Reports on LinuxMCE are less than wonderful. But then I'm biased having been using XBMC on Linux for months now. Folsk i've spoken to who have tried LinuxMCEhad trouble getting it running much less doing what they wanted - it's much more involved I'm afraid.
Umm, some of what you've said here doesn't jive. Performance from a diesel isn't an issue if geared properly. They may have a more limited RPM range but do you REALLY need to rev past 4K when properly geared? As for highway MPG - throttle plates are NOT wide open on a gas engine - pumping losses are an issue. Some of the new electric throttles might solve this issue with some creative tricks to run very lean and wide open but if this is being done it's not the majority. Meanwhile diesels have NO throttle plate to contend with and get their best MPG on the highway at steady state speeds. For pokey commuting around town I'd take a hybrid, for steady state highway go diesel.
Actually in a lower compression engine premium gas would get LESS MPG since cylinder pressure would be lower due to th delayed burn. Detonation running regular would be an indication that a higher grade was needed but if it's truly low compression then that shouldn't have been occurring.
Any modern car with EFI shuts down the injectors during engine braking. As RPMs drop to a level right around idle the injectors begin firing again - you can sometimes feel it. Perhaps you could try engine braking down to near idle to see if you feel the injectors kick in?
Even if your car doesn't do it the VAST majority of EFI cars on the road DO do it. Doesn't save fuel IMO but perhaps it saves brake pads. the throttle position sensor and tach input are what EFI cars use to do this.
Not true, VW has been selling diesels here for YEARS - mine is a 2006. VW stopped selling them for one year while the fuel was switched over - the 07 model year. Most other manufacturers did the same. Have zero issues with my VW, her VW, nor have my friends had many issues with their diesels. You want to try that again?
BTW, Mercedes used to sell diesel here and Jeep had one too for awhile. Lots of pickups have them for towing. IMO you can thank GM's crappy converted V8s for destroying the rep of diesel in this country.
Diesel IS more expensive but each gallon has 30% more energy. That means that it gets higher MPG and while it's a tradeoff to pay more it's not a bad one. I get to go something like 560miles on a tank while owners of gas cars with similar sized tanks get WAY less. I fill up once or twice a month instead of weekly now and while it costs more I'm going further and the car is comfortable to drive.
Diesel engines DO have a sweetspot they like to run in, not sure that is always top RPM. So far as I know nothing with a CVT transmission has been introduced to utilize this as the torque of a diesel would probably trash that trans. (lol) A diesel electric could do this but I've not seen one of those either and am pretty sure this new vehicle isn't that either:-( Diesel electric is how trains and I think some ships use diesel.
Sure, done this - smell nothing. In fact unless I stomp on it forcing a downshift and high RPMs I never see or smell anything. Okay, COLD morning starts it smells a bit but only until I'm moving and it warms a touch.
Newer diesels with roper A/F mixes do nto put out clouds of smoke, do not smell (thank you catalytic), and if you ran them on BioDiesel would actually smell GOOD. When I got my car I did actually get down and smell the exhaust while it was idling hot, no stink - I was impressed! Oh and my bumper doesn't blacken either - this is a 2006 TDI Jetta BTW....
Answer: No it doesn't. BioDiesel is still being "tested" by many manufacturers and companies like VW will not approve the vehicle running on anything more than 10% BD. They claim some engine issues can arise and there are certainly some potential viscosity issues. BD is great stuff I think but with the complexity of newer diesels it's not quite the slam dunk it sounds like on paper. More testing is apparently needed but companies do not seem to be real interested in doing it - at least VW doesn't.
That said - Ford is being stupid. I drive a TDI now and have no issues with the fact that it's a diesel. If VW can do it, and sell out of their diesels!!, then why can Ford not do it? Morons....
Winter might have a different mix of fuel too, things to keep it from gelling perhaps?
If you have a MFD display that can show average miles you ought to have it showing instant and trip miles too - which option package you have? We have a 1 and a 2 here, mine is the 2 with buttons on wheel.
The speedo issue is known, grr! Lots of excuses from VW about it. The odo is accurate though and good for the mileage calcs.
Yup, this one is an 06 - the plus being I do not have to do the mod to allow added fuel in there nor push a button to vent when I fill:-) It's heavier though and saddled with more emissions, oh well. I've heard that there are adapters to allow the big pumps to work with the smaller holes on car tanks but never seen one for sale. I'd like to have one just in case I'm forced to fill from a diesel depot...
The DSG I have shouldn't impact mileage but I find it does, I think the fact that you can keep the travel completely steady must be helping a great deal. I sincerely hope you are not calculating mileage based on the VFD though as I've found it to read nearly 15% wrong on two different cars. If you've got an 06 the speedo' is off too unless it was one of the later ones with 07 gizmos. VW knows about the issue, their fix is B.S. last I heard. I wait till I'm on fumes to fill mine, already cost me one fuel filter and I'm under 30K miles. Still breaking in I'm sure so that could also be a part of the issue. I do drop in to neutral, I don't race around anywhere, and I look way ahead to decide if I should coast - I keep a close eye on the instant MPG. The MPG error can be fixed with a VAGCOM BTW, I did that on one car but not the other yet. 15% is the max adjustment plus or minus. TDIclub or VWvortex will have details.
Cooler weather should have higher MPG - there's more oxygen in the air and thus denser and you aren't running the MPG sucking A/C. The A/C takes a pretty good chunk out of the mileage I've found but when it's 90 and humid I'm using it! I do shit manually from time to time and it seems to help but I get lazy. My first "automatic" driver and I kind of like it, no torque converter is a plus!
Bigger doesn't always mean safer, any SUV owner who has found themselves rolled over on their roof can attest to that. Aluminum structures do not have to be frail and in fact many if not most cars today are DESIGNED to deform in an accident in order to absorb energy rather than transmit it to the passengers inside. That is where alloys come into play and I have little doubt that the engineers building the car were aware of the properties that aluminum exhibits. The FACT that many modern cars have suspension components made from aluminum ought to tell you something about it's strength.
Take a look at the crash data for the SMART cars - to look at them and you would think that it's a deathtrap right? Just common sense right? Well, apparently they do not do too badly, especially in a side impact. That is a poor handling low mass vehicle if there ever was one. I used to own a Chevy Sprint and was rear ended in it at something approaching a 50MPH speed. I was punted through an intersection, seat collapsed flat back, and it took me awhile to find the brakes. I sprained a few things but the car was fine and even drivable - unlike the car that had impacted me. Again, low mass poor handling and I drove away while the two other cars involved had to be taken away on flatbeds.
Ditto, finding diesel is not a big deal. The fact that I can go 550+ miles on a tank sort of makes looking for a station no big deal either. By the time the light goes on I still have 75miles or more left in the tank and there are 4 stations along my commute that sell it if not more. Trips are likewise not a big deal although encountering those high volume nozzles that will not fit my tank is a PITA
One year, 2007. The TDI was sold by VW right up until December 31st as an 06 model even as the other Jetta were sold as 07s. Now in 08 they are brining back the TDI. What years were you thinking of?
I owned a Metro for several years - it can and does go faster than 65MPH I assure you! At about 80 it gets a little scary however:-)
42MPG every day in that thing. I beat the living snot out of it, never changed the oil (it got the synthetic from oil changes in other cars - when oil light came on I gave it a quart or two), and never changed the plugs. This car was an all time champ - beat to heck and still kept ticking. I even got rearended HARD in it without hardly a scratch - although the seat collapsed backwards.
This was a 3banger model with a carb too, one of the later EFI ones would have probably done even better and been easier to keep running (lol). These things make some of today's hybrids look like jokes IMO. I miss that car - sold it for what I bought it for 2 years later - needed an exhaust system and I was lazy. Tires cost all of $40 apiece for it too....
Trip computer in my TDI Jetta also overestimates by 14% - and is in our second TDI as well. On top of that the speedometer also overestimates by a good 10MPH as you get to the upper end of highway speeds. This verified by GPS and by a dyno. VW has a way to adjust the MPG computer and I've done it using a VAGCOM on one of our cars, the speedo on the other hand isn't so easily fixed and it is NOT a linear error either. That error is in the cluster and VWs fix effects the ECU so your Odometer ends up being off some if you use their fix
So anyway, no one should simply just trust the MPG numbers or hell even the speedo in some cars it seems Mind you every other car I own and have checked has had a speedo that was accurate to about 2mph - grr!
OLDER TDI Jetta got 40-50, the current crop gets closer to 30-40. I say this with 2 DSG 06 models at home that get driven in a variety of conditions with mine getting more MPG than her's because I pay attention to my driving more. And I never heard a VW rep tell anyone they would be getting 50MPG, someone pulled that out of their ass or was talking about an older model that was both lighter and saddled with fewer emissions.
That's not 100% of what occurred. They changed the formulation of the fuel which required different emission systems. ALL of the TDI vehicles were pulled after 06 and are just now coming back. The Golf was offered in 06 as TDI, do not think it has come back YET now in 08 but it is supposed to last I heard. They simply skipped 07 is all
Odd, I have the same model year Jetta and seldom get more than 560 per tank. How the hell are you getting that kind of MPG? Straight as a string highway driving at 50MPH non-stop or something?! Stick or DSG? I'm driving the DSG but final drive numbers are about the same and I'm in 6th as often as possible.
Personally I like being able to not fill up for 2weeks or more at a time and while the payback has gone down some since diesel prices skyrocketed I don't regret my purchase.
Oh and to the grandparent - the double clutch stuff isn't exclusive to VW. Porsche and others use it too.
SlySoft leveraged the research of others and then went on to do a great deal of their own. They constantly update their product and when new BD+ crypto hits, fairly frequently, they work around it ASAP to provide updates.
While their software doesn't allow you to directly play the files on Linux it DOES allow you to get access to the files sans crypto.
Sadly no one has provided a one step DVDShrink like app to do anything with these files. No one has come up with an "open" player that can do menus etc. either:( So, folks such as myself end up using tools like eac3to to pull the content off into containers MKV for playback. I happen to like to compress the files for better storage and I use X264 to do it along with meGUI.
In the end I have VERY high quality files that play GREAT on Linux using XBMC. It's not the same since I lose the extra, the menus, and other things but until people write something to decode all that I am stuck:( Ripping\storing still beats having to have a zillion pieces of media on a rack in my living room though!
Funny, I have a 3G iPhone\iPod and not a single song on it was bought from the iTunes store. All of the music on it was ripped from CDs (many bought used), or purchased from Amazon where there's no DRM. For the first time in about 8 years the music industry got some of my cash - all for non-DRM music. I for one am voting with my wallet and skipping iTunes to avoid their DRM...
There is more than one alloy of titanium. Some of them are REALLY hard and should NOT be used for rings, others are not so bad and can still be cut. A worry, aside from cutting, is crushing! If you have a really hard alloy and the finger gets squished it can be a REAL problem when no one can cut it:(
Take a look at XBMC for Linux. It's not quite as simple as what you have described but with a little work it provides a TERRIFIC interface for DVD collections. Will handle music, pictures, and downloaded video too.
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Reports on LinuxMCE are less than wonderful. But then I'm biased having been using XBMC on Linux for months now. Folsk i've spoken to who have tried LinuxMCEhad trouble getting it running much less doing what they wanted - it's much more involved I'm afraid.
Umm, some of what you've said here doesn't jive. Performance from a diesel isn't an issue if geared properly. They may have a more limited RPM range but do you REALLY need to rev past 4K when properly geared? As for highway MPG - throttle plates are NOT wide open on a gas engine - pumping losses are an issue. Some of the new electric throttles might solve this issue with some creative tricks to run very lean and wide open but if this is being done it's not the majority. Meanwhile diesels have NO throttle plate to contend with and get their best MPG on the highway at steady state speeds. For pokey commuting around town I'd take a hybrid, for steady state highway go diesel.
Actually in a lower compression engine premium gas would get LESS MPG since cylinder pressure would be lower due to th delayed burn. Detonation running regular would be an indication that a higher grade was needed but if it's truly low compression then that shouldn't have been occurring.
I smell fish too...
Any modern car with EFI shuts down the injectors during engine braking. As RPMs drop to a level right around idle the injectors begin firing again - you can sometimes feel it. Perhaps you could try engine braking down to near idle to see if you feel the injectors kick in?
Even if your car doesn't do it the VAST majority of EFI cars on the road DO do it. Doesn't save fuel IMO but perhaps it saves brake pads. the throttle position sensor and tach input are what EFI cars use to do this.
Not true, VW has been selling diesels here for YEARS - mine is a 2006. VW stopped selling them for one year while the fuel was switched over - the 07 model year. Most other manufacturers did the same. Have zero issues with my VW, her VW, nor have my friends had many issues with their diesels. You want to try that again?
BTW, Mercedes used to sell diesel here and Jeep had one too for awhile. Lots of pickups have them for towing. IMO you can thank GM's crappy converted V8s for destroying the rep of diesel in this country.
Diesel IS more expensive but each gallon has 30% more energy. That means that it gets higher MPG and while it's a tradeoff to pay more it's not a bad one. I get to go something like 560miles on a tank while owners of gas cars with similar sized tanks get WAY less. I fill up once or twice a month instead of weekly now and while it costs more I'm going further and the car is comfortable to drive.
Diesel engines DO have a sweetspot they like to run in, not sure that is always top RPM. So far as I know nothing with a CVT transmission has been introduced to utilize this as the torque of a diesel would probably trash that trans. (lol) A diesel electric could do this but I've not seen one of those either and am pretty sure this new vehicle isn't that either :-( Diesel electric is how trains and I think some ships use diesel.
Sure, done this - smell nothing. In fact unless I stomp on it forcing a downshift and high RPMs I never see or smell anything. Okay, COLD morning starts it smells a bit but only until I'm moving and it warms a touch.
Newer diesels with roper A/F mixes do nto put out clouds of smoke, do not smell (thank you catalytic), and if you ran them on BioDiesel would actually smell GOOD. When I got my car I did actually get down and smell the exhaust while it was idling hot, no stink - I was impressed! Oh and my bumper doesn't blacken either - this is a 2006 TDI Jetta BTW....
Answer: No it doesn't. BioDiesel is still being "tested" by many manufacturers and companies like VW will not approve the vehicle running on anything more than 10% BD. They claim some engine issues can arise and there are certainly some potential viscosity issues. BD is great stuff I think but with the complexity of newer diesels it's not quite the slam dunk it sounds like on paper. More testing is apparently needed but companies do not seem to be real interested in doing it - at least VW doesn't.
That said - Ford is being stupid. I drive a TDI now and have no issues with the fact that it's a diesel. If VW can do it, and sell out of their diesels!!, then why can Ford not do it? Morons....
Winter might have a different mix of fuel too, things to keep it from gelling perhaps?
If you have a MFD display that can show average miles you ought to have it showing instant and trip miles too - which option package you have? We have a 1 and a 2 here, mine is the 2 with buttons on wheel.
The speedo issue is known, grr! Lots of excuses from VW about it. The odo is accurate though and good for the mileage calcs.
Yup, this one is an 06 - the plus being I do not have to do the mod to allow added fuel in there nor push a button to vent when I fill :-) It's heavier though and saddled with more emissions, oh well. I've heard that there are adapters to allow the big pumps to work with the smaller holes on car tanks but never seen one for sale. I'd like to have one just in case I'm forced to fill from a diesel depot...
The DSG I have shouldn't impact mileage but I find it does, I think the fact that you can keep the travel completely steady must be helping a great deal. I sincerely hope you are not calculating mileage based on the VFD though as I've found it to read nearly 15% wrong on two different cars. If you've got an 06 the speedo' is off too unless it was one of the later ones with 07 gizmos. VW knows about the issue, their fix is B.S. last I heard. I wait till I'm on fumes to fill mine, already cost me one fuel filter and I'm under 30K miles. Still breaking in I'm sure so that could also be a part of the issue. I do drop in to neutral, I don't race around anywhere, and I look way ahead to decide if I should coast - I keep a close eye on the instant MPG. The MPG error can be fixed with a VAGCOM BTW, I did that on one car but not the other yet. 15% is the max adjustment plus or minus. TDIclub or VWvortex will have details.
Cooler weather should have higher MPG - there's more oxygen in the air and thus denser and you aren't running the MPG sucking A/C. The A/C takes a pretty good chunk out of the mileage I've found but when it's 90 and humid I'm using it! I do shit manually from time to time and it seems to help but I get lazy. My first "automatic" driver and I kind of like it, no torque converter is a plus!
Bigger doesn't always mean safer, any SUV owner who has found themselves rolled over on their roof can attest to that. Aluminum structures do not have to be frail and in fact many if not most cars today are DESIGNED to deform in an accident in order to absorb energy rather than transmit it to the passengers inside. That is where alloys come into play and I have little doubt that the engineers building the car were aware of the properties that aluminum exhibits. The FACT that many modern cars have suspension components made from aluminum ought to tell you something about it's strength.
Take a look at the crash data for the SMART cars - to look at them and you would think that it's a deathtrap right? Just common sense right? Well, apparently they do not do too badly, especially in a side impact. That is a poor handling low mass vehicle if there ever was one. I used to own a Chevy Sprint and was rear ended in it at something approaching a 50MPH speed. I was punted through an intersection, seat collapsed flat back, and it took me awhile to find the brakes. I sprained a few things but the car was fine and even drivable - unlike the car that had impacted me. Again, low mass poor handling and I drove away while the two other cars involved had to be taken away on flatbeds.
More tickets of course!
Ditto, finding diesel is not a big deal. The fact that I can go 550+ miles on a tank sort of makes looking for a station no big deal either. By the time the light goes on I still have 75miles or more left in the tank and there are 4 stations along my commute that sell it if not more. Trips are likewise not a big deal although encountering those high volume nozzles that will not fit my tank is a PITA
One year, 2007. The TDI was sold by VW right up until December 31st as an 06 model even as the other Jetta were sold as 07s. Now in 08 they are brining back the TDI. What years were you thinking of?
I owned a Metro for several years - it can and does go faster than 65MPH I assure you! At about 80 it gets a little scary however :-)
42MPG every day in that thing. I beat the living snot out of it, never changed the oil (it got the synthetic from oil changes in other cars - when oil light came on I gave it a quart or two), and never changed the plugs. This car was an all time champ - beat to heck and still kept ticking. I even got rearended HARD in it without hardly a scratch - although the seat collapsed backwards.
This was a 3banger model with a carb too, one of the later EFI ones would have probably done even better and been easier to keep running (lol). These things make some of today's hybrids look like jokes IMO. I miss that car - sold it for what I bought it for 2 years later - needed an exhaust system and I was lazy. Tires cost all of $40 apiece for it too....
Trip computer in my TDI Jetta also overestimates by 14% - and is in our second TDI as well. On top of that the speedometer also overestimates by a good 10MPH as you get to the upper end of highway speeds. This verified by GPS and by a dyno. VW has a way to adjust the MPG computer and I've done it using a VAGCOM on one of our cars, the speedo on the other hand isn't so easily fixed and it is NOT a linear error either. That error is in the cluster and VWs fix effects the ECU so your Odometer ends up being off some if you use their fix
So anyway, no one should simply just trust the MPG numbers or hell even the speedo in some cars it seems Mind you every other car I own and have checked has had a speedo that was accurate to about 2mph - grr!
Do you have a source reference for this claim? Engineered correctly the aluminum shouldn't be an issue.
OLDER TDI Jetta got 40-50, the current crop gets closer to 30-40. I say this with 2 DSG 06 models at home that get driven in a variety of conditions with mine getting more MPG than her's because I pay attention to my driving more. And I never heard a VW rep tell anyone they would be getting 50MPG, someone pulled that out of their ass or was talking about an older model that was both lighter and saddled with fewer emissions.
That's not 100% of what occurred. They changed the formulation of the fuel which required different emission systems. ALL of the TDI vehicles were pulled after 06 and are just now coming back. The Golf was offered in 06 as TDI, do not think it has come back YET now in 08 but it is supposed to last I heard. They simply skipped 07 is all
Odd, I have the same model year Jetta and seldom get more than 560 per tank. How the hell are you getting that kind of MPG? Straight as a string highway driving at 50MPH non-stop or something?! Stick or DSG? I'm driving the DSG but final drive numbers are about the same and I'm in 6th as often as possible.
Personally I like being able to not fill up for 2weeks or more at a time and while the payback has gone down some since diesel prices skyrocketed I don't regret my purchase.
Oh and to the grandparent - the double clutch stuff isn't exclusive to VW. Porsche and others use it too.
SlySoft leveraged the research of others and then went on to do a great deal of their own. They constantly update their product and when new BD+ crypto hits, fairly frequently, they work around it ASAP to provide updates.
While their software doesn't allow you to directly play the files on Linux it DOES allow you to get access to the files sans crypto.
Sadly no one has provided a one step DVDShrink like app to do anything with these files. No one has come up with an "open" player that can do menus etc. either :( So, folks such as myself end up using tools like eac3to to pull the content off into containers MKV for playback. I happen to like to compress the files for better storage and I use X264 to do it along with meGUI.
In the end I have VERY high quality files that play GREAT on Linux using XBMC. It's not the same since I lose the extra, the menus, and other things but until people write something to decode all that I am stuck :( Ripping\storing still beats having to have a zillion pieces of media on a rack in my living room though!
Funny, I have a 3G iPhone\iPod and not a single song on it was bought from the iTunes store. All of the music on it was ripped from CDs (many bought used), or purchased from Amazon where there's no DRM. For the first time in about 8 years the music industry got some of my cash - all for non-DRM music. I for one am voting with my wallet and skipping iTunes to avoid their DRM...
There is more than one alloy of titanium. Some of them are REALLY hard and should NOT be used for rings, others are not so bad and can still be cut. A worry, aside from cutting, is crushing! If you have a really hard alloy and the finger gets squished it can be a REAL problem when no one can cut it :(
Take a look at XBMC for Linux. It's not quite as simple as what you have described but with a little work it provides a TERRIFIC interface for DVD collections. Will handle music, pictures, and downloaded video too.