I have come to respect the posters in this discussion room, a more thoughtful, worldly and intellectual lot than most other automotive NG's. I'd like to share an article I read a few months ago which I found as interesting as it is disturbing, and didn't see any reason to doubt anything it says. Like to hear any comments, etc. I submit it here:
things are going to get very interesting once the brl of crude hits $100.....
I posted this in another forum and it is usually misconstrued as a lament about the current rising fuel prices. It's not. Because ironically, I pay no attention the price of fuel, never have; and as I type this I couldn't tell you to the nearest twenty cents how much a gallon of gasoline costs. When I need more I pull into the closest place that sells it and fill up. What I find remarkable is that so much of this finite resource is gobbled up and naturally it's got to run out sometime, but nobody seems to believe it or care. Or they think it's waaay in the future and we'll have plenty of time to convert to something else (as though there were anything to convert TO). Not to mention the events we're likely to see, in our lifetime if not in the next decade, as nations scramble for the last bit, etc.
I'm not sure we'll ever really run out, it will become prohibitively expensive long before that happens. It would be nice if there were some better alternatives out there though.
Yeah, nice! Beautifully naive article. Yes, oil will run out and maybe we will have to work harder for a while, until the next source of cheap energy is found. Make no mistake about it, the only reason we don't have particularly viable alternative sources at this point is that it hasn't been economically feasible to develop them while oil was cheap.
J.
Gomer E> I have come to respect the posters in this discussion room, a more
I don't see quite as bleak of an outlook as the article puts forth, but I also think that the vast majority of people in the world (not just the US) have no idea how much they have come to assume plentiful cheap energy.
Oddly enough, the best thing which can happen is what is happening right now, a steady upward rise in the price of oil. The various alternatives all require that higher prices be paid in order to work. Cheap oil has kept competing technologies at a very small scale.
Consider the fact that about 10% of the energy used in the US is used to heat domestic hot water for our showers, washing machines and dishes. Making water hot is an ideal application for very cheap solar solutions and is an order of magnitude easier than is generating electricity from solar ... yet the vast majority of water is heated with natural gas, heating oil or electricity. Why don't we nail that problem right away????? The suburban homes which the article trashes can easily support solar hot water systems on the roofs. We have one on our house which has been in operation since 1981 and it provides the vast majority of our hot water needs.
There is also no reason for people to be commuting to work in sub-30 mpg vehicles TODAY. The manic rush to bigger vehicles and the modern horsepower wars have simply recreated the crazy automotive days of the
1960s all over again. Whatever lessons were learned in the oil embargos of the 70s (I lived through 'em) have been completely and totally forgotten. CAFE is a joke and has failed. Bring on high prices, at some point people will be forced to notice the big holes in their pockets.Volvo is one of the many companies which has completely engaged in the bigger-faster wars and has trashed fuel economy along the way.
The XC90-V8 should embarass everyone!
John
Though I agree with some of the concepts the author of the Rolling Stone piece puts forward, I think his overall view is foolishly pessimistic. Pretty much everyone can agree that fossil fuels represent a dwindling resource and that much effort is needed, soon if not immediately, to find effective alternatives. That's about where this guy and I part ways.
His future of a neofeudal wasteland in which no one can travel, cities are laid waste and the southwest is abandoned is pretty far-fetched. Reading his article you can see the obvious contempt for the things he predicts will be destroyed, and that his "logic", to sully the word, is purely based on the things he doesn't like getting the justice he feels they deserve. This is perfectly clear in his statements about the south-eastern part of the US, where he basically says the residents are all gun-toting maniacs incapable of working together to solve a common problem.
This article is the worst sort of fear-mongering hyperbole and this man is selling bad ideas wrapped in snide rhetoric as facts. A quick review of his website destroys any hint of credibility the man has. This is the same kind of nonsense we saw in the late 1990s when everyone was oh-so-positive the world was going to end through computer malfunctions, and self-proclaimed experts proclaimed that humanity would be doomed the instant we lost the convenience of a single resource.
-Randolph d'Amore '01 S80 2.9
someone will comw up w/a new source of energy...it is just a matter of time & $$...."the waitin' is the hardest part".......
The story is no doubt interesting, but I've seen politics infuse other car groups through issues like this. It isn't pretty. In the Yahoo Prius group this sort of thing is the norm and it gets in the way of actual car stuff. There are even people there who insist buying a Prius is actually a political statement. Of course, their politics don't match mine at all....
Mike
I dunno, from my perspective Volvo has steadily improved economy, with the exception of them jumping on the SUV bandwagon. As much as I love my 240 and
740, neither gets 30 mpg, the oldest I've dealt with was a 164 that barely got 18 mpg, as far as I know an 850 and some of the other newer ones will get 30+.
I still don't understand the hype around the Prius and similar cars. I'm sure they drive just fine, but the 40 mpg fuel economy just doesn't impress me. My family had a Diesel car in 1982 that got nearly 60 mpg and unlike the vast majority of Diesel cars we got over here it was quite drivable and much less expensive than a hybrid. Also it didn't have several $K worth of toxic batteries to replace in 10 years. Yeah hybrids are technologically neat, but IMHO they're just not a real solution for anything just yet. Perhaps if they came out with a hybrid using a small turbodiesel engine it'd have something to offer.
Didn't those Geo (now Chevy) Metro 3-cylinder gasoline cars get around
50 mpg (with the 5 speed stick)? And I understand they have respectable passing power as well. I don't know about the newer ones--or do they even still make the 3 cyls? A friend of mine had a small fleet of them for his windshield repair business, several of them went over 300k miles--hard to believe for such a high-revving engine. Incidentally, I drove past a business which had two of them for sale a couple months ago. I've wanted to try to snag one for cheap if I could but I didn't have time to stop and check them out that day. Called them the next morning and some one had come in and bought BOTH of them! I'm not so sure I wouldn't have ended up doing the same thing.
A friend of mine up in Canada had a turbo version, it wasn't called a Metro but it was the same thing. I knew someone else with a standard Metro that had over 250K on it, it was certainly not in tiptop condition but it worked well for his pizza delivering for several years. I sure wouldn't want to be in a crash in one of those things though.
Hybrids are in their infancy, so they are not yet something to knock your socks off - at least in mass market models. But economy is only one facet of their magic. The essence of hybridization is to make acceleration performance independent of engine power. After all, using a 250 hp engine to move a passenger car through town is not good design. Since the electric part is most effective at low speeds, the off-the-line performance of a Prius is surprising. Our 2002 (which has less power than the 2004 and later models) goes into wheelspin control mode if I get too enthusiastic on wet streets, or on dry streets when making turns. Even at that, it averages economy in the upper 40s mpg.
Concept and prototype cars show what can be done with the technology even now. The Honda Dualnote concept car
My point was just that, they're in their infancy and not yet very impressive. If they want to impress me they need to make something that gets at least double the economy of current hybrids while still having reasonable performance. The performance of the Diesel Topaz we had in the 80's was not bad at all, especially compared to other Diesel cars.
A $50 lead acid battery replaced every 4-5 years is nothing compared to $4K worth of highly toxic nickel hydride batteries. As for accelerator response, it's adaquate on most cars, more power is always fun but not really nessesary. I drove a 700 Turbo once with a garret and automatic and it's an awful combination, manual gearbox is the *only* way to go with those big old Garrett turbos, the newer Mitsubishi and smaller Garretts are much more tolerable but even those are a little sluggish with a slushbox. Mine with Mits turbo and manual tranny has no perceptible turbo lag.
That's definitely the big problem with hybrids. What's going to happen when the multi-thousand dollar battery packs start to fail out of warranty? We know the price and durability of that type of battery in laptop computers, which you would think would be an easier life (relatively constant power drain, no temperature extremes) than in automotive applications. It's not like you could ignore the bad battery, as it's needed to start the car (which presumably would still shut down every time you came to a stop), and since they all operate at well over 100 volts, I wouldn't want to be messing about with booster cables either!
The track record has been good so far - AFAIK there has been no hybrid battery failure in a Prius except from outside damage (one battery ECU went insane and overcharged the battery, one had a long screw run into it when a stereo installer got careless.) The founder of the Yahoo Prius group has
174K miles on his the last I saw, and although he is on his third set of shocks the battery is still going strong. There is a diagnostic screen available for those who know how to access it that gives cell voltage for each cell. Considering there are already a number of batteries available from wrecked Priuses and the cells are individually replaceable, I don't forsee that anybody is likely to buy a new one. Toyota does pay a $200 bounty for any that are returned for recycling.I was apprehensive at first, too. I did a lot of research before making the leap 3 years ago. When I considered the 8 year, 100K mile hybrid system warranty I realized there are at least a half dozen parts in any modern car that may be worth more to replace than the car is worth at that point. And the battery is not only designed for longevity (unlike portable electronics batteries, which are designed for rapid charge, high capacity and a short, spectacular existence), it is also coddled. The state-of-charge is kept within very conservative limits - 40% to 80% charge IIRC - and the charging and discharge voltages and currents are carefully controlled. The battery pack has a cooling fan and temperature warnings that restrict the charge/discharge rate. The battery is also smaller than you might think; with the steel case the one behind the rear seat back in our early Prius weighs 110 lbs.
If you Google "prius battery fail" you will get nearly 12000 hits. Looking through them you will see most are speculation about when they will fail, how much it would cost to repair them, what will happen.... I doubt there is even one of them about a battery actually failing. If you Google "honda transmission fail" you will get over 60000 hits, mostly about why the transmissions fail, what to do about the failed transmissions.... And the transmissions in question (automatics for 6 cylinder engines in a particular range of recent model years) are about the same price as a brand new battery pack for a Prius.
Mike
I agree with most of what you say. But the essential feature of a hybrid for city driving is regenerative braking. Capturing the car's kinetic energy and then restoring it as the car accelerates back up to speed is what allows high city MPG. And it shouldn't take a very large battery for that.
Add me to the list of people who would love to see a Diesel/electric hybrid.
Just out of curiosity, what's the fuel efficiency of an aircraft carrier? How about a fleet of them? What about fighter jet? What about a fleet of aircraft carriers full of fighter jets?
Any chance we'll see any of those go hybrid?
Just wondering. blurp
On Wed, 17 Aug 2005 11:54:41 -0400, the illustrious "L David Matheny" favored us with the following prose:
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