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Lotus Teases With a Fuel-Agnostic Two-Stroke Engine
JohnnyBGod writes "Lotus claim to have invented a new, more efficient engine design. The two-stroke, flex-fuel engine can achieve, according to the surprisingly technical press release, 'approximately 10% better [fuel consumption] than current spray-guided direct injection, spark ignition engines.' The engine has a sliding puck arrangement to control its compression ratio, and has direct injection and a wet sump, to eliminate fuel leakage to the exhaust and the need to mix oil with the fuel, two common problems with two-stroke engines. Lotus engineering have released a video explaining the engine's operation."
It's the year of Lotus on the desktop!
You forgot to use a car analogy!
10%? So that's what? 22% instead of 20%? Whoope!
Ford built a Fiesta with a two-stroke engine that achieved 1.4l/100km (that’s 168 mpg!) in 1996! Not a drawing. Not a experimental model. No, a real driving prototype car. Looked just like a normal Fiesta.
I wonder why it took until now, for something that’s still worse to come out.
If I were the Ford engineer, I would be angry as hell.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
They can be run on multiple fuels (or indeed, mixtures thereof) and would be ideal for a series-hybrid vehicle, where the drivetrain could be eliminated (it was the weak point in the turbine cars.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This drives me nuts.
What about this is new? Does it exist due to breakthroughs and material science we didn't have available thirty years ago? Not that I can see.
Which means this is nothing that a team of imaginative engineers couldn't have come up with long ago, and likely would have, (and probably did) if they'd been allowed to. Fuel efficiency means the oil billionaires, (the people who have been running things since forever), make less money. The only reason this is happening now is because the corrupt deals being cut in Copenhagen with regard to carbon trading and various other ass-backward plans are a means of making more profit in different ways and promise greater control over every aspect of our lives.
Look, I'm all for efficiency and I'm sure the engineering team on this project are fine people. But this is bullshit. It's a press release which appears in the same breath as that Israeli company and their silicone battery. The people allowing this stuff to float to the top of global media-consciousness don't care about the actual state of human affairs or about the genuinely awesome things we could be actually doing with technology. This is about agendas and sculpting public awareness and making damned sure the slaves are tightly locked down.
So, yeah, thanks Lotus. Very courageous of you to cautiously advance this lukewarm idea past the oil barons. Because crop-based fuels are SUCH a good idea.
-FL
not using a car analogy is like walking
This engine looks to be a lot more complex than the usual two strokes, so it will cost a lot more to manufacture and maintain, a lot more to design and engineer, will have lower yield rates/higher failure rates so it will cost the customer a lot more money. So, as a consumer of engines, do you spend possibly twice as much on the engine because it is 10% more efficient? If the major cost is the engine itself and fuel - as has been the case up until recently - is comparatively cheap which will you buy? As a manufacturer who has to compete with other companies, which design is the best choice for you to focus on? Yes these could have been designed earlier, but the reason they weren't is nothing to do with propping up oil companies profits, it's to do with whether there was any profit to be made in building the engines.
What drove the adoption of fuel injection over carburettors? It wasn't oil companies, it was the pressure of emissions legislation: it's cheaper to produce an engine that meets the requirements with FI. Before that was a factor, carburettors are much cheaper so that's what was used. As fuel becomes more expensive and the quantity of emissions becomes a significant factor it becomes profitable to build more complex and expensive engines because that cost is recouped by the lowered consumption and emissions.
30 years ago we didn't have the electronic control systems, the precise manufacturing and the economic pressures we do now, so suddenly these 'designs we should have thought of years ago' become viable.
I talked to some guys who were doing automotive engineering apprenticeships at Lucas, and they said one of their projects was to design a super efficient carburettor for a motorcycle engine (this was around 1997). Their design was hugely efficient in comparison to the existing product, something like 20-30%, but significantly more complex and hence it was not suitable for production.
It would be great if we actually had all the technology and knowledge that we need to survive for an eternity in peace and harmony with our surroundings, but the likelihood of that being the case, and that it is all being held back by a few greedy corporations seems pretty slim...
Also wrt. the crop based fuels, since this can run on pretty much anything, wouldn't that open up the possibilities for switchgrass, algae based fuels etc. which are not based on food crop sources? Ethanol from corn is a bad idea - and one that is actually promoted by some big evil corporations
So I pay $30, not $33 when getting gas. Whoop-dee-doo. We need a car that doesn't USE GAS. Hydrogen or electricity please.
Now I just need the Flux Capacitor and I'm outta here!
The comments on the youtube video date back to 9 months ago, how is this recent news?
From the linked Wikipedia list:
"Better fuel economy (18 US mpg)"
Also another manufacturer's story:
http://www.rover.org.nz/pages/jet/jet5.htm
(20mpg FWIW)
Dude, Chill!
Let's assume you're right and it could have been done 30 years ago (it couldn't but I'll get to that later). It's newsworthy because no-one has done this before, in fact it's more newsworthy if someone has a really obvious idea that no-one has done before. I'm sure the first person to stick an internal combustion or steam engine on a cart was told it was a really obvious idea, but the first horseless carriage still deserved to be big news. I'd certainly class a major engine development as being as newsworthy as the latest revision of the Linux kernel being released.
As I understand the article they're using direct injection similar to that used in modern performance diesels. This is a relatively new technology that requires very high pressure fuel injectors which are still a developing technology and weren't available 10 years ago never mind 30. Don't forget mechanical engineering is a much slower moving field than software - they have to design and test things in their field before they release them ;-)
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
Oh, and the government has put spy chips in our heads too!
In all seriousness, this whole big oil conspiracy is a load of junk. I'm sure the oil companies would do that if they could, but look at it from the car company point of view. If a car company could come out and say "Hey! we got a car that gets amazing mpg and behaves just like any other car!" they would have an instant fortune. How exactly would oil companies go about stopping these companies? I've never heard of oil companies buying car companies, left and right. Did they go and kill everyone who has worked on a high efficiency engine program?
Whats changed more than anything recently is modeling software and rapid prototyping. There is only so much math you can do by hand when trying to model an internal combustion engine while it's running. For a long time we made engines with trial and error and whatever math could be done by hand, but now we're at the point where we can make accurate simulations of the workings of an engine. Hell I wouldn't doubt if they run these simulations with genetic algorithms trying to find the right shape or timings to run in a prototype.
As for this engine compared to that battery, there they've said "we have this working battery, it's not all that good, but it works!" and here we have "Not only does it work, but it's current form is better than other engines!"
Additionally it is in the oil companies' best interest to develop production of producible fuels (rather than extracted fuels) because the costs for extracting keep going up, and the amount of energy required to extract keeps going up. Eventually we will run out of oil, it's a matter of when. Once the price gets high enough if one company has been investing in producible fuels while the others have been slacking off, they have an opportunity to make massive amounts of money.
Ideally the best solution is using the electricity generated from a fission nuclear power plant to power the vehicles, indirectly through some storage medium. The question then becomes which storage medium? Hydrogen is inefficient and a compressed gas, making cars into mobile flamethrowers (since there is no oxygen in the tank it won't explode, but any that escapes will sure burn, and any rupture in the tank is a lot worse when working with a compressed gas than with a vaporous liquid like gasoline). Batteries will require large amounts of certain metals (I don't know what the current estimates for usage versus supply of battery metals are, but there are a LOT of cars in the world) and don't have the energy density of gasoline. This leaves us with biologically derived fuels. Let me first say that this whole 'ethanol from corn' is the true load of crap that being fed to Americans, corn is terrible for production of ethanol. It would be better if we could get the enzymes that break down cellulose into a fuel to work right, but we're not quite there yet. Algae grown in large salt water ponds are our best option currently, but that doesn't get the corn area swing votes quite as well as making a whole new use of the staple crop for several states.
So, in conclusion, nuclear fission power plants (with reprocessing, and newer reactor designs) used to power a storage medium for cars. Tada! Ok, not that simple, but more or less, yeah.
So Lotus has created an engine that believes that nothing is known or can be known about the existence of fuel.
:)
"[citation needed]" ... reminds me of wikipedia
This engine looks to be a lot more complex than the usual two strokes, so it will cost a lot more to manufacture and maintain, a lot more to design and engineer, will have lower yield rates/higher failure rates so it will cost the customer a lot more money. So, as a consumer of engines, do you spend possibly twice as much on the engine because it is 10% more efficient?
They key words there being "two strokes". It's very possible it's still cheaper to make and simpler to maintain than the equivalent powered four stroke engines.
which is totally what she said
I thought they did software like Notes and were owned by IBM.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Which means this is nothing that a team of imaginative engineers couldn't have come up with long ago
So is most of the new technology that you see. Even special relativity is obvious in retrospect.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
In all seriousness, this whole big oil conspiracy is a load of junk.
You say that with such certainty that you must have some pretty solid reasoning and knowledge on the subject. --Or be operating from a comfortable state of nearly perfect ignorance. Let's see which it is. . .
I'm sure the oil companies would do that if they could, but look at it from the car company point of view. If a car company could come out and say "Hey! we got a car that gets amazing mpg and behaves just like any other car!" they would have an instant fortune. How exactly would oil companies go about stopping these companies? I've never heard of oil companies buying car companies, left and right. Did they go and kill everyone who has worked on a high efficiency engine program?
Oh boy. I don't want to be insulting, but this is extremely naive.
You could benefit from some reading on the events of the last century. First of all, it isn't oil companies. It's the oil elect. Many of them are politicians and decision makers in other key industries and boards. Oil is just one of the dominant forms of wealth, and so it is controlled by old money, along with every other significant sector of society, including the media, pharma, arms, banking and information industries. Collectively, this has been variously dubbed the Military Industrial Complex, and you can bet your socks it does whatever necessary to control power and wealth. Usually people don't need to be killed in order for secrets to be kept. Rather, you only hire on people who have been effectively programmed through schooling to be cognitively dissonant, (able to look facts in the face and yet continue believing contrary dictates), you silence them with non-disclosure agreements involving harsh threats for failure to comply, use simple bullying when that is not enough, character assassination when they get out of hand, and when things are dire, resort to murders, of which there are far too many examples. But primarily, simply training people to have a fear of seeking beyond orthodox beliefs is 99% effective. --As a practical example, consider your own reactions; You'd probably have a lot of trouble telling somebody that you believe in Astrology, and not just from any logical perspective, but rather from a deeply-felt gut wrenching imperative stemming from deep within. That sweaty-palmed sick feeling is evidence of the Pavlovian mind programming we've all been exposed to. It is both invisible and ubiquitous throughout society. It is deliberately inserted through simple techniques, it is easy for our controllers to modify after it is implanted, and it is incredibly effective in controlling human behavior.
I barely even know which way to point you on this. Perhaps this book would be a good start. "Farewell America" is fairly well accepted to have been authored by the French equivalent of the CIA, and based on hard intelligence gathered from French, Russian, and even American sources. It was originally published in French in 1968, but it was unavailable in the United States for many years. With the coming of the worldwide web, this is no longer true. With regard to this posting thread, it covers the involvement of the oil and arms industry.
Good luck.
-FL
I wonder how this compares to the OPOC engine that is being developed by the same guy who did the TDI for VW. Check out the nifty flash animation: http://www.ecomotors.com/ . I think the new found focus on economy is starting to (finally) spur some innovation in this area.
Yes, Two stroke engines have been around for a long time. However, this engine purports to be a clean two stroke - something that has not been around a long time. Anyone with an mid-70's two stroke motorcycle could probably go around the block before biking in their own smoke - so yes, this is new.
The advantage of this "system" is obviously 1) it's light, 2) it's clean; 3) it can use multiple fuel types.
1) A light engine can be combined with a generator; a battery. Think Electric-Car.
If the battery in an electric car is large enough to run ~30 miles; the car has a sufficiently strong auxillary motor (not enough to drive the car fast uphill, but enough to repower the battery between the downhill & uphill) - this makes an electric type car better. A "more complex" two stroke should be lighter than a four stroke; make the Electric car significantly better. (Personally, I drive under six miles most days. Occasionally I want to visit friends who live outside the range for a purely electric vehicle - requiring me to have a conventional vehicle, or an expensive one with multiple power systems.)
2) If the engine is as clean as a four stroke, then the engine is as clean as a four stroke. EG: you will be able to use it in a production vehicle without as much pollution as a conventional two stroke.
3) It can use multiple fuel types: EG: You can fill it with Gas, Diesel, Algie-Diesel - or if you're in a 3rd world country: you can use Strained Fryer Grease (Diesel Fuel) from Bob's Yak stand. (May only work in warm climates, not recommended for stoned hippies, etc...)
So yes, if this works as implied this is a good solution that represents a significant improvement over a four stroke engine. (Not to say that the moving-puch cylinder head would not work in a four-banger.) For a company that makes very light vehicles, and is working on an "electric-type" vehicle - this solution makes emminent sense. Please insert this in your tin-foil hat so the Govenment does not leak it to the Big Oil companies.
So is most of the new technology that you see. Even special relativity is obvious in retrospect.
You appear to be suggesting that everybody who has been thinking about how to improve internal combustion engines over the years simply failed to come up with anything smart.
If you read through just the examples posted among the comments for this story, I think you'll find such a position is untenable. Heck, there's one example in an adjacent response to this exact post which describes a significantly more efficient carburetor mechanism designed by apprentice engineers which was rejected because of the supposed manufacturing costs. (Which is ridiculous; the whole point of the industrial revolution is that manufacturing costs become negligible once factories are tooled up and a market for millions of copies exists.)
The brain spark was burning gasoline in the first place. Everything since then has largely been a matter of mechanics and efficiency management. If good ideas are only just now coming up, then the last half century's worth of engineers have been pretty thick. I think in this instance, one can safely invoke even Occam for guidance on that question!
-FL
Not only is it a two-stroke engine, which are inherently more efficient than four-stroke engines, but it also limits the moving parts to a minimum. And Lotus never boasts about something it cannot do. However, I'd like to see a multicylinder version of it.
And that's no mean feature when you see the number of moving parts in today's engines fitted with variable valve timing/lift systems (which, of course, the switch to electric propulsion will avoid altogether).
The question is, however, is it too late? And imho, there is a "yes" and a "no".
Yes, the electric motors have been long proven to work.
No, the weight/energy ratio of electricity sucks. No, other (really!) "CO2 clean" fuels already exist, with engines already able to run on them (this particular engine included).
The future looks promising anyway. Now, I just wish that the car manufacturers turned more effort into removing weight. Even if that means stepping back on safety features - after all, nothing has been done yet on the driver training front.
Thank-you for offering the first reasonable-sounding notes among this spate of responses.
What a day!
-FL
Two Strokes are notorious for having a narrow power band. I wonder if they'll couple this with an CVT transmission to keep the engine in the best efficiency range? Also, I'd be curious to see how the pipe tuning holds out especially in road vehicles.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
To paraphrase Robin Williams; Never have I seen a slashdotter in more dire need of a blowjob.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"You appear to be suggesting that everybody who has been thinking about how to improve internal combustion engines over the years simply failed to come up with anything smart."
No that's the implication of your statement, not his.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
You appear to be suggesting that everybody who has been thinking about how to improve internal combustion engines over the years simply failed to come up with anything smart.
No, merely that a lot of the improvements we've seen in internal combustion engines have been along these lines (things that were physically possible decades earlier but needed someone to think of them). The fact that we haven't seen this particular improvement before just means that no one thought of it. No conspiracy needed.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You do know that Lotus is commonly held to stand for "Loads Of Trouble Usually Serious" and that it usually relates to mechanical problems with the engine?
That said to mitigate getting marked as a Troll I don't think that slander has had any serious merit for more than a decade. I believe some also inferred the accusation occasionally related to the suspension which, given Lotus are generally the go to people for handling would suggest that it's only because they try so hard in the first place that they occasionally chucked out a duffer. Like Aston or Lancia many moons ago.
Anyway, mines the Exige 260 in nose-bleed orange please ;^)
Regards, Phil
I believe this could work, and in fact it is what I advocate, and what will be done in more economically free countries (ironically including China which is already building the infrastructure now). There are no technological challenges that I see, only political ones.
Regarding how to store the relatively cheap electricity we could be getting from fission done right, the easiest way in the short term would be by coal gasification. This would allow us to convert low-quality, high-sulfur coal, which we have in abundance in the U.S. (and also in China, Russia, and India), into a higher-quality, less polluting, but definitely non-carbon-neutral liquid fuel. Eventually, the incremental improvements we are already seeing in fuel cell technology should allow us to transition to carbon-neutral or carbon-negative methods of storing and converting energy.
The market will work if we let it. We won't completely run out of oil, but as proven and recoverable reserves shrink, prices will rise, making other forms of energy production more competitive. Carbon emissions will not shrink in the near term due to growth in the developing world, but if sustainable green technology is developed in the wealthier nations, it can be shared so as to allow other places to develop more cleanly and sustainably. (I don't believe in AGW but I understand there are other good reasons to wean ourselves from oil dependency, and I also understand that energy usage is one of the prime determinants of quality of life and we should be looking for ways to provide clean energy, not forcing people at gunpoint to use less of it.)
Nonaggression works!
It usually has to do with the parts around the engine. Lotus' initial quality control isn't the greatest, and they've put some parts where they shouldn't in the past.
As far as the engines, Lotus is famous for tricking out existing engines, from the ancient Fords to GM in the Opel Omega to the modern Toyotas in your Exige dream. They've even gone ethanol for that in testing.
I don't know why people still think the Oldsmobile diesel was based on a gasoline engine. It wasn't.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldsmobile_V8_engine#LF9_Diesel
I for one do understand the military/industrial/banking/education/media/medical/pharma complex, and in fact I am part of it (not because I'm proud of it, but because I must feed my family and have no other way to do so). I agree for the most part with your observations. But it does NOT control the entire world, and in fact it is being kept on an increasingly short leash by those who do, by those whose money is older by centuries than the American experiment itself. They view American imperialism and militarism as no longer a business opportunity, but rather a significant threat to their entire way of life. They are engineering a war that will end this threat, while preserving their own wealth and investments by shifting them to the places they believe will survive and even prosper in the aftermath of that war.
Energy is indeed being suppressed; people are being manipulated to believe that it is scarce and dangerous and that consuming it is a bad thing. And oil, which most people equate with energy, is indeed scarce at the moment. But, in the form of uranium, thorium, and coal (which can be converted to cleaner forms of energy), among other things, there is PLENTY. The US and world elites are struggling to maintain control over it, which means both ensuring that they have "their" share but also that others do not, since this way others can be manipulated into fighting each other for it and increasing its value. But the resulting shortages that all of us normal people see are PURELY political in nature. Even barring any future technological innovations, there is plenty of energy for all of us, and our descendants, and theirs, for generations to come. We just aren't being allowed to access it.
Nonaggression works!
Interesting. This post seems to have been typed on a french keyboard (or possibly a variant), judging from the typo of the word "my" as "mùy".
There is no other keyboard I'm aware of that would make it remotely possible to misspell "my" as "mùy".
This might be a great power plant for a plug in hybrid.
If it can be a clean as a petrol, or the new diesel tech.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
The fact that we haven't seen this particular improvement before just means that no one thought of it. No conspiracy needed.
You're right, but for the wrong reasons.
Ideas are just ideas. They come when they are called for. Finding a more efficient alternative to the existing design paradigm is just a matter of hiring a diverse group of people to come up with novel solutions using the materials and tools available. That's where this idea came from. I doubt very much that it was a brain spark which, upon its discovery, was heralded to the top of the car-making empire by a bright-eyed inventor. No. I suspect that a design team was hired to build an efficient engine capable of burning bio-fuels in response to the shifting nature of the fuel industry.
The, so-called "Conspiracy" is simply that there have been forces present resisting this kind of activity because the old ways are perceived as safer, tried & true and just too risky a flow to work against. I don't call that "conspiracy". I call it cowardly and stupid. It's just plain lazy corruption, greed and the force of people too scared of losing their jobs to rock the boat in any significant manner. Why is it that sceptics perceive every complaint offered against the public-relations brochure/TV version of reality as a claim of conscious and deliberate "Conspiracy"? -A brush up on the fundamentals of basic human nature would go a long way to quelling their desire to rationalize everything into a false reality where no government or corporate body ever tells a lie.
It's never black & white, of course. The human creative muscle has its phases, one idea builds upon the next to be certain. It would be silly to ignore how the process of invention works. But it would be equally silly to pretend that corrupt forces do not exist when it is clearly evident that they do. All I'm saying is that this engine and the people who designed it may well be brilliant, but that it's peanuts compared to what could have been if corrupt forces were not acting on the world as a whole.
-FL
Excellent.
If those damn kids put sugar in my gas tank again, I'll get cinnamon buns now instead of a dead engine.
oops.. yer right....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I learned to drive in a 2-stroke car -- a 1968 Saab, AFAIK the last 2-stroke car that could legally be sold in the US (50CID was the limit for that year, it was at or a hair under). They are not better in absolute terms, old style 2-strokes are just plain filthy. Their rear mufflers would not rust, instead they would become plugged with a mixture of soot and partially-burned gunk. If you left one of those cars idling for too long next to another car, you would leave an sooty oily spot from the exhaust. You could rejuvenate a muffler, if you had access to a trash fire or bonfire, by cooking it to bake/burn off the gunk.
Using synthetic oil for lubrication helps a little bit, because it is formulated to burn better, but in general, there is no way that these cars were cleaner.
So -- I actually drove one for years, actually worked on their exhaust system, actually left one idling next to another car for too long, and have seen all this with my own eyes. Where did you get your information? I'm curious to know what would cause someone to spout such obvious nonsense with such self-assured authority.
It's really amazing how they can do so well in engine design and yet put out software that causes this much consternation...
That is all.
Let's compare apples to apples. Gas engines currently run on at least 30 ppm sulfur and are beating diesel in emissions, which run on 15 ppm sulfur. Don't forget about aftertreatment devices.
Americans are right to think that diesels are dirty. All those VW TDIs with high mpg? Ya, they're dirty. Don't kid yourself.
Would it pass in California? Probably not. You see two-stroke scooters around here sometimes. I don't know if they're legal or not, but I know they STINK when they go by, especially if they're not well maintained.
Odds seem slim that California would ever allow a production two-stroke automobile on the road, unless they could prove that it throws out less emissions than a regular car. They are already quite strict about Diesels from my understanding (although you can still get them if you really want one). Part of the Diesel requirements are that you have to prove an older engine doesn't become a heavy polluter under regular use. Two-strokes would probably have a similar procedure.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Oh, man... I'm picturing being *that guy*, the one that rolls out his riding lawnmower with the Lotus symbol on the hood... All my neighbors would stop pushing their mowers to watch my gleaming grass cutting muscle machine in amazement and envy. Cue Tim Allen caveman grunts...
Awww yeah...
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
The fact is, they were a slightly modified gasoline engine design. That's the problem. Sure, you can beef-up the crank, change the pistons slightly, and cast from a different alloy, but it's still a bad design for a diesel engine. Diesels have different design considerations, and aside from the 4-cycle basic layout that diesels and gasoline engines have in common, they really need to be designed from scratch.
As a result, it was rather unreliable and underpowered. I found it amusing you could have a car in the NADA Older Used Cars book that had a book value of $400, with a $500 deduction for having that godawful engine in it.
The 6.2/6.5 GM diesel engines weren't really that much better. They're more powerful and a somewhat better design, but they still miss the mark on reliability and were prone to overheating because they just weren't designed to have enough oil volume, adequate oil or block cooling systems, and the other little things that keep diesels reliable (like good fuel filters and fuel-water separators) were absent from the implementation. I was not impressed by the 6.2l engine in a Chevy truck I had a number of years ago. It simply didn't have the diesel reliability and other traits I expect. I have a good bit of experience owning, operating, maintaining, and making minor repairs to a whole lot of diesel engines (I owned & operated an excavating & trucking business), those older Chevy engines are really the only diesel engine I actively avoid and consider dealbreakers. It's just not worth the brain damage when you can get a real diesel engine that gets the job done and is reliable like a good diesel is.
The people allowing this stuff to float to the top of global media-consciousness don't care about the actual state of human affairs or about the genuinely awesome things we could be actually doing with technology.
Argh, you can't say something like that and leave your readers hanging, wondering what "genuinely awesome things we could actually be doing with technology." Please provide some examples. Thanks.
What about this is new?
From the article, "The primary component of the variable compression ratio mechanism is what is termed the 'puck', or a moveable junk piston in the cylinder head." That's pretty new.
Energy is indeed being suppressed; people are being manipulated to believe that it is scarce and dangerous and that consuming it is a bad thing. And oil, which most people equate with energy, is indeed scarce at the moment. But, in the form of uranium, thorium, and coal (which can be converted to cleaner forms of energy), among other things, there is PLENTY. The US and world elites are struggling to maintain control over it, which means both ensuring that they have "their" share but also that others do not, since this way others can be manipulated into fighting each other for it and increasing its value. But the resulting shortages that all of us normal people see are PURELY political in nature. Even barring any future technological innovations, there is plenty of energy for all of us, and our descendants, and theirs, for generations to come. We just aren't being allowed to access it.
This is the most insightful and useful comment anybody has made in thus far in this whole thread.
-FL
I find this to be an interesting discussion, because although everyone blames the GM diesels' problems on being a modified gasoline engine, some of the most well-known and reliable "classic" Diesel engines in cars were nearly identical to their gasoline counterparts: VW 1.5, 1.6, and 1.9 Diesels and BMW 2.4L Diesels. The 1980's VW 1.5-1.9 engine blocks were nearly identical to 1.8-2.0L gasoline engines, with bore spacing, etc being identical. The same goes for the BMW 324TD and 325e/i...the cranks are swappable etc.
The problem (as your post supports) is poor design choices, not the base from which they were derived.
The 2009 RX8 is rated at 22 highway mpg by the EPA. The bigger, heavier, faster Corvette is rated at 25 mpg. So yeah, the rotary is a great, powerful, compact engine. Unless you care about fuel economy.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have an RX8, as long as someone else was paying for the gas.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
If you aren't competent enough to know the difference between silicon and silicone, you're nowhere near competent enough to make decisions on the other subjects you mentioned.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
If you aren't competent enough to know the difference between silicon and silicone, you're nowhere near competent enough to make decisions on the other subjects you mentioned.
I've seen this pattern far too many times; people who are so desperate to avoid thinking, they will latch on to the first flaw, no matter how small and irrelevant, even something as minor as a typo (*cough*), and toss out everything else based on that. --It has been my experience that this never has anything to do with the actual noted flaw, and everything to do with deeper emotional issues.
I knew a guy who told me, in all seriousness, that he didn't like science fiction books, (ALL science fiction books), because one book he'd read had been poorly written. --The actual problem being that he found the act of reading itself difficult (due to minor dyslexia) and so needed an external excuse to not have to engage with books at all.
The difference being that that person was just a kid. Half-baked evasion techniques are excusable in kids.
How old are you?
-FL