The Most Sickening Obama Ad.............To Date !
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Keroseneuser
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On your first point, that is not alway correct. depends on the fuel delivery system, tuning, gearing and type of use. If for instance you down size the engine in a tractor trailer to one of the turbo charged high HP rated smaller engines. Same engine but different applications. the 1.8 liter turbo in a small car will make it really scoot with high MPG. that same engine in a large application will have to rev at red line just to get the truck moving burning more fuel. You cannot gear a small engine low enough to meet the torque demands of a heavy load.
I have a classic car with an evil large displacement old school engine. Larger and producing more power and torque than my truck sitting in the driveway that is 35 years newer. Car is 6.6 liter carbureted and the truck is 6 liter fuel injected. Car gets 15 MPG and the truck gets 14. If I were to fuel inject the car with one of the new kits and regear it with a 5 or 6 speed(like the truck) I could get it up to 20 or 21 MPG and oddly enough, make the car even faster.
Take the above 1.8 liter comparison, same motor in 2 different applications can produce very different MPG ratings. In many cases out there a larger more powerful engine that has to work less for the same result will be more efficient than a small one having to rev its guts out to make the power.
Your 1.8 liter 176 hp engine most likely makes that 176 horse's at or near red line 6000 to 7000 rpm where it is sucking all the fuel the engine can take without breaking. Normal driving you may have access to 80 of those horses or so that produces that 48 mpg. You actually USE the 176 hp ability of the engine and your fuel milage drops by 50% or more.
There is an old saying in the hot rod ranks. Horsepower sells cars, torque wins races. That is the issue with the numbers you see on many new car brochures. There are all kinds of small engines producing high HP ratings but the torque numbers are in the tiolet. Sure on a dyno it produces that nice high HP rating but it is a nearly useless number in the real world if it has to rev at redline to make the power. A tractor trailer does not move on horsepower, it moves on torque. Thats why you wont see a gas engine in a tractor trailer, they cannot compete with the diesels low rpm pure pulling power.
Now having said all that, what fuel source other than fossil fuels do you possibly see that will be able to adapt to all the different functions that we as humans currently use? Alternate technology is fine and I am all for it, but wind isn't it, solar isn't it, fuels cells might do the trick but the technology is far from there yet, simply saying "make it so by 2016" won't magically produce cheap power cells by then. Nuke power would probably be the best answer right now fo getting off fossil fuels...it can be used to make power, run ships, trains, cars, and the military even built a nuke powered aircraft engine in the 50's. It really does seem to be the do all non fossil fuel...except for that small problem of your genitals glowing at night!
You mentioned public transportation...thats nice but even that is dependant on fossil fuels, or nuke power. All those subways run on electricity that comes from...you guessed it coal, oil, and nuke power for the most part with a couple windmills and hydro plants tossed in to make you feel better about it. Until there is time for technology to come up with the next generation of power we are stuck with processed dinosaurs.
Oddly enough NASA was one of the greatest pioneers in alternate fuels, soler, fuel cell tech etc. They advanced the technology vastly for space craft since it is tough to find a gas station in space. But what did our current crowd do? Pretty much shut the whole agency down while at same time saying "We need alternate fuels"
Glenn Quagmire
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Thank you for your consideration. I understand you felt the need to interject that crap when you were feeling down, but a thread about Obama advertisements is not the place.
Get over yourself.
SparrowHawk
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The Audi 1.8 Turbo is the engine I have in my TT. It can be "chipped dwn to 179hp or as high as 265HP and fuel economy & performance will be affected. Also Audi used a patented "low torque turbo" meaning that the boost kicks in a very low RPM to provide the required torque to move a relatively heavy car like the A-4 at a brisk pace.
Government is almost NEVER the answer. Market conditions in Germany are such that high performance and economy drive the German market. Audi has invested MILLIONS in their technology to meet market demand. Additionally Audi produced a hybrid turbo diesel that successfully competed at LeMans. Technology that works is develped by market forces and corporations seeking to meet that need.
Crony Capitalist schemes like Solyndra Fail, Audi succeeds.
Government is almost NEVER the answer. Market conditions in Germany are such that high performance and economy drive the German market. Audi has invested MILLIONS in their technology to meet market demand. Additionally Audi produced a hybrid turbo diesel that successfully competed at LeMans. Technology that works is develped by market forces and corporations seeking to meet that need.
Crony Capitalist schemes like Solyndra Fail, Audi succeeds.
Ms Tree
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Hense the part about all other things being equal. I never meant to imply that any engine could be used in any application. There are certain uses where square inches are the best answer. My initial point is given the roads in the US there is no need for a 500hp Mustang or a 400+ HP Mercedes. I have no interest in banning such engines but I think a tax incentive to limit them and start pushing people toward smaller engines and cars is the right move given our current dependance on foreign oil.
And in a world where our dependency on oil is getting people killed I see no reason why a 20mpg car much less a t 15mpg car should be acceptable. My car is a 17 yr old diesel that gets 30 around town and 34 +/- on the freeway.
I am defining efficient in terms of fuel use. In the above application the 1.8l uses less fuel than the 2.0l. Not to much when you look at one litre of fuel but it adds up over the life of the car and the volume of cars.
Unless you are a stop light racer or a lead footer how many times do you need the full power out put of your engine? I have never red lined any car I have ever owned. I run the tach up to 60%-65% or so. US cars are not designed to be run flat out. They are designed to be run at 60-75mph for close to optimum fuel mileage. My dad used to have a 12 cylinder BMW that would cruise at 70 @ 2,000 RPM +/-. He said he would get about 24mpg or so on a road trip. Point being, very rarely do people run their cars ar red line or even close to get the full power of their engine to the wheels. I doubt the engines are even built to with stand that type of abuse for any duration.
Not arguing that point. That's the biggest reason I like my diesels. Great mileage, lower HP and gobbs of torque
There is no one size fits all. Natural gas could work on tractor/trailers. I would think it could be used in trains and ships as well perhaps. Cars I think will eventually get to fuel cells or even a fuel cell/electric hybrid. I would guess that it will be quite some time before we can completely abandon fossil fuel. Given our current mode of operation with the oil companies and oil producing nations I think they are holding technology back to make a buck for them selves. I would like to see some sort of competition for grants similar to what they did for the Space X race. I would love to see the governments put a few billion dollars on the line. Have some engineers, scientists or what ever put out some standards. Then let free enterprise build something. Right now there is no incentive and there is no money in it.
Companies build stuff they can make and sell now or in a few years. Small companies do not have the resources. Large companies do not want to put it on the line for reasons mentioned above. I think if we give the little guys an incentive we could get some good workable products out there. I doubt Virgin Galactic would have happened without that incentive.
Of course it does, but it moves far more people for far less fuel than a car does. The reduction has to start some place and mass transit is one of the easiest and efficient ways to start.
NASA did some amazing things. They came up with countless inventions and yet they were their own worst enemy. As I think I said else where in this forum, every time NASA tried to make something they had to reinvent the wheel to do it.
Russia had a very basic (some would say primitive) space program yet they have more man hours in space than we could even dream of. The Space shuttle was designed with a 10 yr life span and 100 missions per re-entry vehicle. What we got was a 30 year program and 135 launches total not to mention the loss of two vehicles due to human error. WTF? The Saturn V worked great. All they had to do was build a stronger launch platform, develop a better capsule and voila, we'd still be in space. Now we have to thumb a ride on a Soyuz. Let's here it for Gorbachev other wise who knows what kind of boon dogle NASA would have come up with.
There is a reason the VW Bug (original) was/is one of the most popular cars out (over 22 million sold including the new junk) there in terms of numbers sold. Easy to work on and pretty reliable.
OH yea, almost for got one more thing about NASA. It was government funded. Pretty sure private enterprise would not have put us on the moon in '69. Sometimes the government needs to step in, it's a mater of how they do it that counts.
Ms Tree
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OH, thanks for that info. I thought the smaller more efficient cars in Germany was due to fuel being nearly $8 a gallon for RUG of which a little over $6 is tax. The need in Germany is due to the high taxes on fuel, high taxes on high powered vehicles.
Current German Fuel Prices
German fuel tax
I found this info on a forum regarding car registration costs in Denmark
The registration tax on a new car is 105% on the first (approx.) $10.000 of the original price. That means, slightly more than double those money. 180% on the rest. Which means, almost triple the rest. Before calculating that, however, you have to add sales tax, which is 25% of the original price. For motorcycles, it's more complicated, but ends up being largely the same result.
To take an example, my Ducati S4R, which has a "suggested price" without any taxes (sales tax or otherwise) of about $14000 ends up costing $42300! That's more than 3 times the original price, the taxes ending up adding about 203%.
And then we add a yet another "green" tax paid each year, based solely on fuel consumption (the higher km/l (miles/gallon), the lower tax, obviously).
In spite of this, I have two bikesBut I also got them somewhat cheaper by way of importing and registrating myself, rather than letting a salesman do it - and by way of some luck in terms of the tax office getting the original price a bit wrong.
As for gas, taxes are about $0.60 per litre (unleaded) = $2.27 per US gallon. That's the "green" tax alone. Also add sales tax etc. The final price is, at the moment, slightly over $1.71 per litre = $6.47 per gallon.
Any way, you are 100% right. Aside from all the taxes that the European governments charge to buy/register cars and the taxes that they charge on fuel the government has nothing to do with the driving force behind smaller fuel efficient vehicles and mass transit.
I'd bet the farm that if we had to pay $8 a gallon that the number of gas guzzlers on the road would drop to the point of being nearly extinct. The clamor for mass transit would be defining that even with your head buried as far as it is in the sand that you wold even hear it.
Glenn Quagmire
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Do you practice at being obtuse away from here?
Dog Wonder
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Proof the truck doesn't make one a man.
Keroseneuser
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Where is the money going to come from? Other than the few heavy urban areas in this country reletivly speaking most of our nation lives in what you probably consider the sticks.
In my city it is costing roughly 500 million per 10 miles for our version of a light rail (subway, MARC whatever you want to call it) So far my city has spent 480 million on 9.6 miles of track that basically all it does is connect one drug and gang infested neighborhood to a few spots. 500 mill gone and I have yet to meet a single person that can use the train to get to their job. Let alone make it a primary way to get around. It does not make money and the biggest news about it over the last year that I have seen is the poor SOB that was robbed and nearly killed at one of the stations for what was in his wallet.
Take baltimore for example. years ago I and others rented a house as a commuter pad in a neighborhood that was connected to their light rail from the airport. The neighborhood by the accounts of the few remaining long time residents used to be a very nice middle class place to live. To quote the neighbor "This was a nice place till the light rail came in, then all it did was import burglars, crackheads, and muggers." he was trying to sell his longtime house. I rode the light rail for a month or so to get to work but after seeing a guy shooting up heroin one evening on the train I figured it was time to buy a cheap car, 6 months later we had seen enough and moved to a better place.(7 miles from nearest train station) We ditched the house and rented an apartment. In the year the house was used as a airline crash pad it was broken into 6 times.
I assume you live in one of our more urban areas in this country so the public transportation thing makes more sense to you. For most of the people in this country where a trip to get milk is 5 or 10 miles, on in the case of much of our midwest maybe 20 miles to get milk public transportation is out of the question. At 500 million per 10 miles you cannot print enough money to make public transportation viable for all this country like they have done in much of europe.
Natural gas for trucks is a nice idea, but again where you are talking about the interstates of the midwest how many billions is it going to cost to put even enough filling stations to let a NG powered truck make it in a well planned route let alone a normal delivery schedule? It is very easy to find places crossing this country on major roads that are 50 to 100 miles between gas stations. I don't have the figures for a LG or NG powered trucks range but I doubt it is close to the 1000 mile unrefueled range most long haul trucks are capable of carrying now.
This is the problem we have. Alternate fuels are nice and eventually will have to become the way of the future....but right now the technology and infrastructure is not there and it is many trillions of dollars and years away. All we would do by making the decree of 70 miles per gallon or "use tax" or massive public transportation at this early stage is to further destroy our economy, put more american people into the poverty level and load trillions of dollars more debt on our already flat broke country. Like it or not the United States is broke, and you cannot possible tax the 51% or so left actually paying taxes enough to do what you are talking about. Gov't has to quit spending money they don't have, and cannot make.
Support the research for better alternatives as you stated, I agree with that. Not letting us tap the resources we can access and taxing the crap out of the average joe in "use" taxes is a sure fire way of destroying this country before the technology can exist to fix the fossil fuel issues.
Ms Tree
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According to the last US census that I could find dealing with this (2000) over half the US population lives in cities of 200,000 or more. Only 60 million lived in cities of 200,000 or less.
The cost of catching up will always be far more expensive than the cost of keeping up. It is cheaper to moderize existing infrustructure than to build from scratch. That is the problem and result of living in a country that is reactive rather than proactive.
In my opinion we can either bite thr bullet and start pumping what I believe will be a little money now (in comparison to what we will need to spend when we have nno choice) or we can spend far more money to play catch up when the 'choice' smacks us in the face and we are left with no alternative.
We need to start spending money wisely. I am guessing like in most cities that $50 million a mile light rail could have been built far less expensive had not not made it as fancy as they proabbly did and really made people bid for the actual cost of building a more basic system.
This is a new bridge in Dallas. Is it nice? Sure. Could we have built a more basic bridge to do the same job? Yes. Could that basic bridge have been built at a lower cost? What do you think?
The same idiots who built and supported this bridge are the same people who buy a 60" flat screen and finace it. Very few in this country seem to look at the future. Everyone is worried about to day. The problem I see with that is that decisions you make today will affect what happens down the line.
We need to get the governement involved in a smart way (incentives, competitions ...) to start coming up with solutions for the future. Trying to come up with a way to keep the Titanic affloat after it hit the ice berg is futile and stupid. Trying to prevent the ship from hiting the ice berg in the first place is less costly and a far better investment in my opinion.
As fro the NG issue. Start putting in filling stations in the cities and start converting local trucks to NG. Then start movingout of the cities. Start by givingout low/no intrest loans with tax incentives to start installing them. Start giving loans/incentives to start converting trucks over to NG. The instalations and conversions will creat jobs and infrustructure. In a couple of 10 20 years we can get it done.
Mass transit will be more costly and time consuming but our populations are growing. According to the census cities are growing faster than urban. It is only going to get worse not better. Ignoring the problem or saying it is too hard only postpones the inevitable.
The cost of catching up will always be far more expensive than the cost of keeping up. It is cheaper to moderize existing infrustructure than to build from scratch. That is the problem and result of living in a country that is reactive rather than proactive.
In my opinion we can either bite thr bullet and start pumping what I believe will be a little money now (in comparison to what we will need to spend when we have nno choice) or we can spend far more money to play catch up when the 'choice' smacks us in the face and we are left with no alternative.
We need to start spending money wisely. I am guessing like in most cities that $50 million a mile light rail could have been built far less expensive had not not made it as fancy as they proabbly did and really made people bid for the actual cost of building a more basic system.
This is a new bridge in Dallas. Is it nice? Sure. Could we have built a more basic bridge to do the same job? Yes. Could that basic bridge have been built at a lower cost? What do you think?
The same idiots who built and supported this bridge are the same people who buy a 60" flat screen and finace it. Very few in this country seem to look at the future. Everyone is worried about to day. The problem I see with that is that decisions you make today will affect what happens down the line.
We need to get the governement involved in a smart way (incentives, competitions ...) to start coming up with solutions for the future. Trying to come up with a way to keep the Titanic affloat after it hit the ice berg is futile and stupid. Trying to prevent the ship from hiting the ice berg in the first place is less costly and a far better investment in my opinion.
As fro the NG issue. Start putting in filling stations in the cities and start converting local trucks to NG. Then start movingout of the cities. Start by givingout low/no intrest loans with tax incentives to start installing them. Start giving loans/incentives to start converting trucks over to NG. The instalations and conversions will creat jobs and infrustructure. In a couple of 10 20 years we can get it done.
Mass transit will be more costly and time consuming but our populations are growing. According to the census cities are growing faster than urban. It is only going to get worse not better. Ignoring the problem or saying it is too hard only postpones the inevitable.
