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30+ mpg is supposed to be good??

The majority of cars will be driven by petrol until:

a) The oil wells all run dry, or

b) The tree-huggers revolt and overthrow the fat-cat oil producers and thier political cronies, or

c) The world ends, or

d) All of the above

--T
 
37 MPG for the Americanised Toyota Yaris? What a total ripoff! Even the old Toyota Echo (non-hatchback Yaris) they've been selling stateside gets over 40 MPG!

In England even the gas-powered Yaris gets over 50 MPG, and the diesel pulls 68 MPG COMBINED. Of course these are measurements in Imperial gallons but I think the difference adds up to less than 10% less MPG stateside.

Is Toyota crippling the efficiency to sell the ludicrous-profit-margin Prius, or is it the strict environmental regulations (especially so here in SoCal)??

It's not even legal to sell new diesel-engine passenger cars in California.
 
Ah, interesting. In Sweden, we're finally moving in the other direction when it comes to diesel. In the rest of Europe, almost every second car that is sold is a diesel (or so it is said). In Sweden, less than 10% have been diesel so far, mostly due to penalizing taxes based on the diesel engines from the 1970'ties. Those polluted the air with nasty gases, and thus the yearly tax in combination with a tax per mile you drive would make them very unattractive to own.

Since a decade or more, modern diesels with particle filters and other wonders let out far less nasty gases and CO2 (or so it is said) than a regular petrol driven car. Swedish taxation has remained the same though, until this year when they radically change the system for all vehicle types and all fuels. In some extreme cases, a diesel car with a particle filter will be profitable to own compared to the equal petrol car only after around 80-100 miles/year, but more typically the break-even is around 1000 miles/year.
 
carlsson said:
So, the majority of cars will be driven by petrol until all the Arab/Muslim countries have been neutralized? (for some value of "neutralized")
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I don't mean to give the wrong impression here, I'm not anti-Arab or anti-Islam. In fact, probably the opposite is true. If being anti-Israeli makes me by default pro-Arab/Muslim/Palastinian, then so be it. I just refuse to be labeled 'Anti-Semite' on the basis of my political stance. Those who choose to label me Anti-Semite don't seem to recall that the Palastinians/Arabs/et. al. are also sons of Shem.
I believe that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. The Israelis have been participating in terrorism all along, from the 1947 Bombing of the King David Hotel, which killed 91 civillians, right up to the latest act of genocidal warfare, this morning's missle attack on a residential neighborhood in Gaza, which might or might not have 'neutralized' a terrorist or two. I mean, really...??? They machine-gun children who commit 'insurection' by throwing rocks at tanks! Pardon me for not jumping to the side of the 'poor, oppressed, Jews', but there's only so much I can stomache. I got nothin' against Jews, Muslims, Arabs, or any other group, (well, mebbe JWs, but they're just plain annoying), but the simple accident of birth doesn't make one inherently evil, however, a people's choice of government can reflect on that culture's general mindset.

--T
 
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Sorry, it was not my intention to make you sound like you want to blast those Far East countries into oblivion. Maybe neutralized is far too military word to use. How about "Western adopted" or "Western civilized"? I'd rather not just say civilized, since I realize these countries already have a civilization, albeit sometimes not highlighting the same values as other civilizations do.
 
I dunno, mebbe I read it the wrong way. My usual knee-jerk is to jump-in on the side of the underdawg. (Give Ireland back to the Irish!).

--T
 
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What if a buncha desert-dwellers suddenly found themselves in the position they were in a hundred years ago -- with nothing to eat but sand, and all the light sweet crude they want to wash it down with? That would create such a power-vacume in the middle east that the sucking sound wolud blow-out even Ross Perot's eardrums. The US (and other powers) would no longer be able to excercise whatever little control they now have, and Armegeddon becomes a real possibility.
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I understood this that if the world was not oil dependent anymore, the people in countries whose wealth is based on the oil industry would not have any obligations or business relations to the rest of the world, so they could cause a big fight (what you refer to as Armegeddon). My point was that if these countries have been Western adopted (or neutralized as I first wrote) before the oil dependence ends, the riots may be avoided on a civil manner.
 
NathanAllan said:
I had to vent somewhere. I am seeing ads on TV about these new cars getting 38 miles per gallon and this is the best that they can do? I had a 1977 Mustang (yes, the Pinto based one) and I got that kind of mileage. It wasn't supposed to get that good of mileage, though. What I did was:

1. Add a header to its 4-cyl engine with a as straight as possible 2" pipe,
2. Put a Mallory SuperCoil on the ignition system with copper core wires,
3. Put a cheap-o TurboII muffler on my now near-straight pipe,
4. Block the smog pump,
5. Put in the hot-burning and high temp splitfire spark plug,
6. Ran an open air filter.

So I was basically tweaking my system to run better. This kind of thing doesn't really work on newer cars like my Cavalier, but I can still get a header and better exhaust, which I plan on doing, and get the high quality wires that have copper cores. Better spark, better mileage. And they make a ram air for it, too. Better mileage from less restriction of airflow. Anyway, most cars have tweaks in them that make them run better. Since I was doing all of my own work it was easy for me but I understand that if you had someone do all this it would likely cost a bundle.

Every time I see those commercials I remember my Mustang. And then most likely I go into a tirade about it to anyone who'll listen, heh heh.

Nathan
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when i was a teen just before i got my car my mom took me to sears in her yellow mustang it was brand new 1977 and every1 there thought it was cool. I didn't i'm a chevy kind of guy
 
I keep seeing those commercials and I keep thinking back to my mustang. matter of fact, there's one like my old one for sale on Ft. Bliss (saw it while I was delivering). It looks like it's been restored and is all shiny. I had 15" rims on mine, the one i saw has it's original 13" and it kind of makes the car look a bit goofy. They were wide, and I kept having to buy tires for them rubbing against the inside of the wheel wells. http://www.angelfire.com/ca/stoneys/ I found that looking for a pic. The one I saw is blue or silver (it was dark when I saw it) and looks like maybe a ghia. I miss that car. I'm not gonna even ask about it, got too much to do. If I can find a fixer upper that's more or less complete and not wrecked I might go for it :)
 
Heh! My first Mustang was a '64, which I happily got rid of, after it had tried to kill me on several occaisions. The steering wheel is just a little too large for a car that size, and when attempting to make a quick (power-slide) left-hand turn, the driver's elbow has a tendancy to bash into the doorframe, right smack on the funny-bone, causing the hand to go numb and lose it's grip on the wheel, leaving car and driver at the mercy of inertial forces. (The last time, it was a telephone pole that stopped me from squirting out into heavy traffic, after jumping the curb and shooting across the median).

I dunno, I have had several Mustang IIs, which I really liked, but I never really understood the popularity of the 'original' body-style.

--T
 
Of course, when I saw my first Mustang II, I sorta sneered at it (having come up around Mach 1s, Boss 302s, & Shelby GTs, etc). I took one look and said something to the effect of: "Mustang? That ain't no Mustang, it's just a Pinto with a cigarette lighter!" It took a while for me to come to appreciate the 'new' down-sized pony car.

--T
 
Possibly the solution to gas prices goes back to WW2 where I remember reading of one enterprising Brit who due to petrol scarcities had a closed Vat on top of his Morris filled with pig excrement which supplied him with methane to power his vehicle. Think it also had a picture of it, so it wasn't simply urban lgend.

Could be the BS coming out of most of the western "leaders" could also be packaged and used for the same thing.

L
 
Alternatives can be expensive. I briefly looked into converting a car to electric power but the approximately $10,000 it would take can buy a lot gasoline.

Kent
 
I've thought about electric but yeah, they're so expensive as to not be affordable (to convert at least). I'm trying to figure out a way to use alcohol effectively and not spend a fortune converting. Or maybe dual fuel. Still some research to be done there.
 
I have a practical solution for the higher cost of gas. The vehicle in question is a 1994 Saturn SL2. (124hp) First, some data:

AVG MPG: April & May 2005: 26.13
AVG MPG: April & May 2006: 28.07

Difference: 7.4% improvement

I'm driving a little differently than I used to. First it started as an experiment, but given my compulsive-obsessive behavior it is sticking. One of the big energy loses in driving a car is in using the brakes, and then accelerating back up to speed. Keeping this in mind, I've been doing the following:

- Driving at 60 MPG instead of 65. Yes, I'm a wuss and I'm getting passed by young kids on bicycles. However, even on an aerodynamic car the efficiency drops very quickly at higher speeds.

- Coasting into stop signs and red lights from an earlier distance. This gives two benefits .. it keeps you from wasting energy by braking, and it saves energy when getting back up to speed. It does require more planning and thought though - you just can go barging up to intersections anymore.


This is just simply an optimization problem ... With those two minor changes my $2.71 gallon of gas now goes a measurable bit further. I still need to check the tires to be sure they are properly inflated, but other than that nothing extra has been done to the car. Just the driver got fixed. :)

(I need to burn the money on gas for the airplane, which is usually $1.50 more per gallon than car gas.)
 
Auto!

I'd rather a manual, but this was the wife's car first. She's in a larger (and hungrier) minivan now. Having a choice of gears would be even better ...
 
I coast into stop signs too, if there is no other traffic behind me. To plan your driving is often featured in motor magazines, but it is also important to now and then brake hard to keep the brakes alive and not rust apart, at least over here (maybe brakes don't stick and rust in e.g. California?).
 
My sister had a Saturn and she got great gas mileage but she made up for it in maintenance. She might have gotten a lemon, but her belt tensioner went out and it wasn't immediately apparent and it took out everything that was on the belt. My wife and I found a Saturn for $850, running and driving, and we couldn't figure out why it was so cheap! It was spotless and looked great. We found out. It had a transmission leak, and it was on the one-piece housing that had to be replaced. We talked to a few mechanics (I haven't worked on a Saturn ever and don't know them) and the housing was gonna be so pricey as to make the car not worth it. I don't remember most of the details, but jusat remember the bad feeling about it. After that I'm not much of a Saturn fan.

I'll go back to my original post. Good airflow in and good exhaust flow out with an over the top ignition system does great for mileage. Those other tricks, too. And sensible driving habits.
 
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