEN Central Park?

Almost every day. I'm mostly on the loop - the Southeast part of which is lined with horseshit.

Or Battery Park? Or any of the parks in any of the boroughs? Yes there's a great deal of trash but it's hardly the pig-stay you pretend to know it to be. The only incredibly filthy place I can think of is the subway, and that's usually manageable.

You must have an impaired sense of smell because everyone I know is aware of the filth.

And finally, as for your comment on the absence of a middle class... First off, you misused the word eviscerated; unless everyone in the middle class has been systematically disembowled that is.

Thanks for the insight.

And second, that's not true. The middle class has mostly moved from the city to the outlying surburbs on the other boroughs, and not from financial difficulty, but mostly from the desire to "escape the clutter of living in the city." As a single adult living in a city is great, but it's not always the ideal place to relax/raise a family in.

So you're agreeing. The suburbs are by definition not the city.

My previous post was a bit harsh, but my point is that the idea of NYC being a "green" city is ridiculous.

Wagons...

[lenski]

2002 VW Passat, 1.8L turbo

In-town, mostly local freeway fillup-to-fillup average 28.7 MPG summer, 26.9 MPG winter
(occasional) long haul trips: 31.6 fillup-to-fillup

I am 6 feet 4 inches tall (38+ inch in-seam), and the car is *perfect* for my height, the best I've ever had. Fold down the rear seats, and it will hold my custom-made extra-large bicycle and my (5 feet 10 inch) wife's bicycle and plenty of additional stowage. No mechanical or electrical problems (it's only 4 years old, ask me in 5 years; we drive our cars >12 years). My wife decided which cars were acceptable from a safety rating perspective, and I got the one I wanted.

The car has plenty of turbo-juice to get onto the freeway from an on-ramp safely.

This is not rocket science and it is possible to have a vehicle that carries you, your friends and furniture without blowing our environmental budget. Our other car is a small sedan that also gets OK mileage (a 1996 Integra), which in a year or two will be replaced with the most efficient vehicle we can find that meets required safety criteria. Maybe hybrid, maybe low-emission diesel.

I don't feel much like an eco-nazi, but to be perfectly straight, my wife and I much prefer walking to the local supermarket: Quality time together is in short supply these days.

Anyone wanting a good buzz should consider aerobic exercise (I like riding a bicycle). With a bit of training, the aerobic rush is awesome, the biochemical effects begin immediately and last several days. Longer term, the exercise helps with stamina and delayed onset of diseases of age. I am 49, eat anything I want any time I want and am not overweight (198 lb).

The human body is built to be worked. Reasonable nutrition and good consistent workouts are just about the best way to maintain the only body you will ever have.

Re:Wagons...

[Gulthek]

It gets even better milage if you get it with the TDI (diesel) engine. Added bonus: it can run biodiesel!

My wife and I have a Jetta Wagon TDI (because you can't get a passat with a manual transmission) and *love* it. 40+ mpg and we burn biodiesel whenever we can. Luckily we live near Piedmont Biofuels. We get an average of ~44 mpg but hit about 50-51 on road trips.

I'm also on the tall side, 6'2". Driving and riding in the driver's passenger is fine, but the back seats are a bit cramped for tall people. The wagon is best suited for two adults, 2-3 kids, and lots of cargo space; or two adults and lots and lots of cargo space.

I like to ride my bicycle...

[Assassin bug]

I like to ride my bike,
I like to ride my bicycle.
I like to ride it where I like.

Not all off-road vehicles are gas guzzlers

[Chemware]

For people who really do want / need to go offroad, then there are small SUVs that are quite capable: Subaru Foresters and Suzuki Grand Vitara to name a couple. On a recent trip to Uluru (Ayers Rock) via the Oodnadatta track our heavily loaded Forester got 8.5 l/100 km (US 28 mpg), with a roofbox. Their off-road ability is quite high, and can be further increased with sump guards, heavy-duty tyres, lift kits, and so on. You don't need a tank like a Landcruiser or Jeep.

Re:Not all off-road vehicles are gas guzzlers

[kpharmer]

> You don't need a tank like a Landcruiser or Jeep.

A jeep wrangler isn't a tank - it's a very small SUV - only has two full-sized seats with two small seats in the back that double as the storage area. I suspect that it weighs less than a Subaru Forester or Suzuki Grand Vitara, but I'm not sure about that. But they do only get around 25 mpg.

The jeep cherokee is the bigger version: this supports two people up-front, another 2-3 in the back seats, plus storage behind this. It's the medium-sized SUV (and the one that in my opinion everyone started to copy in the late-80s).

It's still far lighter in weight than a landcruiser, or a full-sized truck like a ford f150, or a suburban-like thing. These are the ones getting 10 mpg - and often are poor performers offroad anyway (where their excessive width & length prevents them from being used on some trails, etc).

Personally, I've done quite a lot of offroading in an old International Harvester Scout (old tech from the 60s & 70s). See these at www.binderbulletin.org. They're very heavy and incredibly durable, but get 16 mpg on the highway best case (unless you've got one of the 70s diesels).

I use mine as a daily-driver, but at this point that totals less than 5,000 miles a year. It is also used for offroading, but I found that getting out via even a very capable vehicle only gets you so far. Then you really want to hike, take a mountain bike, dirt bike, or quad-runner. The truck is still useful - and will take you and your family & gear far beyond where a Grand Vitara will go. But at some point it is just much more pleasant to hop out and get on the bike.

Or in other words...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Rigorous testing and good use of available technology; nice work.

ANNOYING! :-)

Re:It's still pollutive crap.

[ironring2006]

1. Clean streets
2. Cheap healthcare
3. ??????
4. World Domination!

but we all know that (3) is to have a huge frickin' army, so we'll never get to (4), and the US will never get (1) or (2) even though they have (3).

Now if only Stephen Harper and George Dubya shared similar views and we could combine our.............OH NOES! WTH IS THIS? ACCKKK! LET GO! YOU'RE TAKING OUR OIL? AND ALL OUR FRESH WATER? WHAT? WHADDYA MEAN WE'RE ALL GETTING DRAFTED? THAT DOESN'T HAPPEN IN CANA....*THUMP*

Great article but I what does a sedan look like?

[Ecks]

Nice detailed article. I'd love to see the results for a vehicle that was less overspecialized though. My ideal test car would be optimized for expressway commuting like a Toyota Camry or a Nissan Maxima. The Jeep is really set up and styled for off road use and as far as mileage is concerned that yeilds a compromise in gearing, frontal area and coefficient of drag. I'd bet that with a Maxima or a Camry or pretty much any street Sedan or Coupe you'd find the mileage peak between 100 and 130 kph (62 ~ 81 mph). I'd love to test this out with my own fleet. Anecdotally I would say that my mileage peak is right around 100 kph and I'm pretty close to the EPA's 14% improved mileage using cruise control over flat or hilly terrain. I think that the big difference is that I'm driving sedans that are setup for the expressway so they are geared to have the mileage peak at highway speeds.

-- Ecks

Perfect for that insignificantlove

[Tweekster]

portion of the population that has a real need for an SUV. But of course they buy a real SUV, one that can handle off road. Ever notice how most SUVs handle like a shopping cart on basically all terrain.

SUV's

[Oldav]

For those who don't understand why SUV's are so popular in the US, It's a national overcompensation thing, big car,compensates for small appendage!

What about Mass Transit?

[radiojosh]

I think that the real tragedy in energy consumption is that many large municipalities don't invest in sufficient mass-transit systems. I live in suburb of St. Louis, MO. St. Louis has *some* busses and a Metro Link train that really only serves as a way to get from a few select parking lots to a couple of stadiums and convention centers. When they tried to extend the train into the suburbs to provide a truly useful system, it was voted down because people were afraid it would bring crime from the city into the suburbs. I guess criminals don't have cars?

It was really an eye-opener to visit a place like Washington D.C. that has a truly awesome train system supplemented with a lot of buses. It consisted of several different train lines, a few of which reached *deep* into the suburbs. Seattle, WA, which has a monorail capable of going TWO places, also has a magnificent bus system. There Metro transit authority has a webpage that will plan your trip based on starting point, destination and arrival times. Wifi is extremely common in the various businesses there and the city is even peppered with free municiple Wifi hotspots. So if you have a laptop with you, you never have to worry about being able to figure out which bus to take. Seattle is also currently building a more useful train system as well.

So, lord forbid we save energy, reduce carbon emissions and give the underpriveleged a leg up on getting to their jobs, because, you know, criminals don't have cars and HOLY JESUS WHAT IF WE MEET A POOR PERSON?!

The real alternative is a fully continuoes gearbox

[trygvef]

The best alternative I have ever seen to improve fuel economics on vehicles is this new Flagear fully continuous gearbox: http://flagear.fladby.com/

The gearbox is computer controlled to keep the ratio between engine speed (rpm) and the effect needed optimally at all times, thereby keeping the engine speed as low as possible which in general results in up to 50-80% less consumption of fuel.

The environmental benefits will be huge. 50-80% reduction of the fuel consumption will fulfill the Kyoto- agreement 5-7 times.

Re: 'when-you-have-to-use-gas'?

[entirely_fluffy]

What happens when you 'when-you-have-to-use-gas' and you find out you have used it all up?

Want to cut gas consumption in half?

[fantomas]

"Want to cut gas consumption in half?....Start by clearing up the traffic people sit in every day"

Invest in some decent public transport, think long term. It won't work for everywhere but will cut a lot of those urban/suburban traffic jams. Check out how busy the car parks are in European 'park and ride' edge of town parking locations are, that offer out of town drivers the opportunity to park and then get cheap shared transport (buses, metros, trams) into the city centre 5 miles away. They are all doing the same journey (out of town to the centre) at the same time 5 days a week.

Run some decent long distance trains on main transport corridors, European trains travel at 100mph plus, faster than cars. Think about the big economic picture (how much do we save if you factor in wider aspects) than just costing the train travel at how ever much they need to break even independently.

Re:Want to cut gas consumption in half?

[mccrew]

Invest in some decent public transport, think long term.

Sounds great in theory, but in practice it has not been demonstrated to work except in cities with high population density.

• Public transit cannot pay for itself - every rider's fare requires subsidy to pay for actual cost
• Many commutes are suburb-to-suburb, whereas public transit is designed for hauling in and out of city. In the Seattle area the daily exodus to suburban employment now exceeds the suburban influx.
• Many places where people want to live do not have adequate population density to make mass transit a viable alternative
• People like the comfort, security of their own car, and are willing to sit around in traffic rather than give it up.
• My own observation: most people who propose grand plans on reducing traffic are really just interested in getting other people out of their way

My vehicle gets 220+ MPG

[EmagGeek]

I calculated once that my preferred vehicle (bicycle) gets over 200 MPG easily and probably even more, considering $3/gal for gas. It basically boils down to this.

How many calories can I buy for $3? Assuming pasta is $0.50/lb, I can get about 10k calories for $3, which is enough for about 200-250 miles of riding depending upon how fast I am going. Crusing at my normal speed of about 22-23MPH, I figure 40cal/mile... at an elevated cruise of 26MPH, I figure about 60cal/mile. Climbing a 12% grade gives about 100cal/mile. So, if I'm on a flat ride, the number is up in the 250 range and on a hilly ride, it could be as low as *gasp* 150.

This is an order of magnitude greater than the mileage my SUV gets... although I haven't yet figured out how to haul a load of 2x4s from Lowes to my house on the bike yet...

I don't have a car

[Anonymous Coward]

It's amazing to me to see the lengths that people will go to to continue to drive their crappy box cars. You look at the math he put up and it's plain as day that the lame aerodynamics are the driving force behind his poor fuel economy. Rather than shift to another, more efficient body style Mr. Vanity persists in tweaking that which will give him a 1% miles per gallon benefit. Let's all have a parade in his honor! Here's a man attempting to ignore the big picture (oil is finite, kiddies, and we're running out), why is this laudable?

For the record, I haul refridgerators, 13' sections of carpet, etc from stores in my area to my house on a bike trailer I built. I am in better shape than most of the people that I know and have more money in my account than most of them. There are options.

Re:Where does the alternate fuel come from?

[embracethenerdwithin]

I'm not sure if everyone really thought this through, but bio fuel comes from stuff we would normally eat. So what happens if the entire world switched to bio fuel that's "grown in the heartland"? Will we have to chose between eating and driving? To me it just seems like a bad idea to make you're energy source and food source compete. There's already enough hunger in the world, why turn food into fuel? Do we then stop sending out foreign aid and such because we need fuel instead? As far as electric cars go, where do you get that electricity from? Probably from the local power plant which is most likely burnign coal/oil. Currently the only ways we have to make sustainable clean energy are hydro power and nuclear power(waste isn't too clean). Hydro only works in certain areas, and nuclear is protested by enviromentalists and leaves quite a mess. If we go solar, what happens on a cloudy day? Does the whole nation shut down? With wind what happens when the wind dies down for a long period of time? These are great things to help boost energy, but will not sustain an entire nation. I have no idea what the answer is, but these ideas don't seem like it.

what kind of mileage do they get pulling stumps?

[kpharmer]

> I'd love to see the results for a vehicle that was less overspecialized though.

sure, but if you want to compare them to the jeep on the highway, it's only fair to have them also compete offroad. :-)

i've got an olds aurora with a v8 (a very aerodynamic sedan), and have been doing quite a lot of the same analysis this guy, though less formally. I can get 30 mpg if i'm very gentle on acceleration, keep it under 75 mph, etc. Drafting can probably get it to 35 mpg with two car lengths between, but the guys that drive the semis don't like that much. I think you might be able to get this car to 40 mpg through modifications, running on flat terrain at sea level and keeping the speed to 60-65 mph. Maybe. I'd be surprised if you could get an accord to 80 mpg with similar approach - maybe 50-55 I'd think.

Also noticed as the author mentioned that cruise control doesn't save gas on large hills. It's way better to pull off on the acceleration until you're just doing 35 mph on the way up, and give gas until you're doing 120+ mph on the way down.

But back to my original point, this car can't tow more than 3,000 pounds (no horse trailers), has miserable clearance, and can't pull a stump worth a damn.

another option?

[willCode4Beer.com]

These arguments always kill me.
Okay, lets take a typical scenario.
You commute to work (alone), you also have a family and maybe want to tow a boat.
How about two cars.
Get an old used pocket size car for the day to day commute (this is the over-whelming majority of your miles anyway). Then get a nice newer sufficiently large vehicle for the family (and towing) for the times you need it. The nice vehicle won't get very many miles and can stay nice (keeping a higher resale value), and an old beater for commuting won't cost much to begin with and will save lots of gas. Just get an old VW Golf or Subaru 2dr or something similar (around 40mpg).
Save money, save the planet, stop arguing, yada yada yada.

Re:another option?

[Kohath]

How about two cars.

Good suggestion. How about whatever you want to buy? One car, two cars, big, small, medium, sporty, new, used, etc. They're all choices that fit someone's need. People should buy what works for their situation.

The OP was the one who knew that other people than him were making the wrong, immoral choices of vehicle because they were bad, immoral, vain people, unlike himself.

Re:another option?

[myth246011]

"Okay, lets take a typical scenario.
You commute to work (alone), you also have a family and maybe want to tow a boat.
How about two cars."

This would only work if you commute enough miles to work.

Someone that drives 50 miles a day for work in a 20MPG car vs the VW Golf (31MPG) might save $600-700ish (maybe $700-800 if you go diesal)(thinking in terms of gas prices now which could go up or down) which if they buy a 5-6 year old Golf will cost $5000-$6000. Now the Fuel savings is offset some when you figure in the cost of maintenance and repair on the car that is getting older and perhaps more unreliable plus you still have to perform regular maintenance and carry insurance on the SUV that is parked. Having two cars will also take more time to keep them maintained.

A plus side of having an extra car is that you can use the other when one is in the shop for whatever reason.

This may work for some people depending on how long their commute is and what the price of gas is but for people with shorter commutes it may not make economic sense. One should really evaluate all the costs involved with trying to maintain a second car just for commuting.

Re:another option?

[willCode4Beer.com]

Good point, questioning a persons morals never seems increase the quality of a discussion.

Re:Where does the alternate fuel come from?

[mr_mischief]

Have you seen the price of gas? Some people are already starting to choose between eating and driving. Even more will have to choose when all those summer vacationers stay home, and the tourism industry lays people off.

BTW, don't let anyone tell you Bush invaded Iraq for cheap oil. No oil man wants cheap oil. They all want exactly what we have now -- scared markets that drive up the market price without necessarily raising the price of extraction and refinement. If Bush did this for Big Oil instead of his stated reasons, then the payoff is now, not after the war.

Remember, market price applies to people who buy oil on the market. The Big Oil companies don't buy oil on the marjets, they sell it there. It still costs about what it did in 2000 to extract the oil. It costs a little more to refine it because of hurricane Katrina. The big oil companies can't say it's more expensive to extract the oil because of the strife in Iraq, because oil companies weren't allowed to do business with Iraq (except to the amount of the oil-for-food program) before. The price is riding concerns over instability and uncertainty. Big Oil profits are the highest ever.

Here's a basic economics lesson for those of you who may be rusty in the discipline or may be too tired to realize it at whatever late and/or early hour you read ./ -- profit is roughly what you sell something for minus what you paid to get it minus expenses. If profits are at record highs, then there's a much larger selling price than acquisition price. All because of "instability" and "uncertainty". IOW, the guys at the Big Oil companies learned a lesson from Microsoft -- they're using Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt to make money. The only difference is that with a fungible resource that everyone uses, you don't make people fear and doubt the competition. You make them fear and doubt the supply chain, so that you can create a sense of a shortage or of an impending shortage whether or not that's actually the case.

Re:Gas Dependant Hobbies

[Kadin2048]

Your attitude is naive.

The GP -- the skydiver -- is paying for the energy he's using when he goes skydiving. He pays for the charter of the plane (probably splitting it with the other people who are going, and also paying for a lot of other stuff, like the pilot, etc.). But he paid for the energy that it's taking to get him up there so he can enjoy his fun floating down.

Likewise, the person driving the Suburban around town to get their groceries is paying for it every time they fill up its tanks at the pump. Maybe you think it's stupid and wasteful, but apparently they disagree -- and they're spending their money on the gas they're burning to prove it.

It's not as if people don't think about the cost of energy -- they do; it's just that their cost/benefit analysis comes out differently than if you did the same thing. The guy going skydiving is saying "it's worth x dollars and y liters of aviation-grade kerosene so I can go parachuting," and the woman with the Suburban is saying "it's worth z dollars and n gallons of gasoline for me to drive around in a car that's bigger than everyone else's."

They're not taking anything from you in doing this -- you could have had the same amount of gas that they did (it's not like it's rationed), if you had wanted to pay for it. When the supply starts to dry up, and the price increases, doubtless people will reconsider whether their gas-intensive recreational activities are worth the cost anymore, or whether their ginormous vehicles are really practical. But for right now, those people are voting in the most important way they can -- with their wallets -- and saying that it is worth it.

Now you could argue that the price of gas is artificially inexpensive, compared to what it should be if all the negative externalities associated with its use were taken into account. I might even agree with you there. (Although I don't think that just increasing taxes on it, whose revenue flows into general funds and is squandered, instead of actually being spent on those externalities, is productive.)

You could also argue, and here I would agree, that the companies and other entities regulating the price of petroleum products today aren't doing a very good job taking into account the future demand for their product. That is to say, they're selling too much of it too quickly right now, in order to reap short-term gains, when instead they could get a lot more for it by extracting it more slowly and selling it at a higher price to those people willing to pay. (Aviation, for instance, is impractical without fossil fuels -- very few other things have the required energy density.) However, this is a wholly separate argument from what people should be able to do with that gas, provided they're buying it at the market rate along with everyone else.

Even when gas is $15 a gallon, there will still be some people who think it's worthwhile to drive an inefficiently large car, or own gas-powered personal watercraft, or go skydiving -- and that's their decision. They have just as much a right to do that with the gas that they buy, as you do, to go wherever you want on your scooter and its tankful, which you bought. As long as both of you are paying the same price for the same product, meaning that you both get to perform the cost/benefit analysis, it's the height of arrogance to pass judgement on others' hobbies.

I have an alternative...

[shawn_f]

How about a gun engine or a Bourke Engine? Now That is an alternative...

http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Bourke_Engi ne
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Gun_Engine

Trying to tweak an already inefficient engine is futile; the time and energy outweighs the product...

Just a few pennies from my head...

Re:Gas Dependant Hobbies

[nelsonal]

Certainly your skydiver is paying for the cost of his energy, as the charter company wouldn't be around very long otherwise. However, the arguement made by most environmentalists is that the price of gasoline does not include the full social costs of it's use (which is true) and they argue that they are very large (which is subject to further research and debate). From your examples and tone, I'm guessing you may have read this already, but for others, here's by far the best look at the subject. http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/CoaseJLE1960.pdf

A practical bit of advice:

[Ihlosi]

the trunk is full

Go to ebay and buy an inexpensive playpen, stroller, chair, highchair and overnight bag, and store them at your folks' house. It's amazing how much time, hassle and nerves this small investment will save you ... trust me (9 month-old son here).

Re:A practical bit of advice:

[Nos.]

But then we need at least 3 sets of stuff for that to work... which starts adding up real quick in costs. My parents, her parents, and her aunt & uncle's place. Its really not that practical. If anything, the trailer sounds like the best idea of the replies, however, given that newer minivans get the same or better mileage than the Intrepid, its a better bet for us.

Re:Where does the alternate fuel come from?

[embracethenerdwithin]

I'm not saying oil is awesome or anything like that. I am also not talking about Bush or Iraq, those are totally unrelated to my question. The simple question is what happens when our nation decides that instead of producing food to eat we should produce food for fuel? I'm just asking if anyone has any hard evidence yet about whether this can be sustained. Can we make enough food to both eat and have fuel? Also, what about the other consequences of linking fuel to food. If fuel demand spikes, then food prices could also spike. Farmers will have to chose if they are going to grow food or fuel, which ultimately results in less food being produced. I don't think oil is the answer, I am just pointing out that there may be same bad consequences when we link food and fuel.

another option

[willCode4Beer.com]

the other poster suggested replacing all of the stuff you have to carry.
Let me offer another idea. How about a compact utility trailer to haul the extras. A good one can be found for a couple hundred. An added benefit is if you are planning a weekend trip, you spouse can prepare the trailer on friday while you are still at work (as opposed to waiting for the vehicle to get home). A small trailer is also easier to load/unload than the trunk or back of an SUV. Its also much cheaper than the price differential of a bigger vehicle.
Then, you can hook-up and go.

Only yiou can decide if its the solution for you but, it should definitely get some consideration.

This isn't unlike my argument about pick-up trucks. The majority are purchased for very occational hauling. A cheap 8' trailer from harbour freight can make this up. I picked up their folding trailer. The bonus is, while folded up, it takes hardly any space in the garage and when loaded, it can be easily transferred between vehicles. Of course, for your usage, you probably want an enclosed one.

Re:Gas Dependant Hobbies

[TheSkyIsPurple]

>I have the right to speak about this, I walk to work, drive a motor scooter for the majority of things, and once in a awhile I take my Honda S2000 out for a nice drive.

What effective MPG must you achieve in order to have the right to speak on the topic?

You've tripped up my defenses.

[ScentCone]

I'm really not sure how to digest this. I'll have to remove my normal slashdot comment pre-processor so that I can handle something lucid, rational, and level-headed right from the factory, as-is. Whew! Thanks.

Brazillian ethanol

[willCode4Beer.com]

I agree another farm subsidy, oh, I mean corn based ethanol, probably isn't the way to go.
BTW, the only problem with your math is using ethanol to *replace* petroleum instead of augment it. That said, I thank you for running the numbers instead of the mouth. If more people actually examined the numbers, as you have, then these pdiscussions would have more meaningful content.

Run a google for Brazil and Ethanol, you'll see wide usage, and production from sugar beets.

an alternative

[Goldsmith]

you're kidding, right?

An alternative to off road vehicles? How about a horse?

Re:The real alternative is a fully continuoes gear

[b0s0z0ku]

The gearbox is computer controlled to keep the ratio between engine speed (rpm) and the effect needed optimally at all times, thereby keeping the engine speed as low as possible which in general results in up to 50-80% less consumption of fuel.

Sounds like a CVT (Continuously Variable Trans). CVTs are already 90% efficient and optimize RPMs. Adding another 10% efficiency will increase economy by another 10% or so, and the best CVTs get maybe 20% better mileage than a traditional automatic and are 5% better than a good manual gearbox. Another 10% gain won't cut consumption by 50-80%!

-b.

Demand

[phorm]

Those are all factors, but not all of which can be controlled. It pisses me off to no end that I am seeing increasing numbers of huge fricking motorhomes passing through my city here in BC, Canada (many domestic or visiting from the US). First of all, I see no reason that anyone needs to tote the equivilent to a small luxury house down the road, and secondly because the gas consumption is insane. Long weekend coming, gas goes up. I actually do see a decrease in regular users during the peaks, as many sane people wait for it to drop again. On the other hand, you will still see plenty of idiots filling up their gas-guzzling motorhomes because it seems that they can only get about 100-200km without needing another fill... usually $100-200+/fill

So why would the gas companies not jack up prices? Sure, a few people will cut back when the prices are high, but there are still plenty of idiots with SUV's, motorhomes, and the rest guzzling down more and more gas, enough to make it plenty profitable for the gas co's to keep jacking up the prices.

Re:Demand

[Timothy Chu]

I'm all for gas prices going up. If they didn't, people/goverment would have no incentive to investigate alternative fuel sources, which we all know we'd need to do once we run out of fossil fuels.

Re:Demand

[phorm]

Yes and no. Countries don't just need to investigate alternative fuels (although that is definately an avenue to persue), people also need to learn to learn to be more conservative of the fuel we have. The problem is that a large portion of the people buying the bigass SUV's and motorhomes have plenty of cash, and while the might find it annoying to pay more for gas it's not going to hit them very hard. The fact is that they're driving wasteful vehicles because they can, and because they don't care.

Yes, a big enough gas cost might make them care, but then it's also going to affect a lot of other people. There are plenty of people driving older vehicles because they can't afford something newer and/or more fuel efficient, and in fact the cost of gas has made used milage-friendly vehicles less available and more expensive. About 1 1/4 years ago I bought a new Corolla (which I bought because the milage+power seemed best in that price-point at the time). Originally I was going to go used, but decent Toyota's were actually fairly scarce around here. A lot of people I know can't afford a newer Corolla, and the cost or upkeep of other used but fuel-friendly vehicles may also be pretty hard to afford, yet use of transportation is pretty much a necessity of life for many. Looking at the hybrid's there's good milage but actually a pretty big trade-off for maintenance and replacement (batteries wear out).

So you have two categories, people who can't afford an efficient vehicle and people who don't want to. Raise the gas price enough and those at the lower end will simply not be able to afford to drive, period. Those at the higher end will either keep paying the higher costs, or maybe eventually go with something more efficient. However, by then the good portion of the population is screwed. Even for myself with my Corolla - which is pretty efficient if you drive it right - it's gonna be pretty hurting in the next few years, and everything else is going to rise as well as the cost of transporting goods increases.

The good news is that some of the energy-efficient vehicles are becoming more trendy, but the bad is that it's still not enough to convert a lot of the SUV, motorhome, or truck-which-I-use-like-a-car crowd.

I think you misstate

[YesIAmAScript]

Nowhere near half the vehicles on the road have AWD/4WD. I would save not even half the vehicles on the road are models that offer AWD/4WD. But there are a lot of them out there. Also, your stuff about adjustable ground clearance isn't really true. The only non-SUV that had that (recently) was the Audi allroad. That vehicle is no longer available. Audi killed that vehicle in favor of the Q7, an SUV.

And people have been buying SUVs for vanity nearly forever. As you say, rarely do people take them off road. And on road, AWD doesn't make your car safer, it just makes it possible to get there sometimes when you might not have been able to otherwise. But in those cases, virtually everyone has the option to just stay home. That's a lot safer. People have been buying them because they are afraid to buy wagons and minivans (depending on the size of your loads) because they're not "manly".

There is another problem with your comments. Those sedans with AWD still get horrible mpg. You give up 2 mpg highway and 1-2 mpg city to pick up AWD. It is very difficult to find an AWD sedan/wagon that gets over 25mpg highway. My A6 gets 24mpg. The allroad variant of it mentioned above gets 21mpg. This is all dismal.

The working poor needing to pawn stuff is because you can get secondhand SUVs very cheaply, especially Explorers, which get truly awful mpg. People need to be smarter with their money. Don't just buy the cheapest vehicle, buy the one you can afford to run.

Unfortunately, this cuts both aways. When buying my A6, I look at the options, and it would have been much cheaper to buy an SUV for $30K even though the mpg would be worse, compared to the $44K I paid for my A6. If I had made the fiscally smart decision on buying, I would be using even more fuel than I am right now.

There's only one way to incent people to buy vehicles that get better mpg, despite higher initial price. Unfortunately it's very unpopular.

Ignored Energy, Imitation Energy, Sweet n Low

[Anonymous Coward]

Imitation Energy, good as th' real thing baby >
http://www.newpath4.com/roadbumpignoredenergiesusi ngcarenginedawn.htm

Ignored Energy >
http://www.newpath4.com/roadbumpenergyusingcarengi newow.htm

Oh, that's easy!

[Anonymous Coward]

> Since when does proprietary software have infinite power?

Obviously, they're Excel users--they divided by zero :-)

(Disclaimer: Yes, I know that division by zero is actually *undefined* rather than infinite, and I've even used Excel enough to have seen #DIV/0! in a few cells.)

No, you are just wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, welcome to slashdot, where any fool can post whatever fiction they want. How about not posting tax info until you move out of your parents' basement and file a tax return or two?

The tax break _was_ (its since been repealed) for small businesses (not individuals) purchasing vehicles with a GVWR over 6000lbs. This most definitely does not include a honda CRV. Absolutely nothing to do with anything "off-road".

It was mostly designed to help farmers, since (pre-SUV popularity), 6000 lb weight ratings were pretty much just for big pickups actually used to haul stuff. Nowadays, very large SUVs bought by doctors/lawyers (=small businesses) were qualifying for the tax break, so it was repealed. Think of it as a "bug" in the law, which got fixed fairly quickly, by gov't standards.

Re:No, you are just wrong

[ksheff]

very large SUVs bought by doctors/lawyers for their idiot wives who cannot drive and would die in a regular car..

at least that's what I've observed

Have to agree, build your dwelling for the area.

[default luser]

I made a trip to Puerto Rico last year, and I was a bit amazed at the architecture: with the exception of downtown San Juan and tourist hotels, all of the habitations have no glass. Designs are built open to the air, with shutters built-in to all the windows. There are window air-conditioners, but nobody bothers with forced-air HVAC systems.

Sounds inefficient, right? Wrong. For most of the year, the people leave their houses open to the air witout using the AC, and it is quite nice. During the humid summer months, when mosquitos are about, they use the shutters to close up the house at night, and run the window air-conditioner to cool the room enough to sleep.

This is a nice compromise, because in a place like Puerto Rico, glass is an expensive building material, and is also a liability come hurricane season. Shutters make a lot more sense, both as hurricane protection, and as a cheap way to insulate and easily cool single rooms.

Yes SUVs do make a big difference.

[mbkennel]

The cartels controlling the oil prices are in the mideast and we
can't do anything abou that.

And yes, the gasoline consumption of the USA does make up a nontrivial
fraction of global oil consumption, and now half of US personal
vehicles are "light trucks & SUVs", whereas by actual utility,
it ought to be about 10%, as it is in most other places on the planet.

In other words, banning needless trucks and SUVs in US would be as
significant in oil consumption as many of the largest oil projects on the planet
put together.

Want to cut gas consumption in half? Start by clearing up the traffic people sit in every day. There, billions saved. It's a start

That's enormously harder because it means forcing people out of where they live
and destroying the value of the homes. Why do the hard task instead of having
people buy a damn station wagon instead of a Land Rover?

Re:It's still pollutive crap.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bear in mind that having clean streets in industrialized countries like Canada and the US has more to do with the population and inherent civic pride than anything else. What's the difference between clean areas in the US like Phoenix and dirty nasty areas like, for example, Baltimore? Hmm, must be the people. Look at the demographic data for both cities and draw your own conclusions. Also, look up the data for Toronto too and see if maybe there is a pattern.

Obviously, its a politically incorrect hypothesis but, seems to me the main differences between, on the one hand, Europe, Canada, Australia, and on the other hand, the United States is the demographic make up of the population. America is 2/3 non hispanic whites and, I believe about 12 percent black and something like 14 percent hispanic with the rest made up of various other ethnicities. Obviously, not the same case as in the other nations (and continent) I mentioned. As the indigenous caucasian populations of Europe are displaced more and more in the coming years, you folks are going to be in for quite a surprise. Maintaining a high level of culture and society gets harder and harder when a large and growing percentage of your population accounts for the grossly disproportionate levels of crime, parasitic siphoning of social services and a general wreckless disregard for established norms of decency and civility.

Be sure to thank your precious representatives in Brussels for me.

VW is noble and all...

[winnabago]

Of course, this doesn't help us in New York, Mass, Connecticut, California, and other states who have chosen prohibition of new diesel sales until fuel regs catch up. For newer, 2007+ models, the government WILL be telling you which diesel of the two you can use, punishable by heavy fines, of course. Good luck finding the right nozzle!

Boring Huh! (was Re:Change engine sizes)

[MZoom]

... If you're talking about drag racing, there's no skill involved in that boring sport. Rev up, dump the clutch, and go straight. So boring.

According to this page, drag racing fans often witness acceleration faster than the space shuttle launching or a catapult assisted jet fighter, with deceleration of up to 5G's. The possibility of separated retinae for the driver seems to indicate this sport would be anything but boring for both fan and driver.

Now imagine holding a highly modified pro-stock harley to your ass while laying face forward as your launched like a pellet from a slingshot to finally reach 180MPH in about 7 seconds. The only thing between your now dirty shorts and the hot rubber tire is a 1/4 inch thick piece of poorly insulated fiberglass. I would think anyone capable of that feat has plenty 'o skill for this sport!

Re:Great article but I what does a sedan look like

[amper]

This is a typical fallacy that many people seem to believe. The power required to drive a vehicle faster increases with the cube of velocity. There's no way to break the laws of physics.

You will generally find the mileage peak of any particular vehicle at the slowest engine speed which is capable of maintaining forward velocity in its highest transmission configuration. For most cars these days, you will find that that point generally exists somewhere in the 40-50 MPH range. As an example, say 1800 RPM in 5th gear for a typical small-ish (say, sub 3000cc) engine.

Europe

[fantomas]

Maybe Europe is a "big city" but there's a lot of public transport right across the continent. Yes there's population density in places like Netherlands, but there's a lot of public transport intercity use in rural France, Germany, etc. On the population density argument: again, back to my post: offer urban and suburban transport and 'park and ride' - get people to drive their cars from the low density place to the edge of cities and then share transport from there. For practice rather than theory discussing if public transport works I point you to: Europe, China, India: big places, lots of rural population, lots of train and bus use. Whether it 'works' or not I think is largely socially constructed, people's personal preferences play a large part.

Re: your point about public transport about not being able to pay for itself - think outside the box and say "so what?" maybe if it's a social good then it doesn't matter if it doesn't pay for itself? Nobody suggests reducing the army because it doesn't make a financial profit, it's considered to be a necessary part of the country's infrastructure. Nobody closes schools because they don't make a net cash profit from their users. Could air travel pay for itself if air fuel was taxed? it's currently exempt from fuel taxes so skews the actual cost - what would tickets cost if air fuel was taxed at the same rate as automobile fuel? Cost out public transport with its fuel tax set at zero and see what you get. At some point somebody's decided that for social reasons air fuel is tax free. How about making public transport fuel tax free?

Re: grand plans on reducing traffic - well sometimes I get the train from a small town to London, and cycle round London. So stationary autos are actually preferable to fast moving autos for me :-) I don't benefit either way, but I like the cleaner air. My main commute is by bike into work each day, 8 miles each way, longer than some people admittedly. I travel on pedestrian and cycle only redways so cars are irrelevant to my commute. Sometimes I drive a car (me and my girlfriend bought one between us) but as somebody who tends to walk or cycle to the shops, I'm really concerned at how much people will use their cars - maybe driving half a mile to pick up a paper and a pint of milk on a sunny day.

Re:Gas Dependant Hobbies

[johnlcallaway]

I wish I some mod points....this comment needs to be much higher.

I have always felt that one cause of the difference between my actions and more serious environmentalists is a matter of a convenience/inconvenience factor. An environmentalist may be willing to pedal 25 miles to work, take an hour or more, arrive all sweaty, and spend another 15 mins. taking a shower. Or spend almost two hours and take the bus(I've checked the schedule...). I am not willing to do that, and ride a 45MPG motorcycle (I live in Phoenix and do this every day because my daughter drives my truck for her much shorter commute.) I'm willing to tolerate the few weeks of 110 degree heat (in full gear, mind you), while I notice the number of bikers declines quite significantly this time of year. It appears their convenience/inconvenience is different from mine.

See the Great-great-grandparent post.

[FatSean]

That poster started the discusion using his 22MPG CR-V as an example. He wanted the room. I countered that you could get a vehicle with the same or better room for better than 22MPG.

What model are your 'sports cars' that get 40MPH? They must accelerate like a tortoise.

Way to read too much into a statement and over-react.

Re:Where does the alternate fuel come from?

[mr_mischief]

I see. Yes, that is definitely a concern. Sorry for being so snarky.

Hopefully, the farmers won't be the ones who have to make the decision. Most biofuels are being made from crops that are already being grown for food. Corn oil and soybean oil are often already the target, so the fact that table grains and grains for high oil content are often different stocks of seed should hopefully be a limited issue.

Using the same source for both would have an upward pressure on the prices for both, to be sure. Hopefully in mkost cases it won't knock things completely out of whack. If there was a serious drought, a crop blight, or an attack with an indescriminate herbicide (agent orange, anyone?), the prices of food and fuel would hoth skyrocket. That's the worst scenario.

OTOH, the cost of fuel to ship food from rural farming regions to urban areas is already driving prices much higher than they could be given more even use of the land. If the cost of the raw material for both goes up hand in hand, that's exponential instead of linear. The cost of fuel is also already driving up the cost of production signifigantly, since there is fuel involved in running farm equiptment. So we'd be going from two price pressures on the crops to three on the fuel costs, plus the added demand pressure from using as the fuel.

It's truly a whole new economics, and it may mean the slow return of local farms in areas that don't currently have them. Since ethanol in particular can't yet be reliably transported by pipeline, local fuel production facilities make much more sense too. It's too bad the Feds are just now getting around to wanting to update the locks and dams on the nation's main rivers, because barges are the cheapest way to ship large amounts of grain. Bigger locks mean more barges per tugboat. Trains will hopefully be used more than trucks for the large amounts of corn, soybeans, and grain oils that have to move outside the pipeline, as that's a big cost savings, too.