Scary article in NY Times about petroleum supply. Very, very scary.

BROOTAL...YOU RULE! HA HAHA.

I'm already packing dynamite under my car.
"Touch those tanks and ....BPHHHhhhhmmmm!"

 

AMEN

 

If the mfrs were racing, they'd be developing newer, better technologies. The few that still race are doing so, but the huge distance between what's seen on the race tracks and what's seen in the showrooms means very little can trickle down.

The C5/C6 Corvette program is a good example. Lots of the development for this great car came from the race track. It has great power, handling, and fuel economy for what it is.

The Acura NSX also featured much race-inspired engineering, and was a great car.

If NASCAR used factory cars (like they used to), we'd see these same cars developing beyond basic aero shape, which is now being minimalized to remove any mfrs advantage. I feel if a mfr comes up with a better idea (be it a more slippery shape, a better engine design, suspension, whatever) they SHOULD have an advantage...it makes for better cars.

Racing made cars better. It's been this way as long as there has been cars...until now.

If we ever see "stock" class racing become popular, we'll see better cars because of it. Without competition, there's no need to improve. Rather, the mfr's are playing to the "demographics" and investing in huge marketing instead of superior engineering. It's working for them, and against us.

Scotch~!

 

I read every post on here, but in the final analysis it will still cost me an arm and a leg to go to The Roundup and that sucks.

And yes I've been a pessimist all my life, I read all the doomsday books (and UFO books too) as a teenager and I recall one of them saying that oil would be gone by the 1980s.

I will however say that it's completely asinine to be taking four children to school in a vehicle the size of a Sherman tank, it's smacks of greed and oneupmanship, it has nothing to do with safety. SUVs are inherently dangerous and no more useful than the station wagons of yore.

I still believe we're asleep when it comes to inventing alternate sources of fuel. I don't think you should wait until the toilet paper's down to it's last sheet before buying some more, you might be left with a dirty ass.

The reason I brought up this topic was because our business and my life have been profoundly affected by the price of gasoline.


When I get to England on Thursday I'll be paying $9.00 a gallon but my rental Ford Ka will get 45 mpg, I hope.

 

diesil is $3.17 in some places on highway 99 between sacramento and turlock cost us $35 to go to the swaps in fuel

 

John, it cost us us $48 in gas to go to a gig in St. Pete and we made $45, now that's a good return on investment.

 

Nads, just give up a pack of smokes a week and put that money in a jar labeled "Round Up".

 

First off, let me say that this is a complicated topic but I have just a few things to add.

Technology has brought much more than better efficiency. I say better efficiency because the average weight of vehicles has been increasing. Therefore, better economy on the engines part will not make better mileage in a heavier car. If you are really motivated, go online and search the gross vehicle weight and epa fuel economys of many different vehicles. Find economy vehicles and performance vehicles. Average the EPA city and highway ratings. Then plot the weight versus average EPA mileage. What you will find is that you get roughly a linear trend, as weight increases fuel economy decreases. You may say that is trivial (the trend is) but the fact that it is roughly linear is not. It means that performance is not the main reason for the poor fuel economy in current cars (average EPA ratings have been staying roughly the same) the weight is.

You have to remember too that emissions have come leaps and bounds since the eightys, and even though your 60's car may get 25MPG it doesn't get the same emissions.

Maybe some of you already know this but I'll explain it anyway. Fuel economy from the EPA is calculated as follows: Driving cycles were developed in the mid seventies by the EPA to mimic the "average" city and highway driving of an american. These driving cycles consist of many speed-load combinations which represent driving a vehicle for a prescribed time. To determine the EPA rating a vehicle is placed on a chassis dyno and is run through the speed-load combination and the fuel economy is calculated. This sounds like a good way to provide a uniform test for determining fuel economy but it has many problems.

The driving cycle is most simply put, outdated. The vehicle is never taken over 55mph (highway), and is also a very non-aggressive (aka low load) cycle. Many cycles have been developed and are used by manufacturers to design cars for a combination of the EPA cycle and a more real-world driving cycle. You may say, why does this matter? well, joe jackoff has no idea about anything and they simply compare the EPA rating to buy the car (which is important to the manufacturer). But the manufacturer doesen't want joe jackoff to get the car and get way worse than the EPA rating because then joe jackoff will not buy one of their cars again. So they meet in the middle designing a car with the best mileage somewhere in the middle.

You also have to remember that people in different places drive cars differentely. Someone in LA has (on average) a different driving style than someone in Alaska. The EPA rates them the same. In reality, new driving cycles shoiuld be created for each area.

There is much more to fuel economy but I will stop here.

Now on to alternative fuel sources....

It seems painfully obvious to me that there is NO ONE SOLUTION TO THIS PROBLEM. A couple of months ago I saw a lecture from a PHD from MIT about the hydrogen economy. For those of you who have been asleep for the last five years, many people (some smart, some not so smart) think that we are going to transition in the next 25-50 years into a society which uses hydrogen to power fuel cells in vehicles and hence drive the whole economy (aka hydrogen economy).

The reasoning is that we need to get away with carbon-based fuels. The thinking here is that we have been pulling hydrocarbons (oil/coal/nat gas) out of the earth and burning them which releases carbon which used to be trapped inside the earth into the atmosphere. Wood is not the same, that follows the idea of the carbon cycle.

So back to the PHD from MIT. I asked her where she thinks we should get the hydrogen from. Her answer was that we would get it from natural gas and electrolysis. So, her solution is that we keep using Natural gas and transform it into hydrogen (nothing new here), which doesn't avoid the carbon problem. Also it makes us dependent on natural gas, not much different than oil. Much of our Natural gas comes from out of the country currently too (canada I think.....not sure though). Electrolysis was her second source (my favorite). So for those of you who don't know, electrolysis is when you use electricity to break apart water and get hydrogen and oxygen.

So, problem number 1 with electrolysis, where does the electricity come from? The gubernator here in CA seems to think that we can put up solar panels at gas stations to "trickle" electricity and break down water. This works as long as there is only one or two cars filling up per day. The fact of the matter is WE USE MORE ENERGY IN GASOLINE PER YEAR IN THIS|COUNTRY THAN OUR POWER PLANTS MAKE. Go to the department of energy's website and look at the amount of gas used annually and the Kw-Hr produced per year and compare (you have to assume an efficiency for the average gasoline engine....I picked 35%).

Another interesting figure to look at is where the energy in the US comes from. The DOE says that in 2003 53% came from coal. Wake-up people, our energy comes from coal. Less than 1% comes from all alternative sources COMBINED. So what people are saying is that we are going in the next 25-50 years double the power output of the country will solar power. I simply don't believe it.

Another interesting thing to think about is that basically you have with hydrogen (when the hydrogen comes from electrolysis) created a less efficient electric car with a possible longer range. If you use electricity to break apart the hydrogen and put it in a tank and make electricity in a hydrogen fuel cell to power an electric motor, you basically have an electric car. Except you lose the energy from the efficiency of breaking apart the water and putting it back together.

Now if you burn the hydrogen, that is different, however even with hydrogens increased LHV, the partial pressure of hydrogen makes it less feasible to run in an engine, especially in a naturally aspirated case.

I think that we will probably have some combination of these technologies. Maybe fuel cells will find a place....one proposed solution is to use them at shipyards. Shipyards are very dirty, diesels run to power the ships at dock. Some yards still use engines which run on COAL DUST.....very dirty, although these problems could also be solved with updating the current engine technology at these yards.

Other technology, like hybrids, may help increase the lifespan of gasoline. HCCI engines have offered higher efficiencies and emissions than current engines (Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition), they are like a cross between a gas and a diesel. Methanol could be a good fuel source, but again we have the problem of the shear amount of energy required would mean that we need to grow corn at an unprecidented rate. Maybe a combination of these will work in the end. Currently I'm afriad that politics and preference will get in the way of actual progress.

Just my two cents.....

 

Too funny, that sums it up perfectly! The Boy Scouts have a motto “Be Prepared”...but I like your dirty ass statement much better.

 

The Model T Ford got over 25 MPG. How far have we really come? The internal combustion technology is there..........sitting on a shelf or taken to the grave with Smokey Yunick.

 

Nads - I can comisserate, it cost $47 to fill up my Buick the other day. And its hard not to be a pessimist when your TV is a firehose of misleading hysteria. The fact of the matter is that gasoline is, by historical standards, still pretty cheap; inflation adjusted, oil was $90+/barrel in 1980. In current $, gas was $4/gallon in the '50s, and $5+ during the height of the OPEC crisis. And a sizeable chunk of the price is "non-market", in state, fed and other taxes; the state of Florida takes a bigger piece of your gasoline bill than Exxon's profit margin. The <i>only</i> reason that gasoline cost 3x the US price in Europe is because of higher tax levies.

The current price of gasoline is due to a lot of factors, such as increased demand from China and SE Asia and the high structural cost of exploring/ extracting/ refining oil; nobody wants oil well or refineries in their neighborhoods, so we've made it expensive to do so.

Long term, tho, the cost of gas is destined to go down. One big component of the current $65/bbl oil price is market speculation -- think "internet bubble." Lots of people have flooded the options market for spot oil with dumb money. The premise is (a) the price will continue to go up, so (b) I'll buy up oil & gasoline options even at insane prices, because (c) I'll find somebody who will pay more in two weeks. Some people have gotten rich using that strategy, which has lured a lot of copycat idiots. Trust me, somebody's going to get burned soon.

 

TV is a firehose os misleading hysteria.......thats funny

do you really think that we aren't going to have to deal with the gas issue in the next 100 years?

 

I meant "of" not os

 

Actually I'm pretty pessimistic, and I don't drink from the firehose. There's plenty of good reasons to be wary of things.

I think the fact that the whole thing becomes a looming issue proves a need for some actual real progression. Sooner is better than later. And speaking in relatives doesn't necessarily make something right.

 

The same way we had to deal with looming whale oil shortage in 1875? I was just a kid then, but that was the main source of lamp oil at the turn of the last century. Based on 1875 usage rates, we were going to run out of whales by 1900. Seriously. Just like in 1975, the world was going to run out of oil by 1990. It was a known fact.

Back then this is how we "dealt with" the looming whale shortage: The price of whale oil went up. A smart guy in the petroleum industry (a tiny little lubrication enterprise in 1875) realized an oil distillate, kerosene, made a dandy and less expensive substitute. The oil industry was born, and the bottom fell out of the whaling industry. No need for expert panels of Whale Scientists, or lamp technology symopsia.

 

Drag cars run on clean burning, infinitely renewable alcohol. Yeah, the mpg isn't as good as gasoline, but when it's cheap and has no emmisions, why will we or the tree huggers care about mpg?

As for ripping on SUV drivers, every one of you who said that should be ashamed--we drive the cars we want, with antiquated technology, that don't burn clean, and that aren't all that safe compared to today's vehicles (dual reservoir master cylinders, seat belts, crush zones, air bags, collapsable steering columns, door latches that don't fly open on impact, seats that come loose or break in a bad impact, etc etc etc). One of you even mentioned that people should have to prove the need to own one?! What the fuck--we don't live in a totalitarian society (yet). Freedom to drive whatever we want and whatever we can afford is what allows us to have our hot rods--and the soccer moms to have SUVs. Once they start limiting SUVs, our rods are right behind.
Don't ever forget that.
-Brad

 

Engine technology is there to make better mileage, but they all have reasons why they are not implemented. Remember that money and not the enviornment drives the manufacturer. As soon as it's profitable, they will make it. Hybrids got to that point, and here they are. Other technology isn't there yet.

Again, it comes down to WEIGHT. now with more composites being within the feasible price range, that may have an effect. There is a point where you can't get anymore out of the IC engine, it's called the carnot efficiency. Engines won't work forever on gasoline.

 

Alcohol still creates all of the bad emissions. Although they can be mostly eliminated just like a gasoline engine.

It isn't cheap, although its' getting more affordable now that gas is more expensive. Yes, it's renewable, but the amount of corn or whatever crop you are using to make it that would have to be grown make it infeasible for the only solution. Did any of you read my first post on this?

The US consumes the equivalent of 5 TRILLION Kw-Hr of energy of gasoline (assuming a 35% efficiency for the IC)

 

Don't touch my Tostito's bitch. Get it corn, over-demand,....ahhhhh, nevermind.....

Inevitably electric of some sort will be the way to go. Its the most efficient work-to-road motor with better work ability. If not, why do they use them in trains. Acceleration is constant, with little energy waste. The biggest hurdle will be acclimating the world to the idea.

I will always have my antiquated IC in my life. Maybe just not my everyday.

 

So what you are saying is that we need a substitute for gasoline, and I agree. But this problem is much more complicated now with the increase in technology than what it was with a simple lamp. And like I said in my first post on this, I don't think there is one simple solution, or at least not yet.

 

Electric motors have infinite starting torque which makes them great for a train. Also try coupling a 5000 Kw (6500 HP roughly did it in my head) engine to the track.

Electric motors have low efficiency at higher speeds. Hence, the HYBRID!!!!!

Use the motor in its' best efficiency range and the IC engine in its' best efficiency, plus throw in the benefit of having the possiblilty for regen braking. I will too also always have at least one IC in something I drive, even if gas is 200 dollars a gallon.

 

Hey Nads, so what was the reason behind the price of oil dropping to $8 a barrel about 7 years ago? Too much oil in the ground? No users? cars too economical? There's about 100 years supply of oil left at present consumption and supply, and the sooner all the 'soccer moms' fuck off and drive electric cars, the more there will be left for us petrolheads to put to good use.

I work for a company that searches for oil, Westerngeco. Part of the Schlumberger empire. We do siesmic surveys on the ocean floor to find reserves of oil, plus measuring how much is left in current operating oil fields. There is a shedload of oil out there, and the current high price is purely and simply the result of a political game played by the powers that be.

 

All I know is......I remember in the '70s when gas went to $0.35 and I had a '68 Roadrunner with a big block and I told my wife "we gotta sell this car!".

We did, and now gas is nearing $3.00 and I wish I had it back.

I'm sure when gas did hit $0.35, all this same BS was going around the coffee shops.

It may seem expensive, but your gonna find a way to buy it and we're not gonna runout in your lifetime, or your kids lifetime, or your grandkids lifetime.

Yeah, life's gonna change, it changes all the time, but it's gonna go on.

 

Blah blah blah. It's a blessed week that goes by on the HAMB without an ethanol or fuel economy thread to push the tech threads lower and lower. I've stopped posting to them, even though my career/job/industry is centered around all this stuff. If I wanted to discuss fuel economy, I'd go to a fuel economy website. Yes, traditional hot rods use gasoline. So do VW's and weedwackers and lawnmowers and snowmobiles and fucking post hole diggers. Right now, I'd rather see a thread on how to paint a post hole digger Blitz Black with Rockabilly Red augur pinstriping than read this train of theories, rants and conspiracy theories that aren't specifically about hot rods, traditional or otherwise.

 

Cheer up, Nads, it's not quite that bad - only about $6.25/US gallon! (~.90p/L)

 

ZZZZZZZZZZZz.

 

I'll convert all mine to alcohol & brew my own....fork 'em. Hell, just the current gas price gives me the urge to do it. One thing's for sure, nothing will keep me from driving. I'm sure the political game of "don't forget -we- dropped the gas prices back" is already perfectly engineered. If you want everyone out to vote hit 'em where it hurts, daily, (in the wallet) for a while....no more apathy come election day, all you need is a "good guy" and it's all over.......then right back up again after the election. Sheeple.

 

I live just outside NY. The Times is a commie piece of shit and they have been in trouble many times " making shit up " They suck......I feel better now....Kidd

 

I can barly afford gas.. I gotta sell everything i have and keep one...











but yea, thatta be the day when i have one car in the garage..

 

Oh shit, I guess I better start looking for some Rochester 2 jets for my chevy. May take 8 or 10 of them to feed it though.