rising gas prices? try this, HHO Fuel.

[tonebucket]

[quote author="StephenGiles"]Somebody else can do the sums but this morning in Coulsdon, Surrey in England, unleaded petrol is £1.12 per litre. Before we left for Argentina on 26 March it was £1.02 at the same garage.[/quote]

I think the world is a little insane it should be britian and who ever owns the sea in the carribean who should be making the money not the middle east because their oil is of a poor quality and has to be refined alot more.

I think the price of fuel here in the uk should be half of what it is in the US.

 

[SSLtech]

I'll take the math challenge. :wink:

GB£1.12/litre x 2.0 (£:$ exchange rate) =US$2.24/litre.

US$2.24/litre x 4.73 (litres per imperial gallon) = US$10.60/gallon.

So if anyone here thinks that $3.50 a gallon is painful, think of the Europeans.

The price difference over there is mainly taxation though. -The Guv'mint are making out like bandits (NOT the only similarity which I can call to mind, I hasten to add!) at the moment.

Even with the smaller US gallon, (3.8 litres instead of 4.73) the UK is still paying over US$8.50/US gallon.

Keith

 

[AnalogPackrat]

It's well over $3.50 out here in California (higher taxes AND higher prices due to use of special smog reducing blends not used elsewhere in the US). I paid $3.83/gal last week for 87 octane and it's pushing over $3.90 this week. Higher grades are already over $4. One of the local radio stations has daily reports of lowest price stations...low end is around $3.75, but those are few and far between.

We've seen at least a 10% price increase in the past month or so (similar to what Mr. Giles reports in UK). Food prices are also cranking up lately.

 

[Guest]

[quote author="AnalogPackrat"]

We've seen at least a 10% price increase in the past month or so (similar to what Mr. Giles reports in UK). Food prices are also cranking up lately.[/quote]

Asian countries stopped selling rice... Worldwide dollar inflation, logical end of Marshall's plan?

 

[skipwave]

[quote author="SSLtech"]US$10.60/gallon.

So if anyone here thinks that $3.50 a gallon is painful, think of the Europeans.[/quote]

No doubt we've had it easy, but lacking a viable alternative can make you feel your livelihood depends on stable cost of living. The real trouble with this logic is that it doesn't account for sprawl and lack of effective public transport.

Certainly we in the States have enjoyed some leniency in this regard, partly due to petrol favoring economic policy and some vague sense of entitlement to the open road. After all, gas guzzling recreational vehicles are part of the American dream.

Interesting about the hybrids. I went with a VW turbodiesel instead, because I thought that the hybrid technology was too young to be time-proven a few years ago.

My TDI gets 37-40 mpg around town and easily 50 on the highway. I don't understand why the biodiesel thing hasn't caught on more in the US. Maybe now that Ethanol's impact on food supplies is garnering attention. Does anyone know whether biodiesel production has also implicated in the food crisis?

 

[JohnRoberts]

[quote author="skipwave"] Does anyone know whether biodiesel production has also implicated in the food crisis?[/quote]
I read recently that bio-diesel refinery investments in Indonesia are in trouble because cost of palm oil has been driven up by food prices. I think Palm oil may also be a go to substitute for the transfats everybody is avoiding.

There is no free lunch.

JR

 

[SSLtech]

Dude, if you like your VW turbodiesel now... You're going to LOVE the Pompe-Duse turbodiesel engine when they finally bring it over!

I drove a GT-D a few years ago in the UK... 160-something horsepower, a million-and-something ft/lb of torque, and VERY agile suspension... all with fantastic fuel mileage!

VW however haven't sold a diesel in the US for a couple of years or so as of now... which is bizarre, considering that diesel sales accounted for a significant portion of their US sales before they paused the supply...

Lack of effective public transport is due to sprawl... Public transport works well -even in the US- in places like New York. The Florida light rail idea is just DUMB, since nobody lives close enough to a station, (due to sprawl) and the station at the other end of your trip isn't near anywhere you want to go either... BAD idea... but I'm quite sure that it's getting built because some politician got his axles greased...

"Gas tax holiday" and other ideas are BAD ideas. We don't need to be promoting sales by reducing prices bearing in mind that this is a finite resource. We need to encourage THRIFT and CONSERVATION. Putting it on sale for four months will only make Exxon and the like richer, by stimulating sales, and collecting less useful government revenue along the way... Then when the price returns to what it must inevitably do, we're all screwed again.

-The "gas tax holiday" makes about as much sense as postponing a hangover by handing out free drinks.

You want it to hurt less, America? -Then USE LESS. -That's really all there is to it.

Keith

 

[skipwave]

[quote author="SSLtech"]You want it to hurt less, America? -Then USE LESS. -That's really all there is to it.[/quote]

:thumb: :thumb: :thumb:

You speaka da truth. The sprawl/transport problem is a chicken/egg paradigm. We won't get better transport without using what we got, but we can't use what we got cause it don't work so hot. Ain't that a bitch?

Relative to EU, we have much greater sprawl to overcome. Coupled with the migration of jobs to more remote locations for cheaper office space really does necessitate a car in many cases. Once you have a car-centric life, it's very hard to justify additional expense for public transport that gets you there in double the time, if at all. I do it anyway, mostly to avoid parking difficulties around the downtown campus where I go for school.

 

[SSLtech]

Hell, Chicago actually HAS usable public transportation. I've used "the L" myself on EVERY visit to Chicago. -Stopovers at O'Hare usually allow me time to head downtown for a meal and a guinness...

Keith

 

[bcarso]

Public (or at least "mass") transportation can work in real cities. It's pretty ludicrous for Los Angeles, save for a fortunate few.

Actually the whole nature of commerce is shifting, in large part due to the changing nature of work. But where the nature of the job allows it, there is a lot of resistance to telecommuting, including a predominant disbelief that employees can be trusted to focus on work when away from the watchful eyes of managers.

I think a good deal of the latter resistance has the underlying problem that managers actually have to track performance, rather than merely monitoring attendance. Really good management requires a lot of skill and is a lot of work. Needless to say, it is quite rare.

 

[PRR]

> I don't understand why the biodiesel thing hasn't caught on more in the US.

Bio-Diesel is currently sold like dino-Diesel. AFAIK, it can be used in heavy trucks. It may not be covered by truck warranties, it may not be cheaper, but it "can" be used, so it MUST be taxed like truck-fuel.

At the moment, road-use taxes on Diesel seem to be higher than on gasoline. Diesel price should be <= good-octane gasoline, but it is higher, and I assume it is because even the mighty trucker's lobby can't swing the votes that the 99% car-public has.

So for economical Diesel Sedan operation, you should be agitating for a <5,000-pound exemption from part of the Truckers' Tax. Since it would be too hard to enforce this at the pump, you'd have to document your use and apply to state and federal tax authorities for a give-back. This aint gonna happen until there are more Diesel sedans. Catch 22.

(True, some of the difference is new low-sulphur Diesel fuel. I don't think a little Sulphur has a big effect on gasoline engines but it really upsets Diesels, and Diesel combustion leads to more noxious Sulphur compounds, so they been trying to cut back.)

 

[tonebucket]

Bio-Diesel here in the UK is taxed less and is about half the price of Diesel if you can buy it.

And the signs are that the tax will be going up on it, what a surprise the UK tax is supposed to be on polution but using Bio-Diesel is kind of carbon neutral because you are only burning that which would have decomposed and turned back in to gases anyway!!

So how can the UK gov add more polution tax on it, unless fuel tax is a stealth tax as we all know.

 

[dale116dot7]

The sulphur causes numerous problems with newer diesels. The biggest is catalyst poisoning. In a lean environment, sulphur compounds contaminate the catalyst rendering it useless. A gasoline engine runs at a stoichiometric air-fuel ratio (controlled to an average accuracy of about 0.001%) and the catalyst lasts a long time.

VW stopped selling diesels in the US primarily because the high sulphur diesel sold in the US (at the time) would have damaged the catalyst. Also, the US EPA penalizes nitrogen oxide emissions more than anywhere else in the world. I am of the opinion that the EPA rules have done a lot to prevent fuel consumption improvements. In most parts of the world, CO2 is a regulated vehicle emission, so the vehicle manufacturer can optimize NOx vs. CO vs. CO2 formation. They are a 'triangle' and you get to pick which side of the triangle you are on. The ultra-low NOx standards means that you need to be on the other side of the triangle, and if you're not making CO to zap the NOx in the catalyst, then you have to make a lot of CO2. You do that by making the engine larger and loading it lighter. Also, truck standards are quite a bit higher than car standards, so you see a lot of diesel trucks but not so many passenger cars.

The published fuel economy is measured not using real-world driving, but a very specific test cycle which was basically a strip-chart recording of someone's trip in LA, I think it was somewhere around 1970. The cycle was revised in 1975 to include a hot restart (the hot-505 portion of the test). It is a very relaxed drive, where even the most underpowered car (the Chevy Sprint) has no problem meeting the trace while almost always under 40% throttle, with the exception of about four seconds of the test (located at 180 seconds into the test), where the throttle would go to maybe 70%.

The rated fuel economy usually has little to do with what a driver gets except in comparing apples to apples. The actual number comes from measuring the CO2+CO+HC emissions of the vehicle and then calculating the fuel used, on both a highway driving cycle, and the US FTP-75 drive cycle.

Biofuels from crops (soybeans or whatever) usually forget a very important factor - the amount of petroleum products that go into growing the stuff. Fertilizer is made from natural gas, tractors run on diesel, pesticides are made primarily from petroleum. The ratio of produced fuel to petroleum inputs is only slightlt better than 1:1. This, to me, makes absolutely no sense. If biofuels are to make sense, we need to do them without the staggering oil inputs used in modern agriculture. Perhaps the algae method, or something like that? I dunno.

As for the price of fuel.... it is a product that is priced just like a cut of meat at a grocery store. In a free-market economy, what is wrong with an oil company deciding that fuel is worth $10.00 per gallon? All of the sudden there are congressional committees looking at it and everything. If the people are willing to pay $10.00 per gallon (while complaining about it), then why are the oil companies *not* charging that? As a shareholder in an oil company, I want to know why they are not getting all of the profit that they can so I can get dividends.

-Dale

 

[SSLtech]

[quote author="dale116dot7"]VW stopped selling diesels in the US primarily because the high sulphur diesel sold in the US (at the time) would have damaged the catalyst.[/quote]
A quite different story than I understood.

In fact VW continued to be the ONLY manufacturer selling new diesels for the better part of a decade here in the US, but could only sell the Old-tech TDIs and NOT the high-tech Pompe-Duse motor which has been sold in Europe (for -what? -five, six, seven years now...?) because of the monstrously high sulphur content: 500 parts per million instead of FIFTEEN parts per million)

-When the Pompe-Duse finally makes it over here (what the HELL is keeping VW?) people might see what a fantastic motor it is... but then this is America, and most people just think that diesels are slow, noisy and underpowered... :roll:

Keith

 

[PRR]

> the US EPA penalizes nitrogen oxide emissions more than anywhere else in the world.

I was in Los Angeles in 1959. "LA Smog" was nasty. It would stand up and bite. And not well understood at the time. But NOx is assumed to be a large part of that.

25 years later I spent two days around SF Bay and sensed no trace of the good old LA air. Of course SF is smaller and windier than the LA basin.

Very likely the Calif and US rule-makers are living in a past, and our NOx limits could be raised or made a trade-off against other outputs.

> you see a lot of diesel trucks but not so many passenger cars.

A Diesel will "always" cost and weigh more than a spark-engine. The high-pressure injection is costly, the high combustion pressure forces robust parts, the ignition scheme is slow and wants excess air, which means less HP per CID. All of which means more pounds per HP. Against that there is the tolerance for compression and the higher expansion efficiency. And modern high-RPM spark-engines must be robust anyway. And Diesel efficiency holds up to very low load. I have little doubt a good sharp-pencil Diesel can be similar in weight and better in raw (pre-Tax) economy to modern sparkers.

I think the sparker will continue to be cheaper in first-cost (ignoring tax and oportunistic fuel sources). The Diesel has traditionally been much better in long-long-term operation costs: the high first-cost gets a robust reliable machine which wears gently. But even a 1940 Ford engine was likely to out-last its body. Sedans run an hour a day. Rust, crashes, and style "kill" the car before the engine is shot. (For those few bodies which live, the many wrecks ensure a supply of swapper engines.) OTOH trucks run 4 to 18 hours a day. At the low end, ~~40K miles/year, spark engines are economic. At the upper end, 250K miles/year, engine wear dominates sparker costs, and the up-front cost of Diesel robustness pays-off.

Which means Diesels end up in "professional" all-day work, and sparkers in incidental to-work roles. Which influences how the tax-man can cut a slice. When automobiles were a luxury in a socialist society, tax the rich! When trucks are carrying goods to balance the GNP, let them off cheap. Or vise-versa, as in the US today. (However fuel for farms is traditionally taxed lower.) Cars are our Right, truckers grumble but pay the tax (in many cases, without any direct vote). The economic fact they favor different engine technology and drink different fuels has been very convenient for discriminatory taxation.

And exceptions to every rule. The GM sedan Diesels converted from the 350 spark-block gave horrible life (odd, because GM once knew as much about automotive Diesels as anybody). The 1942 Plymouth sparker never dies: my brother's needs a new fuelpump but that's $13.

 

[bcarso]

[quote author="PRR"]> the US EPA penalizes nitrogen oxide emissions more than anywhere else in the world.

I was in Los Angeles in 1959. "LA Smog" was nasty. It would stand up and bite. And not well understood at the time. But NOx is assumed to be a large part of that.

25 years later I spent two days around SF Bay and sensed no trace of the good old LA air. Of course SF is smaller and windier than the LA basin.



... Which influences how the tax-man can cut a slice. When automobiles were a luxury in a socialist society, tax the rich! When trucks are carrying goods to balance the GNP, let them off cheap. Or vise-versa, as in the US today. (However fuel for farms is traditionally taxed lower.) Cars are our Right, truckers grumble but pay the tax (in many cases, without any direct vote). The economic fact they favor different engine technology and drink different fuels has been very convenient for discriminatory taxation.
[/quote]

I've been in LA all of my life, and the air definitely is a lot cleaner now than in the '50's and 60's, despite a lot more cars.


In TLS I read today of a new book by Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, and there was a gag quoted that’s marginally connected here (enough for me lol). From the Terry Eagleton review:

“He has a good line in sardonic East European humour, as when he reports that the difference between the Soviet Union and the mildly more reformist Yugoslavia was that whereas in the Soviet Union the people walked while their political representatives drove cars, in Yugoslavia the people themselves drove cars through their political representatives. “

 

[rob_gould]

I am not a believer in peak oil, but regardless, you may find this link interesting - people taking a proactive approach to reducing fuel consumption

http://www.transitiontowns.org/

 

[skipwave]

Thanks for the insights on diesel everybody.

[quote author="SSLtech"]-When the Pompe-Duse finally makes it over here (what the HELL is keeping VW?) people might see what a fantastic motor it is... but then this is America, and most people just think that diesels are slow, noisy and underpowered... :roll: [/quote]

There is a stigma to overcome. My grandma drove an old 'Benz diesel sedan and it was bumpy ride. Plus she drove like a.... ah..... grandma.

I think that the appeal of BioDiesel versus ethanol was that the biodiesel could be had from recycled post-consumer material. Unfortunately, I haven't heard of any attempt to organize that on a mass scale. There must be huge amounts of used cooking oil being dumped. Some big fast food corporation aught to jump on that for the public relations value of being part of the solution. On the other hand, most of the folks running on biodiesel probably hold ideals that would keep them from jumping into bed with an unctuous fast food giant. A bleak irony that less polluting fuel be made from the runoff from people polluting their bodies.

 

[abecedarian]

I haven't been here in 11 months. I hope this isn't a digression but I bought a Prius on Aug 24, 2007. I have driven it 50,000 miles since then. I was cruising at 64 miles per hour yesterday getting 62 miles to the gallon on the highway with the a/c on at 72F. Today going 70 mph I was averaging 55 mpg. The trick is the Prius must be driven with cruise control on at any speed really. That's when the computer regulates the throttle and the MPGs go up drastically. If I don't use the cruise control my average goes down dramatically. The car has been great. No problems what so ever. I drive an average of 1,200 miles per week and it looks like that will continue for the next 52 weeks. I am so glad I bought this car and I did it when gas was $2.80 a gallon. Imagine what I'd be paying in gas now with a regular car! Just me 2 cents.

 

[SSLtech]

Actually when you look at it that way, you're still tricking yourself somewhat.

ANY gasoline vehicle will give best/lowest delta fuel consumption at highway speeds, and you can IMPROVE the Prius' cruise performance by throttling back slightly uphill... the computer doesn't "see" hills, but you can.

Cruise control usually beats human brain/foot/throttle interaction in gasoline vehicles, because the human brain EXPECTS to go faster downhill, and there is always a slight 'lead foot' instinct... even Granny has it.

The Prius is a good car, and I'm actually for hybrids, though I know my post history contains a good deal of counter-information, because I do feel the need to play devil's advocate.

At highway speeds the Prius is just a small gasoline car, with a slightly optimistic computer. it's biggest benefit is a fairly slippery shape and that it punches a rather SMALL hole through the air. -Other than that, it is subject to the same influences as conventional powertrain vehicles.

Keith