Posted on 08/12/2002 8:16:08 AM PDT by dubyagee
Uh, if you don't mind me asking, what state do you reside in?
Maybe. However, I think the car company approach is going to be to argue to the courts that only the feds have the power to mandate fuel economy standards. Personally, I think they should have financed an initiative so that the voters of California could have slapped this idiotic law down. And they would have.
Spare me your excuses, pillager of the earth. Wear a poncho and strap the briefcase onto the back of the cycle. Rent a car on the days when you need to drive around clients. As for snow and rain, who cares? Sure, a four-wheeled vehicle would be marginally safer for you, but it wouled be substantially more dangerous to everyone else on the road. If the accident rates for four-wheeled vehicles factored in the fatalities they cause, then it would be seen that motorcycles are vastly safer for society.
Nope, the bottom line is that anyone who can get by with a sedan could get by with a motorcycle just as well. I myself, of course, am not such a person—my lifestyle requires both an SUV and a minivan. But I operate on a higher moral plane where I can make such decisions dispassionately. Everyone else scuttling around below me in those rice-burning econoboxes had better have a good excuse for needing four seats and a roof, or else they ought to be driving motorcycles.
Is that enough, or do I actually have to put in the </sarcasm> tag?
Basically, you read these stories about innocent Christians being bombed in Bosnia three days after the Saudis ink some huge contract for American military aircraft, i.e. you begin to get the idea of how some of this money sent off to the islamic world for oil comes back to this country, and the conclusion you start to draw is that SUVs kill Christians.
I mean, if the choice is between feeling sorry for you and your SUV or for those Bosnian Serbs, guess what?
That's aside from me no longer being able to ever see further than the stinking SUV or van one or two cars in front of me in traffic of course, or the fact that all SUV and van drivers appear to attend the same driving school, i.e. "tailgating isn't everything, it's the only thing", and their lights coming in straight on top of people in ordinary cars.
Again, somebody using one of these things the way they're intended to be used, for business, hunting/camping trips etc. etc. causes me no problems; the guy who drives around in traffic in one of them, which appears to be 90% of their owners, should be taxed into tommorrow.
One delightful possibility for a happy ending to the American love affair with the SUV: the same insurance companies which got rid of the "muscle cars" of the mid and late 60s might finally get the message on vans and SUVs and get rid of them for us.
I have the secret right here:
Suppose you want to do 300 mpg, in a vehicle that goes 60 mph. Then a gallon's journey, 300 miles, takes 5 hours. A gallon of gas contains 115000 btu of energy, or about 121 megajoules. This energy is burned in 5 hours, for a rate of 24 MJ/hr, or about .00667 MJ/sec = 6.6 kJ/s =6.6 kW. One horsepower is about 750 Watts, so a 100% efficient 6.6 kW engine would be about 9 hp - about the actual power delivered by a small riding lawnmower.
Now lets consider a man on a bicycle. 10 mph is not too hard to sustain for a rider, about 200 W output. Air resistance goes as the cube of velocity, so going 60 mph would require 63, 216, times the power. 200 x 216 = 43200 W or 43.2 kW. Our hypthetical vehicle needing only 6.6 kW do 60 would have to be about a sixth as hard to push as a man on a bike. Have you ever pushed your car?
The "secret" to such a vehicle is that it would have to have less air resistance than a man on a bike, and not much heavier. Such a vehicle would be extremely light, fragile, and especially unsafe at highway speeds, and would be blown off the road in a good crosswind.
This is the secret that the Big Three have locked up in their safes ... that a vehicle with a lawnmower engine weighing less than a moped and with much less air resistance than a man on a bike, will get 300 mpg.
My bicycle has a 750cc motor on it and gets 50mpg, and it's very unlikely your SUV would keep up with it.
Wrong answer.
Do agree that we need a rail system to make traffic lighter?
"Yeah, that's a grea idea".
Would you use it? "No" Why not? "I would have to leave earlier. It isn't close enough to my building. I have to drop off the kids at school. I have to run errands during lunch or on my way home. It's faster to drive." Or any other multitude of reasons, that other people should get off the road, but not them.
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