Posted on 08/19/2006 7:56:28 PM PDT by nicollo
I had a neighbor who had 2 of those olds diesels, they were insanely loud
Honda has done it before: the 1974 CVCC engine was truly revolutionary, and proved that emmission rules could be met by a standard gasoline engine. A truly remarkable engine.
I'm not convinced by diesel, however.
And if I have my facts right, Honda's VTEC has not failed once. NOT ONCE! (according to Jeremy Clarckson from Top Gear).
It's a great show...you can see clips from it on YOUTUBE.
(And that's pretty bad!)
I was talking to a friend last night, just came back from a vacation in Vietnam (Saigon area) visiting someone. She said her friend's driver told my friend that their car ran on oil, because of the scarcity of gasoline in Vietnam. She claims it's regular motor oil. I told my friend that's unlikely, perhaps it's a vegetable oil of some kind. She also said vegetables were scarce, she was having a tough time finding them from vendors there. Hmmmn.
More Oil Than We ThinkThe Times was conservative up until the early 1970s.
(**warning: pdf file!)
Steam powered automobiles would probably be a LOT cheaper to manufacture as the tolerances required are not nearly as fine. Plus they could use crude oil directly in the boilers .. or anything else liquid that burned.
I didn't know Larry was in AA.
< }B^)
As mentioned previously, this is exactly what happened during the oil shocks of the 1970s - shortfalls in supply as little as 5% drove the price of oil up near 400%. Demand did not fall until the world was mired in the most severe economic slowdown since the Great Depression.Utter crap: 1970s offer no demonstration of "classical economic" theory, as the price of both gasoline and crude were stupidly constrained by U.S. government price controls and import quotas (which in turn impacted worldwide prices). The 1973 and 1979 "shocks" followed lesser worldwide shortages than came in the '56 Suez Crisis '67 Arab/Israeli war. But only '73 and '79/80 brought lines and only in the U.S.: a direct result of U.S. price controls.
While many analysts claim the market will take care of this for us, they forget that neoclassic economic theory is besieged by several fundamental flaws that will prevent the market from appropriately reacting to Peak Oil until it is too late. To illustrate, as of April 2005, a barrel of oil costs about $55. The amount of energy contained in that barrel of oil would cost between $100-$250* dollars to derive from alternative sources of energy. Thus, the market won't signal energy companies to begin aggressively pursuing alternative sources of energy until oil reaches the $100-$250 mark.
That the "amount of energy contained in that barrel of oil would cost between $100-$250* dollars to derive from alternative sources of energy" merely justifies the current reliance on petroleum. But that's ridiculous, as $70/ barrel justifies shale extraction, ethynol, etc. What's keeping it away is that no one is willing to invest in those alternatives because they don't believe that current prices of crude will be sustained.
So, the need and possibility for bio-diesel and other alternatives depends entirely upon the continuing high price of crude. It won't.
I don't think so.
bttt
Dr. Z, that German doofus on the new Chrysler commercials, is advertising a new clean-buring diesel Jeep Cherokee for 2007, as well.
Quieter, clean diesel engines sound really good to me, and I'll definitely look into it the next time I go pickup shopping. (Not a Chrysler though, I've owned one too many of them and will never own another. I'm a GMC man these days, but I'm leaning toward Toyota for my next truck. It's been so long since I've shopped for a vehicle, I don't even know if Toyota offers a diesel pickup.)
What would be even better is if someone with some money would start mining all that coal in North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming and start turning it into diesel fuel.
I had a big Dark Blue Olds 98 Diesel, the biggest car I ever owned. It sounded like a Semi but got 35 mpg on the road. The down side was that it ate transmissions, guess they couldn't handle the torque.
OTOH my brother had a little Nissan (I believe) station wagon that was powered by a diesel boat engine. car went 300,000 miles without any problem and got close to 50 MPG on the road. That was a great car!
It takes more oil to make a gallon of diesel than a gallon of gasoline. Per pound diesel and gasoline have about the same amount of energy. It's just that diesel is a heavier fraction of oil and is denser. It would be foolish to use MPG as a basis for comparing diesel and gasoline vehicles.
This information is not correct. In 1980 the world's oil reserves were 28 years of the consumption at the time. In 1985 it was 32 years. In 1990 it was 41 years. And it has stayed between 36 and 42 years since then.
Why not use what most people are actually interested in? Dollars per mile.
Gasoline and diesel engines benefit considerably from using the fuel as the working fluid. On the other hand, having the combustion take place in the propulsion cylinder poses some problems of its own.
One idea I've wondered about would be designing a motor with piston pumps to put fuel and air into a combustion chamber, and a piston engine to get energy from the combustion products. If one used multi-stage pumps, it would theoretically possible to usefully recover a lot of the waste heat from the exhaust and impart it to the fuel. Of course, getting all this in a practical automotive-sized package might be another matter...
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