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:

[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:

[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:

[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?

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

[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

[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

[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.

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!

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...

[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...

[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...

[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 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!

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.

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: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: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 ;)

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.