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Looking To Better Engines Instead of Electric Vehicles
hlovy writes "Don Runkle thinks it's engines, not batteries, that will make automobiles cleaner and more efficient. 'We unabashedly say that we have the best solution,' says Runkle, the CEO of Allen Park, MI-based engine developer EcoMotors International. The startup, which brought in $23 million in Series B financing this summer from Menlo Park, CA-based Khosla Ventures and Seattle billionaire Bill Gates, has designed an opposing piston, opposing cylinder engine that uses fewer parts than traditional motors do and generates more power from each stroke of the engine, CEO Runkle says. He says the 'opoc' engine is smaller, lighter, and less expensive than the motors already out there, and a more viable option than switching automobile fleets over to electrical power."
why not better engines with hybrid technology as well? I'll tell you why, so big oil can keep their death grip on all those who drive cars and so that bicycle advocates and environmentalist can have a reason to continue to hate cars and think they are evil.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
When you can store energy as densely as liquid hydrocarbon, you'll have a successful electric car.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
An engine-developer and seller tells us that the future is in the engines that he happens to be able to sell you. Didn't see that one coming.
Now if someone would just rear-mount that in a cute little chassis, maybe one that looked kind of like a bug or something...
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
No. Even if we make more efficient engines, we still have the oil dependency. Maybe when we're really low on oil, we can have fusion power (not Mr. Fusion...) and be done with fossile fuels and "eco-friendly" energies like bird-killing windmills.
This may be just a short-term solution, but not the real answer.
Like a VW, Subaru, or BMW bike? This is new?
Ok, they may be taking this to a new level, but this design has been around for quite a while.
There is still room for improvement of the internal combustion engine, one is variable compression.
However - a very limiting factor is that consumers aren't willing to pay for the technology, especially in the US where gasoline is dead cheap compared to many other places in the world.
Just look at technologies that have been created earlier - the Alvar Engine (variable compression with a small piston that rotates phase-adjusted to the camshaft, and is actually a assymetrical counter-piston engine), Smokey Yunick's Hot Vapor engine (heating the fuel beyond boiling point before injection) etc.
Diesel engines are also one of the more fuel efficient engines around at the moment. Efficiency up to 55%.
But what really consumes fuel in many cases is the stop&go traffic in cities. Even a short term accumulation of energy in a capacitor bank would help to keep that down. And vehicle weight is also an important factor. Aerodynamic drag is of course important, but only at highway speeds. In a city you can do fine with a shoe box.
So the future for cars is probably a combination of solutions.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Opposed piston motors have been around since the 40s in terms of innovative designs. As far as unique engine variants go, early imagination was not quashed. Books older than you have been written about the pros and cons of I-head, F-head, T-head... 2-cycle diesels, 4-cycle diesels, etc. Check out the Knight sliding sleeve engine. It's all been thought of and conceived, but whether it be incredibly high manufacturing costs or less-than-reliable operation, some force has prevented their use from becoming mainstream.
History repeats itself. What's old is new again.
And why are we beating the dead horse that is ICE engines when we could be advancing other technologies? I wrote in a previous comment how it's very similar to new titanium horseshoes... great, but why?
Stop posting these advertisements! Also please stop spreading the idea that gasoline engines and electric engines are somehow different in there pollution factors. THEY'RE NOT. They both utilize incredibly wasteful systems to produce power and both are horrifically inefficient. You think that the EV's are being powered by unicorn tears? No. It is coal. Shifting the problem to larger plants may seem to make it more efficient, but then you remember we have to build these EV cars and no one knows exactly how bad they are for the environment in the long run. I highly doubt refining thousands of 'rare earth minerals' and then dumping them back into the planet is a good idea.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
I'll glad I'm not typing "what happens when the hydrogen runs out?".
I see a lot of buzzwords, but the few words with some real content in it makes it seem like this is just a two-stroke boxer engine.
More efficient? No shit Sherlock, that's always been the province of the two-stroke. The problem was how to keep the lubricants out of the combustion chamber so that it wouldn't be so damn polluting.
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
The answer is more diesel powered vehicles. Diesel has a higher energy content and with modern CDI engines can be as fast and greener than a typical gas engine. Although while the cost per gallon of diesel is higher, a small to mid sized diesel passenger car can get 45-55 mpg. Throw in better aerodynamics and we can have more fuel efficient vehicles.
"EcoMotors’ opoc engine is built with opposing pistons, opposing cylinders, and a single crank in the middle. Together, the components work to create a combustion power event with every revolution, unlike existing 4-stroke engines that combust every other turn, Runkle says.
So basically you made a two-stroke flat-four. Color me unimpressed. You're not even using Stirling cycle. Tell me, how the heck did you get Bill Gates to give you money anyway?
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Diesel keeps getting overlooked by the hype for hybrid vehicles, but a VW Passat BlueMotion recently broke the record for mileage, getting 74.8 MPG.
One of the problems with converting to new technology is that people are still improving the old one. This always happens. That makes the adoption costs of the new way higher, relatively speaking.
Although, I'm pretty sure the cars I buy now are a lot less fuel efficient than the cars I was getting when I first started driving. My guess is either safety regulations are making cars heavier or people just prefer bigger cars. And I'm talking about cars in the same relative class.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Maker of supposedly cleaner engines thinks that cleaner engines is a better idea than electric vehicles. In other news, maker of windmills thinks wind energy is better than solar. Manufacturer of solar cells disagrees. BP thinks they're all full of shit.
Worse, take a look at the submitter's profile - very few posts (though going back a ways) and a whole lot of story submissions pimping some company or other. I'm catching a whiff of an ad campaign here.
The EV1 and Rav4 EV were rated as no cleaner than a Prius or Civic HX by greenercars.org, and about 8 percentage points lower than my Honda Insight or Civic CNG.
The reason is because while the electric motor is simple and efficient, the electric to battery to electric conversion process is extremely inefficient. Back in 2000 the US government performed a GREET study, and found the two cleanest and most efficient technologies were a Diesel Engine (#2) and a Diesel-electric hybrid (#1). The pure electric car was a distant 6th place behind Gasoline and Natural Gas combustion engines.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
It's perfectly possibly that the future of cheap, clean and geostrategically independent energy passes trough new and improved engines, maybe together with things like biofuels.
Then again it's perfectly possible that electric cars are the way of the future.
Who knows?
No reason to limited ourselves to only one or the other approach though.
That said, this specific gentleman would much rather that more money is invested in "his way" since he stands to make a lot of money if lots of people throw money at it, even if it doesn't work out all that well in the end.
I don't know the limit of efficiency that this new engine design will deliver, but at any sane value this does not solve our biggest problem here in the United States (and probably other nations as well.)
Everything we do is regulated by oil. Our food distribution runs on diesel, our manufacturing runs on diesel. Our military runs on diesel. Our workforce requires gas to get to work. Every facet of American life is dependent on oil based fuels without which our economy, our military, our industry, our agriculture and our commerce will fail. Even with extreme improvement in our ability to harness these fuels, it is extraordinarily unlikely that we can produce enough fuel to be self-sufficient. In short our national security and our very survival are in the hands of foreign powers.
In the best of circumstances this would be worrying, depending on close allies for your ability to survive is harrowing, but sustainable. We are not in the best of circumstances, The nations that produce the majority of oil are not staunch allies, but nations with populaces that are predominantly anti-US. At any time the structure in these countries could break down and we could find ourselves at war with them. This would be a war that even if we win could destroy us as a nation. If we conserve all our fuel resources for the War effort, which we would have to do if we want to win with conventional weapons, we would find ourselves bereft of fuel and the fuel production infrastructure itself most likely in shambles due to the war. Our way of life would be over just as surely as if we had been conquered by a foreign power.
We need to switch to electric not because it is more efficient (although it is) not because it will create jobs (though it will) not because it can be more environmentally sound (although it could be); we need to switch to electrical power because it keeps our vital infrastructure requirements in our own hands. It is a matter of national security, no nation can prosper if it id dependent on unfriendly nations for its very survival.
Little Brother, watching the watchers
So, they get power out of every stroke using two cylinders, instead of every other stroke using one cylinder.
Is this one of those "don't look behind the curtain" advances?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Tried to figure out how this thing worked and I found this video here: http://www.engineeringtv.com/video/Opposed-Piston-Opposed-Cylinder
Some good technical questions and answers, as well as a working illustrative model of the engine.
Why does this become some conservative v liberal thing. Us v them.
For short trips I don't see why I can't leverage the natural gas, nuclear, coal, wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric grid that we have.
For long trips I can use gas(natural or synthetic), natural gas, hydrogen, or whatever makes sense for my region.
I think the battery is largely for energy recapture (braking,idling,etc) and for a quick charge.
As for gas as a fuel source it seems silly to me to keep going to exotic places(mile under water, middle of the wilderness) to get it when we could be placing that human capital into more sustainable fuels\power sources made in our back yard. Decentralized sources also seem more scalable as population and energy consumption increase.
Also, engines are incredibly complicated analog things. We have gotten very good at their manufacture, but batteries can be turned out a much higher rate. Each engines block is usually crafted with robots, but it can takes hours if not days to assemble a fully functional engine. An electric motor is far simpler, easier to replace\upgrade, and ultimately less prone to failure. Think of all the parts it takes to make a simple 4 stroke engine let alone when you start putting turbos and other things to increase their efficiency. Our mechanics are going to need Doctorates.
it's just one of these, basically:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourke_engine
plus the option of having a hybrid system. The Bourke is the cold fusion of the automotive world. We've been hearing how magical and amazingly efficient it is since it was invented in the 1920s and yet no one has managed to build one that is actually more than slightly better than a normal 4 cycle.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
"On a grander scale, Runkle says the EcoMotors technology is ultimately cleaner than plug-in electric automobiles, because it produces more efficient power without having to tap grid electricity—much of which comes from burning coal."
Again, burning fuel is always going to be the less than ideal solution, no matter what the power is used for.
Clean, renewable energy is the way of the future.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Cylinder deactivation to improve fuel efficiency is already a production technology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_displacement The report should have included more details on the engine.
I not a car guy. So, will someone explain to me how this differs from a boxer engine?
Anonymous Cowards suck.
fuel efficiency and sustainable transportation technology is teaching the average lard-bellied coffee swilling cell phone barking commuter the difference between responsible safe driving and break neck dale earnhart rally racing. for example:
not every green light means floor the accelerator
if its 80 degrees outside, you likely do not need the AC blasting
the posted highway speed limit of 65 is not to be interpreted as 85.
dont "race" up to the red light as fast as you can, only to pound the brakes 60 feet from the intersection
married with kids is not a justification for the latest SUV, domestic or foreign
consider foregoing the automobile if your destination is within one mile.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The article is light on details, but there's details elsewhere.
The OPOC engine is a horizontally opposed two cylinder two-stroke engine. As a cylinder in a two-stroke engine has a power stroke on every revolution instead of every second revolution, this engine has very high power density compared to a four-stroke engine of the same size.
Traditionally, two-stroke engines have had very poor emissions. Since the exhaust and intake strokes are not separate, the intake mixes with the exhaust to some degree. This means that some of the intake fuel goes out the exhaust unburned, and some of the exhaust remains in the cylinder with the intake charge, reducing peak temperature. This engine, however, uses assisted HCCI with a diesel injection system, meaning the fuel is introduced during compression instead of intake, so unburned intake fuel does not cross over to the exhaust. (I'm not clear what the "assisted" part is in the assisted HCCI. Perhaps there's a spark plug that's only used during low-power, lean burn conditions?)
The cylinder pairs are intended to be balanced and stackable, so that multiples can be connected together for higher output. TFA suggests that it might even be stacked with an electric motor for low-speed operation.
I imagine these would be very useful for a hybrid, despite the summary title. Unassisted HCCI engines have a small power range, but this would be perfectly fine for a series hybrid generator motor running at a fixed RPM for charging.
100 mpg carburetors have been around about for awhile now .. Weather they actually work or there just BS .. hard to tell but with so many people saying its possible an what not you can't help but wonder why we haven't seen it yet I think because big oil has something to do with that..
Yeah, I got that in my Porsche.
It's not very fuel efficient :-(
As far as I know, electric vehicles are on the order of not one, but 2 orders of magnitude cheaper to run than a gasoline car. Very few people would want to pay up to 100x as much cash for petrol when they can have cheap electricity.
Battery tech is improving all the time, so we may as well bite the bullet and all switch to at least hybrids (just like using a 60 GB SSD as an OS/boot drive; sorry can't resist saying how amazing SSDs are).
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Parent really calls attention to the elephant in the room when it comes to oil and our dependence on it.
So you got rid of the Passat and the wife? Bravo on both!
If you look power to weight ratios, the power (and efficiency) of engines have increased by quite a bit in the past 20 years. 20-25 mpg used to be good milage in the 70's. Now there are a number of cars in the 30-40 mpg range.
So what happened to these saving? Much of it was squandered by putting larger engines into monster SUCs. Even with safety and environmental regs we could get much better cars very quickly.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Does anyone have any numbers on energy and efficiency and financial costs in the various forms of transport? A cousin owning a medium sized fuel transport company told me transport costs can more less be compared as follows:
waterway transport cost - 1
railway transport cost - 10
road transport cost - 100
air transport cost - 1000
Thinking about the physics involved in each mode, especially with friction and inertia, it tends to seem quite true. In any case this is for cargo, but I assume some formulas for energy or dollars per passenger-mile exists as well.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
for sufficiently cheap power you can compromise on density.
Comments so far seem to ignore the issue of mass/power: every kilogram of mass you tack onto a vehicle, reduces its performance. Because that weight has to be accelerated, and at the next stop sign that weight has to brought to a halt. And for most vehicles, "brought to a halt" means wasting the energy that was stored in the form of kinetic energy (vehicle's speed). An electrical vehicle may re-capture some of that kinetic energy, but never 100%. And if a re-capture system adds another 10 kg. to vehicle weight, that's another 10 kg. that rides along, that needs to be accelerated & stopped.
So everything has both a + and - effect on overall efficiency, and driving style / area where a vehicle is used also counts. Cheap power doesn't gain you anything if using it reduces overall efficiency to the point where you started from.
You know, coming from slashdot, I would have thought you'd have an understanding of thermodynamics.
Or at least try to make a look into things before making a kneejerk response.
Even if it's powered by the dirtiest Coal plants available, it'd still be cleaner than conventional cars.
http://imgur.com/ODyoB.png
http://www.grist.org/article/new-study-finds-that-plug-in-hybrids-rule-in-all-possible-futures/
As for batteries, both Nickel and Lithium are nontoxic, and easily recyclable.
(Not to mention, Nickel is the 5th most common element on earth. So it's not that "rare".)
_
What's more, if we are going to solve anything with global warming, we would need to upgrade our grid anyways.
And it takes about 20 years to shift over to a new car fleet. So we best get started ASAP.
Luckily, we have options:
http://greyfalcon.net/solarenergy.png
http://greyfalcon.net/geoenergy.png
http://www.esolar.com/our_solution
http://greyfalcon.net/egs
What is needed is to move off of de-centralized fossil fuel and work towards more centralization of fossil fuel. It makes it easier to control pollution. In addition, by having electric cars, it encourages such R&D as improved transmission. A little change there, increases efficiency for all uses. However, this engine would be ideal in a serial hybrid that is in a black box that can be placed in a car, replacing a battery/ultra-cap unit. Probably an even better use would be in a serial hyrid for semi-trucks, RVs, smaller trucks, all the way down to HumVee type operations.
The only reason IC engines are even competitive with the electric motor is because of the high energy density of the fuel carried on board. If you solve the energy storage problem for the electric motor, there is no way IC engines could compete. Not on efficiency, not on torque, not on emissions, not on noise pollution, nothing. You are held hostage by the fuel tank. Not the IC engine.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
What ever happened to the development of electrically actuated valves? This was a big deal five years ago, and it was supposed to be just around the corner once they ironed out some reliability and electrical system issues... but they had vehicles on the road that worked and had over 100k miles on the clock...
The benefit here would be independently, infinitely adjustable timing for each cylinder for both intake and exhaust, and less moving mass (no camshafts). Some of this can be achieved with other technology. What happened?
I own a diesel VW and have for 8 years, and I still don't get why other manufacturers of reasonably priced autos are not importing more diesel vehicles into the US. I don't think the BMW diesels count, as they're not what I'd consider to be a consumer priced vehicle, in today's economy. I'm thinking Subaru, Honda, Toyota, where are all these players? I know they all offer diesel powered vehicles in other parts of the world. Think of how well a 2l turbodiesel Toyota Tacoma would sell in the US...not everybody needs a SuperDuty.
I have seen 52mpg from my Jetta on a long, flat highway drive (think Kansas), and even in it's bastardized state now (many go fast parts added) I still see 38mpg at the low end, and that's mashing on the accelerator all the time. When a more sedate person drives my car, 45mpg is the norm, but all that torque is addictive and I'll give up 7mpg to really enjoy driving...
Ocean is land, covered with water.
I think the number one thing that could be done is to choose an appropriate vehicle in the first place.
That hemi truck with like 10,000lb towing capacity, do you really need it? How often do you ACTUALLY use the truck bed? I would say 99% of truck owners don't need a truck. They either buy one because A) They like to be able to use it every now and then, or B) Like the idea of owning a truck.
That SUV. Are you pretending that you don't drive a mini-van by using more gas?
The 300HP sport car, or really any high HP car sport or otherwise. Heck a mid-sized family wagon has 240HP now. You know the speed limit has been like 100km since like the 70's right? You know that was put in place to conserve gas right? Does driving something with a top speed of 300km on a 100km road make sense. Do you need 0-60km in under 8 seconds?
Anyway I know all of these things are a hard sell, but you basic equation is weight VS efficiency. If your driving a monster vehicle, you can have the most efficient engine in the world, and it will be offset by weight. If people were only a little more realistic on their needs, then I think that would go a long way towards emissions, conservation, etc...
Particularly trucks. I admit they are handy, but very few people really need them.
No matter how ingenious a heat engine design is, an old Carnot theorem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot's_theorem_(thermodynamics)
limits its efficiency
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_Engine#Efficiency
In practical terms the wiggle room to improve heat engines is small and will only provide incremental gains not sufficient to solve our energy problem. It will simply postpone it by few years.
The real inefficiency is a massive use of personal transport where a mass transit is much more economical.
The diagrams (and you do have to click a few times to get to them) make it look like it's a standard horizontally opposed design that shoe-horns a 2-stroke style valving into the 4-stroke design by adding a second pair of pistons where the cylinder head would normally be that are running on a second set of connecting rods running on the camshaft such that the outer pistons are about 180 degrees out of phase with the traditional piston. Fuel injection and ignition come in at the side of the cylinder, as do intake and exhaust through ports.
There's not much in the way of technical detail that I can see, but on the face of it, it would appear that this design has something over twice the reciprocating mass as a traditional two- or four-stroke for the same cylinder diameter, no inherent possibility of valve re-timing for load (like the awesome Desmodronic style designs) or even advancement for RPM (like essentially every modern cam-driven overhead valve design). Also, the crankshaft now has to withstand the entire force of compression and combustion, unlike OHV designs where the case takes 1/2 of the force. There are three times as many connecting rods (outer pistons have two each). In traditional crankcases, airflow around the crankshaft is an important consideration for high efficiency / high specific power: as the pistons go up and down, the air inside the crankcase flows from the non-combustion side of one cylinder to the other; here there's the same issue in the lower crankcase, but in the upper part, there's no indication of where the air will go as the outer cylinder cycles up and down (not the fuel-air mixture that will be combusted, but the air within the outer part of the case under what they are calling the End Cover Assembly). That would be such a show-stopper that they must have addressed it, somehow, but damned if the diagrams don't make it look like there's a whole lot of air beating going on. I must be missing something.
Personally, having seen first-hand how strong a connecting rod needs to be, I'm wary of those long, slender dual connecting rods for the outer cylinders. Seems like an excellent place for flexing and harmonic vibration. Clearly, these folks are pretty good engineers (and I've been thinking about this design for all of 5 minutes, so the probability that I'm wrong, and they have solutions is high), but they would seem to me to be a potential longetivity nightmare.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Now if someone would just rear-mount that in a cute little chassis, maybe one that looked kind of like a bug or something...
What do you mean? Like those cute little minesweepers or cute little locomotives that have been powered by opposing piston engines?
I'll give them credit for an interesting way of arranging the crank, con rods, and barrels, to give two opposed piston two-stroke cylinders running off a single crank. I also notice the motor's all shown in CGI cutaways and not as an actual running device. There's also some crucial details omitted in the cutaways that make me wonder how they're solving some of the obvious issues with this engine.
Now, personally, I'm a huge fan of two-stroke opposed-piston motors, but usually in Diesel form. There's also some well known issues with getting these motors to run clean, which is one reason we haven't seen a lot of them since the Deltic motors of the 40's. Does it have potential? Sure. Might even be lighter than a counter-crank arrangement, but hell, the Deltics were popular back in their day precisely because of their power density - finally being supplanted in Maritime service by turbines.
Of course, there's currently some rather interesting engines already well into development with some impressive power densities.
Seriously, though, engine efficiency is great, but we'd all be better off scrapping those 4 ton behemoth SUV's and switching to lighter, more aerodynamic, vehicles.
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
I can't watch the video from work (stupid fucking firewall) but from what I gather, there is an electrically driven turbocharger that aids in scavenging the cylinder post combustion and there must be direct injection of fuel into the cylinder on the next stroke. The turbocharger will supply more than enough air, and if it's electrically driven (or aided) it should eliminate lag.
This would be very important if you have a 4 cylinder version of this engine, and two are disabled to save energy, yet you need to make your left turn through the intersection when the light turns red, as lag could leave you sitting there in the middle of the intersection waiting for that oncoming semi to take you out...
Like I said, I can't watch the video, but it seems like a fancy two stroke, with some sort of way of minimizing the combustion of engine lubricant. Coming from the snowmobile world, I know my 600cc 2 stroke makes a similar amount of power to my 1050cc 4 stroke, but I'll take the 4 stroke any day of the week as I'm not burning lubricant, and don't smell like a lumberjack after a ride. A miniaturized version of this engine would be a snowmobiler's dream. 2 stroke power, 4 stroke clean, and a turbocharger to boot!
Ocean is land, covered with water.
I have a boxer engine (horizontally opposed pistons) in my Subaru. The fuel efficiency on a four-cylinder sucks balls, to put it mildly. I go out of my way to drive conservatively and I'm still lucky if I can squeeze 24mpg out of it. To make matters even more entertaining, maintenance is a nightmare -- most pro mechanics want to charge me exorbitant prices because they have so little experience working on them, and when I've had to do routine things like changing the spark plugs, it takes a couple hours because I have to gut the engine compartment to get to the side of the engines where the plugs are located. Nifty idea, and sure it probably increases power output and reduced friction as advertised, but fuel economy and maintenance considerations are shit, in my experience.
blog |
Everyone makes that same sorry mistake, extrapolating an unfavorable curve to infinity as if problems don't have gradual solutions. Lost of Bruce Sterling et all sf postulated worlds full of junkies, so many that society fell apart. Marxists had their nightmare fantasies, and when the world moved beyond tose conditions, they refused to recognize it, failed to adapt, and killed hundreds of millions to prove it.
The world just doesn't work like that, Hydrocarbons won't vanish overnight. They just get more and more expensive, and as the expense climbs, people come up with solutions.
The English burned up all their wood, then found coal, then found oil, and that is how things work.
It doesn't work by flying spaghetti monsters suddenly turning 90% of people into junkies, or sucking all the oil out of the ground in 5 seconds flat.
The biggest problem the world has is the damned fools that think they, and only they, can see the future, and if the world doesn't start working on their pet solution RIGHT NOW, everything is going to hell in a handbasket.
They refuse to believe that anyone else is smart, let alone smarter, that people have always found solutions, and that emergencies on a global scale just don't pop up out of thin air (except killer asteroids and rogue solar waves).
Give it a rest, smarty pants. Get on with your life. Stop living a daily nightmare, you will just scare yourself to death.
Infuriate left and right
A quick summary of the tech:
Overall, this looks promising, but it's important to remember that the energy used to power a vehicle is only part of its overall energy footprint. Something more complex to manufacture and maintain means more energy consumption at that part of the vehicle's life, though that energy could (potentially) be non-hydrocarbon based. It also must not be more expensive than its conventional counterpart, and this engine looks like it would be quite expensive to manufacture and maintain (the central multi-clutch would be essentially a whole additional transmission to maintain, and the number of rotating/reciprocating parts is much larger than a conventional Otto 4-stroke). It's a serious hurdle. But then, we have the Telsa, which is just as exotic. Let's see one of these in a Lotus Elise frame and go head-to-head :)
It's certainly worth investigating.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
which made such a big splash that I can't even remember what they called it.
according to an associate who has done a lot of work for the US automakers, every time an automaker gets serious about fuel-saving features the price of gasoline magically drops exactly as far as needed to make the idea uneconomical.
best of luck to anyone making a more efficient engine, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
Internal combustion engines have to eat something and then excrete something else. Doing less of each is good, but the problem is that we are running out of stuff to feed engines and we are running out of capacity to deal with what engines excrete.
Hence, the interest in electric motors for cars.
Given the where electric car development is now, someone would have to have a significantly better engine right now, ready for production to make it attractive to consumers on a wide and enduring basis.
If things keep going well with electric car development, in 5 - 10 years nobody will want cars driven by engines.
You mean someone like...HITLER?!
I think you are on to something....
OPOC Video
Agreed that his motor is "smaller, lighter," and indeed it is a great product, but it sure as salt is not anything near less expensive, not now at least. Their EM100-- good for ~325 HP-- is well over $100k.
Great tech, would love to build a trike with a small one of these, but the price is insanely high atm.
I thought it looked like a variant on Jumo/Culverin, therefore will have the same problems of what happens if one cylinder starts to fire ahead/behind of where it should. This pre-ignition or non-ignition problem was solved in the Deltic. Oddly enough the Deltic engineers never realised this until they fired the first prototype up and found the problem had miraculously disappeared (because they'd accidentally designed it away).
Thinking on that, when I look at the animation on their website, I wonder where does the gas at the back of the outer cylinders go?
threadeds blog
Isn't this engine layout akin to the olde Beetle's engine layout? From what I gathered by R'ing TFA, the only innovation is that this design would turn off some cylinders, and would generate power in all strokes even with some cylinders turned off; perhaps a two-stroke design?
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
The Prius and anything with variable valve timing already has something much like variable compression, in that it can control when the intake valves close relative to the position of the piston.
They did this before: the Napier Deltic was a two-stroke opposed-piston diesel. The Deltic was meant for use in small, fast ships and trains, and it had three sets of cylinders in a triangle shape, with a crankshaft at each apex. Thanks to its construction it had a high power-to-weight ratio. I haven't been able to find fuel consumption figures for this engine, though.
I am not an engineer, but is it commonly accepted for "engine" to mean "internal combustion" or "petrol"-driven motor?
Can't an engine run on a fuel source other than petroleum based products, or does "engine" imply exactly that?
Thanks,
Not-an-engineer, Stewbacca.
I remember seeing a LONG time ago, a cover story either popsci or popmech, with an opposed cylinder common connecting rod engine. I guess long enough now any patents on it are expired.
There are several engine designs that kick ass. The one I think is best is the MYT engine
http://www.angellabsllc.com/
Others like the external combustion engine and gun engine are quite interesting as well.
Combustion engines are inefficient period. That manufacturers currently use 100-year old designs which make them horribly inefficient, doesn't mean an efficient one even gets close to an electric engine.
The problem is not batteries. The problem is that combustion piles (the actually efficient batteries) are very expensive.
Emissions have been reduced. In fact, a catalytic converter is no longer required on the new Mazda rotary motors. What they did is they run the motor a little rich so that some fuel makes it through the engine (but only a little). After the combustion cycle they add air to the exhaust and burn a second time to ensure all the fuel is burned. The second burn does not generate any power - this is why the fuel efficiency of the motor is lacking. But for the market they are designed for, it does not matter.
Well, actually it does. Fuel economy is important because a car maker's entire product fleet has to average a certain fuel economy level. Wasted fuel is never a good thing, although Mazda's fleet does mostly consist of smaller cars, so that helps.
The exhaust burn was so hot on the system you describe that the exhaust pipes had to be made of a very expensive grade of stainless steel, not usually used for automotive exhaust tubing, which pushed the cost of the car up. The energy required to pump air into the exhaust is also wasteful.
Putting moderation advice in your
If we had the electrical infrastructure to really support them. Decades of fear mongering have left us way behind on our return to safe and clean nuclear power, which could easily handle the increase in power consumption associated with a switch from ICE technology.
How does it feel to be a liar with pants constantly on fire?
I read the article and watched the video, and it's certainly interesting. But what I don't understand is why there aren't more 6-stroke engines out there. In the 6-stroke engine, there's one intake/compression cycle, followed by the usual power cycle, followed by another power cycle that gets power by heating air from the surrounding engine heat. Unlike 4-stroke engines that seem to not get better than about 30% energy efficiency, the 6-strokes can get closer to 50%. They're mechanically a bit more complex, but they needn't be less reliable.
So what's holding us back?
The only viable future for high gasoline mileage internal combustion engines in cars is an impossibly light chassis that won't pass our notably high crash test standards. If you don't believe me, just consider a motorcycle, many of which still run a carburettor and are performance oriented yet achieve a 50+ MPG rating. You can easily get 70+ MPG out of a fuel-economy targeted ultralight car with a highly efficient turbo charged gasoline motor, but the chassis will weigh somewhere near 1000 lbs and will have a crash test rating that is the equivalent of 1 start in the late '60s early '70s rating system (before they added). This will not fare well with the tractor trailers and pickups on the road during the transition. Plus it will be underwhelming to drive one in comparison: extremely slow and unimpressive, very strained feeling, and probably any attempt at spirited driving or any change in road conditions (e.g. traffic jam or lots of braking caused by an old lady who can barely see over the steering wheel in front of you) will likely drop the efficiency several tens of percentage.
Yes opposed piston is an old idea. For a time they were popular for high power density applications, and high efficiency applications (awesome axial flow properties). The reason this old creation fell out of favor is that, for the high-density extreme-efficiency uses fulfilled, there was an all around better replacement: gas turbines.
Gas turbines, however, have their own host of issues which make them unsuitable for all applications. Captone's 30kW microturbine, for example, is itself small, but has a sizable host of systems to support it and deal with the high temperatures, and costs a decent fraction of a million dollars last I checked. It and it's upsized bretheren are found in buses, and the occasional exotic-- see the CMT-380: a car custom built around the sizable & demanding microturbine power plant.
Given the challenges of using gas turbines, EcoMotors opting to dust off and enhance the next best thing makes some sense. There's big opportunity to evolve this already uber efficient two stroke's airflow with modern techniques and tooling. You've pointed out a number of mechanical challenges, but these seem to me considerably more mundane than the challenges of adapting a gas turbine to an every day machine. It may be old tech, but it's considerably better than what powers nearly a billion motorized vehicles on the roads and in the fields today.
I'd say the revival is both well timed and worth pausing to examine. Please feel free to contribute alternative reasons for their having fallen out of favor; would be most interesting to collect more facts or anecdotes.
I have read about this during a couple of previous appearances. It doesn't really improve on ICE efficiency. It is more about packaging and power/weight, which is good. But not revolutionary.
It might be a great Range Extender engine, but I don't see people rushing replace anything with this.
Making H2 from water using solar/wind does not need to be the most efficient method, it lasts as long as the suns fusion reactor.
It's clear that the process will also get better over time. A square meter of earth on a sunny day gets more than a Kw. A couple
of sunny days on an acre of land gets more than a barrel of oils worth of energy. More than 50% of the energy that falls on
desert area typically bounces back into space. The land area of 2 south western states could generate all the energy used
by humans at the moment. We can beam energy from space...
Besides you don't need to use H2 to create electron potential. You can distribute it easily enough, we have it ll over
the place. Getting it live solves a lot of problems. Less storage in vehicles, less mass to store it in vehicles, no
recharge time, no range limits... I ride on electric buses all the time, they climb the steepest hills around here
packed with people.
Electric motors are smaller, lighter and faster than comparable internal combustion engines. No unburned fuel,
no C02 emissions or others that have a negative effect on your living.
We use hydrocarbons because it's more convenient right now. Even when a better solution arrives we will not
change because we already paid for the ICE engines in our cars and want to get the ROI on them. Same
for producing vehicles. Companies want the ROI on plants, people, process. It's clear that we could
build out an electric grid to support EV based transport, it is just not economic quite yet. Vehicles last 50+
years, I see people still driving 60's cars. Even when we start switching it will take 50+ years to see a
major impact. Even then ICE cars will roll on for ages. Jay Leno still drives his steam powered
car on occasion!
The real question is when is it smarter to start changing? In the SF Bay Area the pollution ruins
the hiking during some parts of the summer. That lowers the value of living there, that lowers
the price some people pay for housing... It is a small health issue as well, it takes a long time for
us to get to dealing with activities that kill/damage a very small percentage of people. Also is
it smarter to change first and become the leaders in a new market? Then there is the cost
of buying fuel from overseas and what it does to our freedom here. Do we lower our standard
of living? Less money for health care, education? What about the war's? Would we have cared
at all about Kuwait? How many free people have died for it? Is that smart? What does it
do to our greater wellness? Would you be subject to so many security hassles? Is that
increasing or decreasing your freedom?
France has approximately 31,939 km, or 19,845 miles, of track. The USA has approximately 233,000 miles of track, or over twenty times the track that France has. But the USA is only about 17.7 times the volume of France.
The problem isn't that we haven't put effort into the rail system, the problem is that the continental US is so much larger than France. France is 543,965 sq kilometers; the USA is 9,629,091 square kilometers, or about 17.7 times the volume. By both rail-km and rail-volume, we actually have more track than France.
It just isn't enough -- nine million square kilometers is a huge area to serve, and it is area that developed at a rate that was different than the rate rail expanded. In addition, France's population density is hugely higher than the USA; you have 60 million people, about 110 per sq-km, while we have 300 million, about 31 per sq km (and actually, because we have very high density coasts, that number is way too high for the US interior and way too low for the coasts.)
France and the USA present two entirely different rail problems, and the same strategies can't be used to solve both. It's not practical to set up a rail grid that serves the USA in an equally distributed way -- it wouldn't save money, or fuel - it would lose money and waste fuel.
We would benefit a great deal by moving to dual-track on many routes (the US hiline is one good example... many trains sit and wait for hours in sidings because there is only one track in many locations) and of course, with all that area, hi-speed rail would be lovely - but again, with 17x the area to serve, the amount of funding we're talking about is simply staggering.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
"The B--- S--- Ends, When the Green Light's On"
The problem is always the same with any new technology though. Cost. Even if it has fewer parts, is less costly, and easier to assemble, it will cost more than any current models. At first it will be cost of new equipment and streamlining the process. After they've refined it, it will fall to "Brand Equity". They won't sell it for cheaper when it will undercut current models and they know you'll pay more like you always have.
a normal two stroke has recirculating air in the combustion chamber. when you exhaust you dump some fuel. when you intake you mix with existing fuel/air. air is coming and going from the same general area.
axial flow is the key to opposing piston. the chamber is shuffling a little forwards and backwards in opposed piston design, exposing intake and exhaust ports at opposite ends of the chamber. since air is moving in a net direction, circulation can be much more tightly controlled. there's huge potential to get air behaving according to design and engineering wishes-- the trick, the reason these guys are spending money and this hasnt taken over already, is that this timing is incredibly difficult and exacting. if done right, you get a two stroke that breathes as well as a four stroke. it's just not easy.
opposed piston's been championed for high efficiency and high power density since the 1950's. this is why. given the tooling we now have at our disposal to understand complex factors like airflow and thermal dynamics, it should be no surprise these things are gonna see a huge resurgence.
The idea is to get away from fossil fuels. A pure hydrogen based engine might satisfy that requirement, but, I have read somewhere that pure hydrogen leaking into the atmosphere is a bad thing too. Sorry, can't provide a link and maybe that's wrong, but if correct then storage of hydrogen could be a big issue. (how do I make a paragraph break here? Do I need to enable javascript or something?) Maybe off topic but, what gets me is that all the talk is about rechargeable batteries in the vehicle. Why not something like aluminum oxide batteries that could be exchanged at the equivalent of a filling station when they run out? The driver wouldn't have to wait around and the spent batteries could be efficiently recharged by specialized equipment for re-use.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
what good is a better engine w/ no fuel to drive it
I'd like to ask Ecomotors how can by any means a petroleum engine burn less oil than an EV. This is clearly a research heavily biased toward oil companies as EVs can be recharged on fully renewable energy source such as solar panels or wind turbines, something that petroleum engines, no matter how little oil they burn, will never do. We have had petroleum cars for 100 years. That's enough. It's time for a change and we don't need any kind of alternate fuel engine. They are old and dated by now. If we really get engaged in this feat, lithium batteries will get less and less expensive while solar factories will grow larger and in number (not considering even further breakthrough on the way such as solar satellites). Oil is the past, let it be.
At the end of the day, this is a heat engine. As such, its efficiency is limited by the ratio of the hot and cold temperature reservoirs. It might be better than a conventional piston engine is some respects, but it's not likely to achieve significantly greater efficiency due to fundamental thermodynamic realities. Power density may be higher, but this is a diminishing return. Shaving weight off of a 2500 lb car is good idea, but I don't see it solving our long term energy problems.
I'm really surprised no one has put the pieces together yet.
Yes this is a 2 stroke diesel, and the opposing pistons are really not such a big deal by them selves.
However there's the "Electrically Controlled Turbocharger", which is really a "part-time" electric supercharger.
Why does this change everything? Because you can be 100% certain to flush out all combustion products from the cylinder at all times.
You can eliminate crankcase "aspiration", resonance tuning, and turbo lag and all the attendant problems.
In this context the opposing piston may be just as much an optimization of the valves and ports for this new regime.
To summarize.
2 stroke: high power density
diesel: no unburnt fuel goes out with the exhaust as it is flushed.
electric turbo: no exhaust ever left in cylinder for next cycle, no oil from crankcase etc.
opposing pistons: larger symmetrical ports optimize flushing, balance oscillating mass etc. but have other costs.
Of course it's not that simple. Like all attempts at innovations in a mature technology this is a delicate balancing of trade-offs by someone who thinks they know the game well enough to get away with it. It amazes me how confidently some people here dismiss this in one sentence, while obviously having no clue.
EcoMotors needs to sponsor or provide engines to an endurance racing team. LMPC or LMP1 are probably the best candidate series. The engine has been through lots of prototyping, but it would be proven publicly by endurance racing a highly tuned version. If the engine is as efficient and powerful as they say it is, it will clean up in the Le Mans Prototypes. If it blows up and throws its opposed pistons all over the track every time its out...
Reading comprehension skills lacking?
There will be NO sudden drop-off in the production of oil. It will happen gradually, the price will rise gradually, alternatives will gradually become feasible, and it WILL NOT disrupt lives. This is how all of history has worked, other than asteroids killing dinosaurs.
Infuriate left and right
We definitely need to rid ourselves of the "combustion is bad" mentality which is patently false and really stupid. When we finally get to the point where we can make a hydrocarbon molecule in a 100% carbon-neutral way (either from plants or some solar-powered catalytic process) then I don't see any problems with widespread use of IC engines in many applications. Electricity is nice and all, but simply doesn't cut it in many applications. Batteries just don't hold a candle to a gasoline or diesel molecule. Electric big rigs with batteries certainly aren't practical, and electrified rail can't run everywhere we need to haul stuff. If we had a renewable source of diesel fuel, with the new draconian diesel emissions regs coming into force, the air coming out of a big rig would be cleaner than the air going in, in terms of pollution. That wouldn't be a bad thing at all.
We will run out of oil at some point in the near future. Using less oil moves this point further into the future. But still at some point it will be gone. The alternative is using bio fuels. However, they reduce the area we use for food production. But we should not do that, as we need the food to feed people. As some fertilizer products depend on oil, the output of the agrarian areas will decrease. And even if we can compensate by using animal based fertilizers, the amount necessary to support all these cars out there with bio fuel is far bigger than the cultivatable area. Lately the corn prices in Mexico went sky high, because a lot of corn was used to produce ethanol for cars.
Second, cars waste a lot of energy while they are considerable heavy 1-2 t and they are used to move (in most cases) one person from A to B. While a person weight is 60-120 kg. So you move approx. 8.33 to 33.33 more matter than necessary. The better solution would be
a) To move jobs and people closer together which enables them to walk or you a bike
b) Use public transport system (which need to be improved in capacity and service quality, at least in some areas)
An additional benefit is, you need less space for traffic. You need less resources to build the transportation system (remember 50% or more of the energy used by a car is used to build it).
Most likely you don't like this scenario. In the end you still have to live with it, because there are no viable alternatives. And don't tell me you want to replace the oil based energy by nuclear power plants. Try to do the math and the think about where you want to build that many power plants.
"oh, the oceans are big so that makes it okay to pollute them with garbage" are idiots"
I'd say rather, that anyone who thinks people these days actually say anything like that are idiots.
Yes it's great to reduce pollution, but as the person who responded to you said you are in a world where everything is a dire emergency when in reality real life is more gradual. The oceans are more polluted than they were but have already started (gradually) reducing pollution, which you can do in a reasonable way without putting a bunch of people out of work.
Again, I never said that.
You never had to. It's implied in everything you say. After all, anyone who doesn't agree with you about pollution MUST want to dump raw pollution into the ocean as fast as possible, and is therefore an idiot. When you call everyone else idiots, how are you not saying you are smarter?
Yeah... it's much more comfortable to live in the now, uncaring.
And another example, people are not as afraid as you and are therefore "uncaring". You are a real piece of work. Sadly that work is a large installation piece with a lot of parts.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
All true. I just felt going this far in would be getting excessively off topic, and I didn't want to write a multipage manifesto.
I don't read AC A human right
Engine improvements are great. I don't think the current round of electric vehicles coming out around the world are designed to replace many of the business fleet vehicles. Vehicles which are run throughout the day and over large distances. Currently electric offerings appear to target regular family car usage and commuting.
It's unfortunate that some users are going to be stuck with these noisy and stinky vehicles for a while... while the rest of us enjoys a clean/smooth electric ride. It's a good thing for some companies to continue working on legacy technology like this until we figure out some alternative solutions.
FYI: I have an electric vehicle. I know for a fact that electric vehicles will supplant combustion, not because it is green... but because it is cheaper. Yes, electric is cheaper because there are so few moving parts. Did you know the electric motors are in my wheels? Right in the wheels themselves! No axle, no drive train, no transmission, no alternator, no fuel pumps, no oil filter (cause no oil), no radiator or coolant, no spark plugs, no air filter, no X, no Y, no Z, etc. Seriously... do you think the car companies really want to sell you a car that will cost you 1/10 to maintain and probably last much longer and far cheaper to repair? I'm telling you that part of the "difficulty" in getting electric cars to US markets is the 'difficulty' car companies are having to give up all the huge profits they extract for lease payments they can extol from drivers afraid of all the maintenance costs for combustion engines.
For those of you who are still scared of the idea of switching to electric vehicles... like looking at your needle pointing below E... don't use these sorts of distracting articles as an excuse to hide your fear. Instead start to prepare your mind for the electric car future and know this: you will enjoy it. It can/will save you money.
BTW: We do have enough energy to supply hundreds of years of fuel at our current consumption. Problem is the solution is to turn over all the land like this: http://www.borealbirds.org/tarsands.shtml (just the images). And suppress the land rights of other peoples like this: http://www.iraq-businessnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Baiji-Bayji-oil-refinery-2.jpg. And let our leaders lie via unrelated and horrible tragedies to make it more palatable like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_Commission_Report
I believe it was Lee Iacoca who once said that "electric cars are the wave of the future,,, and always will be".
,,,the exact same things people are still claiming today about electric cars.
While researching a related subject recently, I looked through a LOT of 75-100+ year old automobile and motorcycle literature--newspaper stories, books and periodicals. There's reports from literally a hundred years ago saying how "electrics are going to become popular very soon" and "recent improvements will lead to breakthrougs in storage efficiencies"
And yet even now, 99.99% of everybody is still driving around in non-electric cars, and those that are driving electrics are either paying drastically higher prices per-mile, or dealing with drastically-lower range issues, or both. Nothing about electric cars has changed, other than the government subsidies you can get now (which is just government bureaucrats throwing YOUR tax money away on another unworkable plan).
I generally support polluting the world less, but the "real soon now" song has been sung about electric cars for over a hundred fucking years . I doubt very much that electric cars are likely to be any significant part of that goal.
I myself have often wondered why road-going vehicles do not use cross-head engines. They are standard practice in large ship engines. These can get nearly double the thermal efficiency of a normal piston engine, and are buildable right now with current materials, and current manufacturing techniques.
~
what a sad commentary on the lack of engineering knowledge around here.
if you have the top of the cylinder not fixed, but a piston that also moves, then your lower piston is going to get less power. it will get some fraction of the energy a normal piston with fixed top will get, while the upper piston will get the remainder, less the additional friction losses of the upper piston. In short, nothing added. what bullshit snake oil.
You want power density, get a fucking two stroke diesel
Pushrods are part of the valvetrain.
Regarding compression and tension almost all metals have about the same theoretical strength in both modes.
But compression has issues that tension doesn't. Cross sections have to be larger to prevent buckling.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Pussy foot and you run with no boost, stand on it and you get increased 'effective compression'.
A turbo with an electronically controlled waste gate is a doubly variable compression engine.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
http://www.angellabsllc.com/ Gates may be backing the wrong horse- power. :)
Last year, the Navy spent $424 per gallon to buy 20,055 gallons of algae-based biofuel — a world record price for fuel
See the article here
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
I got modded down as redundant, apparently because I did a "MOD PARENT UP" post and the mod saw that the parent was at 5. However, at the time I posted, it was at 2.
Mods who can't appreciate posting times and what they reveal about relative posting order; or who don't understand how quickly things change on slashdot are unqualified to get mod points. I sure hope a meta-mod gets a crack at the parent to this post.
When piston bores are horizontal, they will wear more at the bottom quadrant due to the weight of the pistons and connecting rods.
Synthetic hytrocarbons? Aren't they toxic and explosive? After all, there are all these warnings about mobile phones could ring and spark off the fuel and how if you drink some petrol you should go to hospital IMMEDIATELY.
Your solution seems to be "avoid batteries because they're dangerous" and move to inflammable, explosive and toxic chemicals not in a battery...
It's easy: car pool!
With two people in the car, the amount of useful work* is doubled!
* = hauling people around, as opposed to hauling a large heavy metal box around
A fundamental problem about cars and energy efficiency is not about the engine, or how to improve its efficiency with 20% or so, it is about how we construct our societies, roads, public and goods transportation. When we build ourselves into a car centric, there is really isn't that much we can do to reduce our energy consumption.
Uh, why is it only drivers changing? If anyone under 25 cannot drive more than 150 miles currently, why would that not change? Is there some sort of physical limit that the under-25 cannot manage to drive 150 miles before exploding the car or something?
PS you're perfectly fair to be a slave to your company who decides whether you get to have your leave. Why are you so afraid of an unstated hypothetical of being a slave to long distance driving?
Is it because you don't like suitable alternatives to owning a big, wasteful car?
They have been making horizontally opposed/boxer engines for decades. The article fails to distinguish the difference between the opoc and a regular boxer engine.
What happened to all the experimental stuff from the 60's and 70's which the oil company's bought off of the vehicle manufacturers and destroyed because they where "too efficient"...I remember there being an experimental Cat system for specific a Oldsmobile in the 60's which ended up getting around 100mpg....this was pulled off the market faster than you could imagine once they realized "a few" hit the open market (apparently the experimental cat system was never meant to go into production as it was "too efficient").
I think the oil company's that destroyed this technology should have to give it back right away because that is literally game changing stuff, like it shouldn't even be a choice they should be forced to cough up any technology's they bought out or destroyed that are relative to this.
I think I would rather have a car with that MYT Engine in it running off Bio,... or hell air even,.... ^_^ http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Massive_Yet_Tiny_(MYT)_Engine#Videos I'm surprised this isn't in anything yet,...
Low emissions, safety features, and amenities of the new cars.