Yup maybe your right but burning and using all of the fossil fuel will surely have an effect to the environment. Reality check if you have a car manufacturing company would you want to start something that will make your company suffer like minimizing the value of your consumers car? Maybe if the governments steps in the idea it will make a difference...... Technology is for Human beings not Humans for technology Not Fair
Bullshit... How the hell do you load the wife, 3 kids, a weeks worth of gear, the dog, the stroller, etc etc into one of those crackerbox cars. Also, I get 18MPG HWY not 8. Plus those 3 cars would never last 100,000 miles with me owing my camper, boat, or whatever while my Tahoe has 260,000 miles on it and still drives and looks like new. So no, these little shitboxes are never going to be in my driveway.
To alleviate the oil situation. Use synthetic oils, grease, etc in your car. Heck, if the US government mandated the use of synthetic oils for new cars and old cars (all vehicles), that would be a lot of oil we would not be using. ANd also mandated that in 2 years, all vehicles would have to get a minimum of 30 mpg. This is easily done by the car makers. Ethanol can be processed from any bio-mass material...corn, wheat, grass, trees, etc. Just read a report that here in Iowa, cheaper to produce ethanol not from the corn, but from the cornstalks. We have super unleaded here that is 10% ethanol, because like 90% of vehicles can take that blend. Plus there are a lot of vehicles already produced, and being produced, that can take up to 85% ethanol blend. Same with diesel, now a blend of diesel that is like either 20 or 25% bio mass. Willie Nelson pushes this stuff!
I know that audi diesels are both massive and quite fuel friendly. I think america is quite bad for producing fuel hungry cars and not worrying about it.
The world will not be ready for an alternative fuel before the governments really want to intodruce it and build out the infrastructur, self. Yes, no private company will take the initiative since the oil Sheiks in UAE will manipulate every major attempt. Only the governments can do it, and they must act together to get everyone with them. Inventing it will be the easy part.
It would be much easier if we just started to use more public transport. It's a shame that people don't know that you actually can take your bags on the subway and get a good exercise so you don't need to go to the fucking gym.
It's amaizing how finite your thinking is. Great for you, you have a subway available to ride. Does that mean everyone has public trans available? What about folks like me with a large family, living in the country? Hell, even Wal-Mart is a 1/2 hour away for us. Can the Audi tow? Nope!
Should and must take the initiative to wean people off oil. Oil companies should and must find alternatives to just oil. But bottom line is all people should and must use less oil. Living out in the wilds of Iowa, there is no public transportation, closest city to do any type of shopping is about 18 miles away. That means that we learn how to shop once a week, or once every two weeks. Can a farmer or rancher out here do everything with a small, dinky car that gets great mileage? No, a pickup truck is a necessity. Try driving out into a pasture with a small car and putting 2-4 bales of hay that weigh about a ton apiece. Or pick and up deliver a cow with a small car. Hate to bring this up, but we do not produce the lowest gas mileage vehicles in the world. Try ferrari, porsche, aston martins, etc.
Thats true a vehicle should serve its true purpose with practicality to the environment and the society not for fame or anything. Like this crazy car BTW the issue is not among cars but to the whole world using oils.
Oh please, you don't need a big truck to live somewhere rural, maybe a farmer needs a truck , but 99% of people driving big trucks are just fat guys. I can walk out of my house and see at least 5 fat guys, with giant trucks, that don' have trailer hitches, and the beds look like there has never been anything in them
This is a good point. It's true that sometimes larger vehicles ARE required to accomplish a certain task. That being said, the Japanese and Koreans make a lot of pickups and cargo vehicles that are very fuel efficient and CHEAP, cheaper in most cases than their American counterpart. Ok, the problem is that most of them are NOT available in America! Can they haul? Yes. Can they tow? YES! 1 tonne, 2 tonnes, 3 tonnes... whatever you want, they have a vehicle. I know because I had a Hyundai cargo van for my business and it could take quite a beating and still only required 6L/100km (8L fully loaded) diesel... that's a lot better than most american vehicles. Also ferret77 hit the nail on the head... no one is complaining about farmers (or contractors, etc.) driving pickups, it's the rest of those city dwellers that refuse to drive anything smaller than a Kenworth. My cousin is one of them unfortunately, she drives only the biggest ugliest Dodge trucks available. But the problem is also with large factories, railways, power generating plants and so on... not just cars.
yeah people are free to drive whatever, but its still foolish, and people who try to justifiy having a tank because they go camping once year don't make much sense either
I can't see a thread on this subject without chiming in, so, here it goes... Why start with fuel cells? The engines costs hundreds of thousands of dollars at this stage in their development (so they're a long way off). Any car that is on the road today (diesel, rotary, internal combustion) can burn hydrogen. With a good engine computer and some tuning, most will get more power and more fuel efficiency (if you equate a kg of hydrogen with a gallon of gas). Mazda, BMW, Ford, and backyard tinkerers have been converting cars to burn hydrogen for years, the cost is down to about $3,000-$5,000 now for the do-it-yourselfer, just imagine if one of the automakers would mass produce the parts needed... All we'd need is clean (from renewable sources) hydrogen. Sure, the infrastructure would be expensive, but not much over a 5-10 year period when you consider how much Exxon spends on oil exploration and how much the fed. gov. here in the states spend on oil subsidies. Nonsense. Ever heard of plastic? There are tons of petroleum based products out there that will sustain the oil industry. In addition, alternatives are not going to develop overnight, so there will be time to adapt to the new market. Exxon isn't going to go out of business when alternatives start developing, they're just going to jump on the bandwagon (with their billions and billions and billions of dollars). Algae produced hydrogen is just one of the cool things being experimented with, though new advancments in wind, geothermal, and solar (like nanosolar) are perhaps a bit more realistic. Right now, you can buy hydrogen in Washington DC for $1.99/kg last time I checked. Granted, its "dirty hydrogen" (hydrogen produced with non renewable energy sources). Thats what the politicians will tell you, especially in the states (Iowa...). Ethanol from corn, switch grass and other bio products is not all that great. 1) its not as cheap as you think, its subsidized just like other crops (or oil for that matter), so tax payers are helping corporate farmers so they can burn ethanol... 2) not so clean, last stats I saw said E85 (85% ethanol/gasoline mix) burns about 20-30% cleaner than gasoline. Plus, it takes about a gallon of oil to produce a gallon of ethanol. Why? The crops ethanol is made from are coated in petroleum based pesticides and it has to be transported to/from/back/forth to make it to the pump (in gas powered trucks, obviously). It also takes a ton of energy to produce ethanol. Right now it takes about 40% more energy (in the form of electricty) to create a gallon of ethanol than you get out of it. HeHe. I'm a pretty big hippy, but I'm with ya Henny. People should not have to sacrafice/conserve. Alternatives exist, we need to implement them. Reducing our oil comsumption is just delaying progress thats going to made sooner or later when the prices keep going up...
Foolishness, like so many things, is in the eye of the beholder. When I pull up next to a Toyota Prius, I think to my self, what kind of FOOL would buy one of those? $20,000 for a car that needs a $6000 service at ~80,000 miles! IDIOT can burn a lot of gas for $6000.00 and be a hell-of-a lot safer in the proccess. Thats ok though, the less gas they use, the more for me
Well the price of hybirds is still keeping them unpractical, but how many people actually use a V8 engine to its potential, unless you towing something big there is no real need for V8. The fastest you are legally allowed to go is what 75, are there states where you can go 85? I think I read that alge can be the best producer of ethonal
I think the biggest problem is ecconomic. The reliance on oil revenues for government treasuries is massive! You also have the problem of huge infrastructure, thousands upon thousands of jobs rely on keeping things just as they are for as long as possible. Even if the 'political will' was in place to utilise commonly acceptable alternatives like LPG or even vegetable derivatives that might work in most vehicles with minimal modification, the infrastructure costs to make it happen safely are long term at best. Add to this the obvious fact that oil giants are central to the worlds ecconomic stability and you must draw the conclusion that the most feasible alternatives will have to come from those companies and utilise for the most part existing infrastructures or at least distribution channels that can be controlled, taxed and won't decimte their workforce. I reckon millions are being spent looking into this stuff everyday and with the pace of global change as it is today, it won't be long before we start pumping something different that works pretty much the same, probably at an initially reduced price. Stuff that doesn't harm the environment as much but in itself might still have some controversy attached that upsets someone or other.
i think this is the biggest problem. People have a lack of a social conscience and dont give a fuck about the enviroment.