LPG conversion - chicken and egg runaround

And pay £700 a week for a rental house - err no thanks - I'll stick with CLs

Why?

Why?

A Volkswagen Van coupe - haha

Since I am human - what does that make you?

My neighbour paid £11,000 for a caravan he used about twice a year. That's a fair number of weeks even at £700. Even a damp, leaky old caravan costs more than a week in a decent B&B.

You missed the S.

The version of human that doesn't like to carry a house around, snail like ;)

Richard

I'm not interested in bodging my car to use a fuel it wasn't designed to at a significant cost, no. If a fully developed, marketable, functional LPG-only vehicle were demonstrated to be a success in the UK market, then I'd consider it. The past experiments have not resulted in this despite these savings.

Why aren't HGVs using LPG? They could carry large tanks (or a series of smaller ones) and emit less particulates and cost less money to run.

Very good; now let's see it work. Apparently some truck drivers are lobbying the Government for reduced fuel taxes too - I expect the Government to pay about as much attention to them also.

Fundamentally, I am not going to be convinced by LPG conversions, ever, any more than I was convinced by the Jaguar XJ-S with a diesel engine that was for sale a few years back. If I cannot afford to run my car, then I get a smaller, cheaper to run car.

I'd be more convinced if the typical conversion were something along the lines of the Corsa or Smart you mentioned (though the returns are not as great - 60mpg equivalent in a Corsa? Why not just get the Corsa diesel?). However, they are nearly always in big, heavy, luxury petrol vehicles. Pete's van makes sense as the benefits are quite easy to quantify on that mileage, but spending money on LPG so you can 'afford to run' a secondhand Jaguar or similar is like having stilts made because you're too short to fit into the Armani suit you found in Oxfam.

Richard

Hehe yea, I remember when I first started driving, a lad at college was using his dad's Range Rover, and that was on LPG, and he was like "It cost £2.5k - but fuel is hardly taxed" and some smart arse was saying that it would be taxed massively soon. Well, it's what, 8 years on, they've still got that rangey and have done about 100k in it since then. It was 2 years old at the time, and had done 15k when they bought it iirc. Last time I saw it, ooo, a month ago? It had done 121k iirc. Anyone care to work out how much they've saved heh? Anyone wanna work how much they'd have spent extra had they bought the "tax is just around the corner" line back then?

"Quite a lot" - Is the answer to those questions I image.

Your maths there is slightly flawed - for LPG you're not taking the VAT off the 60p/litre price before taking off the duty - doing that, I make it

47.5p/litre for LPG, and a surprisingly similar amount for petrol. Weird - I always thought the base price of LPG was lower, in addition to just the duty benefits.

Yeah, but for low-ish mileage users, something like an A8 TDI costs far too much to make it worthwhile. Like anything, it's availability on the secondhand market that makes big V8 LPG motors attractive.

Like I said though - if they whack it up too much more, people will just go back to diesel. The cost differential isn't that huge as it is. TBH, I was banking on my van doing a good 2-3 more mpg than it actually does - it's barely any better cost-wise, over a diesel, as it is, but I'm still pleased I got it, as it's a good old bulletproof Merc engine without any s**te like turbos, DMFs or expensive commonrail pumps to potentially go wrong, so [touch wood] it should still work out ok. What I need is a imported late shape Sprinter with the 3.5 litre V6 petrol engine - 258bhp, autobox, and about the same mpg as my weeny little 4-pot 143bhp thing. Brand new one of them, 250 litre LPG tank fitted from new....that'd work out quite well.

I don't have kids, but I can think of several reasons off the top of my head why if you had a baby, which would grow into a child, you couldn't have a

924S as your only transport.

Also, I love how you bailed here when that guy out-knowledged you on LPG ;-)

Would you never buy a car without a spare wheel well then normally...?

It's largely a torque curve thing. A petrol (with broadly similar power output to the diesel alternatives) with a manual box is only just bearable compared to the better spread of torque in the diesels. Shifting heavy loads needs the torque much lower down for an easier drive. This is why I want the petrol version of the new Sprinter (which I'd have to import from Indonesia, it seems, to get a RHD one) - it's got a lot more power, and an autobox. Lorries on LPG would also need LPG tanks double the size of the current diesel tanks to get the same range.

Actually, all the tests I read to get the figures were based on recent cars, using a variety of modern, new retrofit kits in combination with Euro 3 compliant cars. Whilst the data doesn't specify if they're sequential or not, one of the primary benefits of SGi is that it's compatible with Euro 3/IV., I figured he was just dickwaving - . Which, to be fair, I find highly comical given that he didn't even know what a

924S was.

And I /do/ have kids. And any reasons you can come up with why you can't have a 924S (or 924, or 944) with children, as opposed to teenagers (who seem quite happy to cram into tiny cars with their mates) is going to be laughed at. All the paraphernalia of modern parenting is useless, wasteful marketing tripe. You need a sling, a small soft bag, and a McLaren umbrella style buggy. Anyone who thinks they need one of those huge off-roader style buggies and huge off-roader style car to go with it is an idiot. They may WANT them, and that's fine, but if they think they NEED them, they need to go visit some less consumer-driven societies and wonder how they still manage to breed without branches of Mothercare and "Baby on Board" stickers.

Richard

A 924S doesn't have ISOFIX points I beleive.

Heh, that brings me back - my mum always used to call Mothercare "Mother don't care".

Not if it was supposed to have one, and the space was taken up with a non-removable (by which I mean "oh, I'd like to put a wheel in there, I'll lift that out" - a non-permanent subwoofer, for example, would be fine) modification.

LPGing the RX8 would remove the boot entirely (or have no range), but it didn't have a spare wheel as standard. If the space has been provided then taken up by the tank, I'm losing interior capacity. Where it has gone is almost unimportant, though I must admit the most pointless LPG trick I've seen is a Mercedes 300TE seat with a full-width LPG cylinder behind the rear seats, bolted in and making the car distinctly impractical (I've seen similar on a Jeep Cherokee).

If it was supposed to have one and didn't, and there was nothing where it should be, I'd probably be fairly impressed by the level of rust. I have been offered a Vauxhall Cavalier Cabrio which was exactly like that; opened the boot, and the boot floor had been cut out!

Richard

And this is relevant how? Is it now the law that your child must be in a child seat secured using ISOFIX points (which aren't on all new cars, let alone on a significant proportion of all cars on the road)? Perhaps one is Not A Good Enough Parent if one does not have a nice brand new car with ISOFIX points and a giant convertible in-car seat that is wider than an adult, needs you to open the doors wide enough to bash the hell out of the car beside you (or park in cripplespaces, because children are a disability and their custodians need Special Treatment).

God help the poor if they breed. They'll never cope.

Richard

Weirdo hehe :-)

I haven't been in a car without ISOFIX points for a long time - barring a VX220 Turbo and a few two seaters - for god knows how long. Why did you try and make it sound like I was saying if you had kids you needed a new car? ISOFIX has been around for a seriously long time...

I don't have kids, or even like kids, but seen as it's the industry standard for car seats, and the alternative is those comedy ones that strap in with the seat belt - yea I think it probably would be some kind of priority? ICBW 'cos I don't have/won't ever have kids, but I imagine one vague priority is making sure the chances of them been mangled in a car wreck are reduced as far as possible? I saw a chav woman in the passenger seat of a Saxo the other week, on the motorway, just holding the baby on her lap... I presume this is unacceptable?

Mmm, makes sense, though a lot of US trucks do use petrol and I'm not seeing huge noises from the US using LPG for long-distance haulage. They don't have the same taxation, though.

Maybe a new hybrid powertrain would do it... LPG-fuelled generator, electric drive (full torque)... I wonder how efficient alternative generators are on LPG, like turbines.

I was thinking about energy production in cars after the mention of a kinetic charging armband on Radio 4, for powering phones. I know a fairly insignificant amount of energy would be produced, but I wonder what the results of sticking that technology onto car suspension components would be - you could get a fair number of generators onto a suspension arm or shock absorber and if they produce enough energy to charge a phone with just one, they probably produce enough to supplement some of the electrical systems on the car.

I should probably check if that idea is patented. Especially since I now consider that the induction technology could be integrated with the dampers... and that the loading (the energy generation must, by some basic physics, come from removing energy from somewhere else) could even be modulated to adjust the behaviour of the dampers...

Richard (yeah, I know, I won't get around to it).

I grew up in an era where it was entirely acceptable for a baby to travel in the back of a small car, in a travelcot (by which I mean a glorified shoebox; seriously, cover it in vinyl, add a strap...), unsecured. What you did, see, is drive with consideration to the fact that you (and other road users) may have something fragile in the car.

Accidents do happen. Accidents happen more frequently the less severe you make the consequences, as people get sloppy.

So my priority with kids (and mine are now teenagers, and live with their mum partly because she did, originally, subscribe to the "modern parenting school of consumer culture") is to protect them within reason without reverting to headless chicken "won't someone think of the children!" destructive tendencies. Just like I don't think every adult near a school is a paedophile, I also don't think anything other than the world's finest cotton wool is required to protect my spawn.

Richard

Blasted double-negatives. That should be, of course, that I don't think they should be wrapped in cotton wool. A few scrapes and bruises are normal issue for kids - a philosophy that appears to have been trained out of recent generations, and permeates and grows to become the need for things like pushchairs that can withstand a full impact from an SUV (and as such, are used as a primitive probing device by mothers in town centres, "testing the road" by simply pushing the contraptions out instead of using the old tried-and-tested method of LOOKING FIRST).

Richard

Oh I agree entirely, kids are far too molly coddled these days - but I think the Isofix thing, really is just a good idea, as it helps protect them when they can't look after themselves heh :) It's just a good way of holding seats in and making them easily removable. I'm not one of these that thinks

1 child = Zafira either heh.