Maybe someday a company will make a reliable diesel that'll run on used vegetable oil and/or biomass/biodiesel. Oh, wait, they already have! Mine cost me $100!
Posted on 11/30/2008 9:19:37 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
I agree.
It would probably take longer to switch 50% of the personal transportation fleet to diesel anyway.
Yes, unless we are going to have a mass exportation of used cars, our domestic fleet is not going to change quickly.
Maybe someday a company will make a reliable diesel that'll run on used vegetable oil and/or biomass/biodiesel. Oh, wait, they already have! Mine cost me $100!
We’ve talked a bit about them. He took a few seminars on them, and says they are “live” all the time. He says huge current cirulates around in them all the time, and that you have to get a big pair of linemans gloves and pull out some connector to really kill the power.
He says it will even run the currant in the middle of the night when you are asleep, and the amount of currant that it runs can easily kill you. He is afraid of them.
He has more confidence in the developing hydrogen technology than the current hybrids.
.... and that cuts down trees and kills spotted owls.
Actually... decent, reliable port fuel injection was being installed on cars as early as 1975 - as were reliable overdrive transmissions. They just weren’t being installed on American cars, the Big Three having decided that their answer would be detuned engines running tiny carbs, lousy cams, no overdrive transmissions, and super tall rear gears. It would take the US makers a decade to FINALLY give in and adopt those two innovations, and another decade to finally implement them properly.
As for user-friendliness in the home garage: Sorry, when it takes the average guy longer to figure out what setting his 70 Firebird’s carb should have after reassembling the engine and putting the carb on than it does for me to take a multimeter to any Bosch L-Jet system to see if the sensors aren’t working, then that argument is so much Bravo Sierra. Carbs are *harder* to diagnose and work on than EFI, especially after the advent of OBD-II and other “where does it hurt” systems.
Big auto has major problems. The first is the union. The second is the dealer agreements. Until they shed themselves of both of those, they are done for. They can not compete, they can not retool, they will continue to lose money on every car they make.
from the year 2000:
Great Grandson of Henry Ford: “15 months to end of Gas Powered Cars”
Source: Daily Express Online
Published: 10/6/00 Author: John Ingham (Environmwnt Editor)
Posted on 10/06/2000 12:54:11 PDT by scouse
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a39de2de3291f.htm
my main bitch about 'user-friendly' is needing a hook whenever an electronic gadget fails, whereas my old school stuff can be fixed on the side of the road or limped home, the new stuff hasta wait for the parts to be shipped from Indonesia...
the new systems are great when they work, but most folks dont even know what a multimeter is, and the 'where does it hurt' ability doesnt do me any good when every dumbass in town has the Autozone free scan done and deems an O2 sensor to be the 'fix'...
thanks again for the info, i always look fer your posts re: auto tech...
Sweet!
Except it wasn’t the Japanese that went EFI early on. It was the Europeans! Mercedes, BMW, Jaguar, VW - all of them had at least overdrive-equipped manuals by the mid-60s or early 70s, with electronic fuel injection starting around 1970 and becoming truly reliable with a clear performance and reliability advantage over carbs in 1974 with the advent of L-Jetronic. Overdrive transmissions also started appearing about this time in European vehicles.
Side note: Bosch made the first practical EFI with the D-Jetronic system in 1967 - but it was based off of abandoned *Bendix* patents and designs from the 1950s when US companies tried to make it work and failed miserably. Bosch picked up the dropped Bendix project, dusted it off, paid Bendix for it, and ran with it. The rest is history.
The Japanese also went down the overdrive transmission path that the Europeans did, but they explored another route besides EFI (which most people don’t know about). The Japanese put EFI on their top models starting in the 70s and 80s, but they also had electronic and computer controlled carbs starting in the 1970s and running all the way until the mid 90s. They got acceptable performance and excellent reliability from this method at reduced cost over EFI; however, ever tightening emissions standards eventually killed it off - but this was another way the Big Three could have gone, an interim step between lame “dumb” carbs and full up EFI... and didn’t.
Regarding your “bitching”: If I plopped you down in front of my ex-1966 E-Type and told you that it had just stopped running, would you be able to fix it without a book? How about a 1965 Porsche 911? Or a 1978 Ferrari 308? All of these are “conventional” carbed and ignition-systemed vehicles, so you shouldn’t need a book, right? (If you say yes and you have no experience with those systems used on those cars, I will keep you the HELL away from my cars with a cattle prod if I have to, because they’re NOT like GMs or Fords.)
All systems need documentation. If I stuck you in front of a 1970 Firebird 400 with a dual plane dual quad intake bearing twin Edelbrock 1406 carburetors, would you *instantly* know how to tune and synch those two? Probably not. Learning EFI is little different from learning, say, how a car with 3-6 Webers or Hitachi carbs works - you have to start over. And, by the way, back in the 80s when EFI was new and self-diagnostics weren’t quite there, most makers actually put the test documentation IN THE OWNER’S MANUAL. You know, the one you’re supposed to keep in the car? That one? :P
I found it easier to get parts for my Nissan Pathfinder than I did for my “conventional” Jeep Wagoneer when it had a Motorcraft carb on top of the AMC 360 V8. Cheaper, too. Stuff being shipped from Indonesia seems to be more and more the province of the old domestic stuff. I can’t think of a single critical part that I’ve had to have shipped in from Asia for any of my Japanese vehicles over the last 10-15 years.
And, since you probably don’t know, oxygen sensors are consumables. Older ones are supposed to be replaced every 30-60,000 miles, new ones between 60-120,000 miles depending on design. So, yes, that is often the actual cure for a car’s driveability problems - replace the consumable, you know, like you used to have to rebuild a carb about every 30-60k?
But let’s say it doesn’t fix the problem. How is Autozone blindly telling you that you need an O2 sensor any different than Chief Auto Parts blindly telling you that you needed their “tune up pak” back in the 1970s? Nothing has changed there except the item or items they’re trying to sell you. That’s all. Nothing else.
Also, what do you do when your Ford Mustang has a coil failure at 11pm on Sunday in a small town in Texas? If you have an old school Mustang from, say, 1970, you’re done. You have to wait until morning, at the earliest, to get a coil. You’re not going to be fixing that by the side of the road or limping home. If you have a 2003 Mustang, the Check Engine light comes on, the single coil pack goes offline and you DRIVE HOME on the six remaining cylinders. Distributorless ignition is a wonderful thing.
Likewise the fuel system. What do you do if your carb’s primary passages gets plugged up in the same scenario? That’s it, you’re done until you can rebuild the carb. Hope you brought the special carb tools. If the EFI car has a stuck/clogged injector, you simply return home on the remaining seven cylinders.
I suspect that you are my senior by about a generation, and worked the tech side of these systems as they evolved, and prolly studied with an open mind to boot...
I got started in the early 80s, with a 'domestic prejudice' and a hot rod mentality...the mandated evolution of domestic emmission systems and detroits half assed attempts to implement them just pissed me off back then...
I got behind the curve from the gitgo and then made many personal bad decisions [wild side] that killed my mental ability [wish i had them brain cells back] to absorb the infinate variables of the tech as it changed, not to mention the differences across the board between just the big three in the similar systems...
that said, OBDII was welcomed by me, to streamline the process, but alas Ive been out of the 'public' side for a few years again [farmhouse renovation and a bit more 'wild' side unfortunately ] and fallen behind once more...
as to the 'limpability'...anything can and will need the hook, eventually...it all man made and imperfect...the simple module/coil prob will kill me [unless Im in the old 4x4 that has 'spares' in an ammo box on the fenderwell] but the possibilities of sensor/component failures on late stuff seem infinate...
although I did have a dual fuel taurus that I actually drove from the lot to my bay at the dealer with the botton of the plastic upper intake completley shrapneled...that computer correction to the mixture was impressive...!!!
knowledge is power, and good info is priceless...
Im in the market for a good [most bang for the buck] scanner to do 'private' public work, thats where my autozone beef comes from...people get pissed when they are told that the O2 might not really be the cureall afterall [even family/friends cant wrap their heads around the variables to the mixture], and without on board communication, it seems that Im 'blind' to what the system really is saying, short of flow chart/component testing everything individually...still need info resources there too...and lotsa patience...
hopefully you can ping me whenever you have a new class open up, ive got a lot to catch up on and you have a lot to teach...
thanks again...
Waddayou somekindacommie? Us 'Mericans don't need no multi-meters to work on cars. No 'lectronics of no kind. Set them points at half a dime. Use your girlfriend's toenail file to clean up them plugs and distributor contacts .. throw a rod? Just use your belt to make a new insert and keep on goin.
The function of the electric car will be to provide my son a ride to work. He commutes less than 10 miles, by himself and makes the trip twice a day. He theoretically could use the special electric vehicle for commuting and for the other short trips.
His wife has different needs. She has a child to haul around and needs room. She has an SUV that is mostly used for fairly short hauls but is available for coming to visit mee and traveling the 250 miles in relative comfort at speed with enough room for all the presents they bring.
If an inexpensive electric car were available, they would likely buy one, not two.
Meanwhile you and I need to have our trucks and vans for ordinary use and hauling all the stuff we need to move in our daily activities.
If it comes to fruition, the switch will be made for a secondary vehicle. Miss Green Advocate might not be able to have an all electric because she needs to travel long distances occasionally. She may be induced to rent a car for the trips.
There will be no electric cars without nuclear power. To advocate them is to advocate nucs.
I’m under 35. :D
I got my start on cars in Southern California, so there were a *lot* of imports, with a *lot* of different systems around. There were also the hot rodders and domestic types, it being SoCal, so there were “old” domestic systems, too. I learned to work on all of them at the same time. When I took Auto Shop in high school, there was a 69 Dodge Dart GT next to a 79 Caddy Fleetwood, which was parked across from a 1993 Infiniti J30 and a 89 Honda Accord. You get the idea.
My first car was a $500 Dodge Dart from 1969 (and oh God, was that a pile of crap). My next car was a police-auction-special ‘85 Jaguar XJ6 (which spoiled me), followed by a hand-me-down Toyota pickup truck. I had to work on/rebuild/assemble all of these myself, so I got experience with a *lot* of different systems just at home.
What I am is an IT specialist who does cars as a hobby *and* decided to keep his auto repair skills current through continuing education and research as a backup skill set. As a result, I occasionally get called by my local Jaguar dealer for a consult (I’m considered one of the local experts on a certain older model) and I get job offers at least a couple of times a year from the local Jaguar and Nissan dealerships. :P I’d take one of them up on it, but it’d be a pay cut and too much like real work. :D
As for an OBDII scanner, the hot home (and sometimes shop) setup is a laptop computer (usually a cheap older model) connected to a OBDII interface and running interpreter software. Such a setup can not only read and clear codes, but also get a *good* reading of the live data stream from the computer to “see” what it “sees”.
Here’s a link to the hardware: http://www.obdpros.com/
There are competing units, of course, but that’s just an example. Then you need software, and there’s free software, shareware, and commercial software, much of which is all about the same. You can put together a package from scratch, including an old laptop, for under $300.
As for what goes wrong... O2 sensor’s at the top, followed by the coolant temperature sensor, both common and considered consumables, then much further back the mass airflow sensor or manifold air pressure sensor. That assumes that it sets a code. If the car sometimes will crank and crank and crank and not start, you’re not getting injector or ignition function as the car cranks (not just the priming cycle) it is usually the crankshaft angle sensor or camshaft angle sensor - without that, the computer doesn’t “know” where or when to fire the injectors or plugs. There’s been a LOT of bad CAS units running around lately, some of them seem to have about a 10-12 year lifespan.
As for documentation, you might be surprised. Most makers now make their vehicles’ factory service manuals available in PDF format either on a CD or online for a small fee ($10-30, usually). It’s invaluable for diagnostics - if you ever need to know where to get such items for a specific make, let me know. There’s also another resource which I won’t mention on an open forum because of the “gray” legal area that it is in.
Er, typo - my Dart was a 64.
Automakers gearing up for electric cars
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram | December 5, 2008 | Renee Schoof
Posted on 12/04/2008 11:56:23 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2143288/posts
Can These Hybrid Cars Save Detroit?
(NO! US Automakers beyond repair with the UAW in charge)
abc | 12/4/2008 | SCOTT MAYEROWITZ
Posted on 12/04/2008 4:09:22 AM PST by tobyhill
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2142655/posts
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