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MpgTips News: December 2008
News is emerging that the big three car manufacturers, Ford, General Motors and Chrysler are in financial difficulty. It serves the greedy cigar chompers right. They’ve been ignoring the public for years, building the same old heavy fuel consumption cars. Partly because they don’t want to spend money on research and development, they’re attitude is simply to go with what worked for them in the past, also because of pressure from the oil companies to produce vehicles that use plenty of fuel. Investing money in new technology is not on their agenda, unlike the Japanese manufacturers who are miles ahead in hybrid production and are actively researching other technologies. That’s why I think that Toyota, Nissan and Honda will soon become the new ‘big three’, Toyota is already a major player in the USA and Canada, with the Camry being the best selling car there for five years running. Here’s a christmas tip from me to them. Tip: Rule number one in any business: Don’t make products that nobody wants! I will also tell you what we would like to see mass produced. 1) Pure Electric Cars, 2) Diesel Hybrids, 3) Hydrogen fuel cell cars that run on tap water. Any chance?, I doubt we’ll see them anytime soon, so we’ll continue to buy the same old rubbish and suffer the poor fuel consumption that appears to be purposely built in. - Well that’s the end of my December Rant and a Very Merry Christmas from me. - Alan.
MpgTips News: November 2008
It’s nice to see the price of fuel plummeting recently. It’s currently £0.91 per litre for unleaded and £1.06 per litre for diesel at my local filling station. That’s still too expensive in my opinion and the £0.15 per litre gap between the price of petrol and diesel is ridiculous. This absurdly silly approach to fuel taxation continues to punish the very people who are trying to save fuel. If you drive less than 15,000 miles per year, you might as well buy an economical petrol car. While we are all feeling the effects of the credit crunch right now, it will have an upside for many people with cheaper goods, services and fuel. As car dealers struggle to shift new cars, there is a large surplus of new cars building up at most car manufacturers worldwide, so car shoppers should demand and expect huge discounts, that is, if you can get the finance? - There’s always a catch.
Update:
I have recently updated the site with a fresh theme, a picture gallery, and an amazon shop, which is brimming with car related goodies like restoration books, top gear dvds, haynes car workshop manuals, road safety gear and a motoring tool section for the man who thinks he has everything. You will find hundreds of items like car fault code readers, service light reset tools, compression testers, battery/alternator tester, specialist job tool kits etc, many of the items are hard to find elsewhere, and there are many more products to come. Sales from the shop earn me a small commission, not much, but it all helps to keep the site going and I’m eternally grateful for every sale. Please bookmark the site so that you know where to come, when you need some weird tool you’ve never heard of. Also, many thanks to you loyal regulars who continuously return to the site, without you, I would probably go back to talking to myself, thanks for the support.
Big Myth about Environmentally Friendly Cars: ‘All the major car manufacturers are committed to making more enviromentally friendly cars’. Yeah Right!, and oil companies don’t go around buying out new technology companies just to bury anything new that threatens their monopoly. If car manufacturers are so interested in developing more economical cars and helping the enviroment, how come the first generation of hybrid cars are all based on PETROL engines?, where are the diesel versions?. The current range of hybrids available in the UK are a sick joke by the big boys, when compared to the large number of new super frugal 65+ MPG diesel cars available today, and the more frugal diesel cars are a hell of a lot cheaper to buy new. The answer to this particular question is very simple. Car manufacturers are just like politicians, they all want to create the illusion of doing something, while not actually making any real progress.
If Hybrids are the cars of the future then disneyland is full of skinny people. Hybrids still burn petrol or diesel, they still pollute, they’re expensive to buy and they still cost £70 to fill up. They also deliver poor MPG in relation to the latest diesel cars and everyone knows this is old technology. What I would like to be able to buy at my local dealer is a purely electric car capable of achieving a sensible range on one charge, but nobody is interested in building one. Second choice would be a hydrogen fuelled car because I know that you can make hydrogen out of water, indeed I have already done just that with a diy hydrogen booster I previously built, so I already know its releatively easy to make your own hydrogen fuel. Nope we can’t tax water so you can’t have one, and if we did decide to allow someone to build one, we will scare you shitless by making it so complicated that you will have to use a hydrogen re-fuelling station, which is convenient for us because we are quietly confident that we would be able to continue taxing the shit out of you until you have no money left. The truth is that we live in an oil based economy, so the last thing our leaders want is a cheap mode of transport for the masses that utilises anything other than a heavily taxed oil based fuel. Especially if one of your oil company owning buddies is the president of an even larger country, and you’re currently helping him plunder the middle east (I hope he doesn’t read this).
Any fool could easily build a better hybrid than Toyota or Honda have produced thus far. Boat owners in the far east realised a long time ago, that if you replace the factory fitted diesel engine with a 240vAC motor, and power that motor with a smaller diesel generator, fuel efficiency increases anywhere from 40 - 200% depending on the boat, so let’s take that same theory and apply it to your average hybrid. It appears to me that any hybrid would be a damn site more efficient if it simply had a small diesel generator powering its electric motor. If you add in a very small battery pack to capture regenerative braking energy, which in turn would occasionally reduce the load on the small & efficient generator. Any battery expert will gladly tell you that there are sometimes up to a 40% energy loss when charging a batteries, so it’s obviously much smarter to send any electricity you produce directly to the motor, eliminating the loss incurred through charging a battery pack first.
Does all this make sense to you? I should think so, I think it’s high time the car industry woke up and smelled the fumes, instead of spoon feeding us old technology, just give the people what they actually need, a cheap fuel efficient car for the masses. I have often thought that if just one car manufacturer were to build a modern super cheap ‘peoples car’, bung in a super frugal engine, offer a ‘no frills package’ ie fit wind-up windows and a radio, they would sell millions of them. While there are a few cars that already come close, they all seem to be fundamentally flawed in some way, like the Ford Ka, the initial idea was a good one, but they fitted an old crappy 1300cc petrol engine that struggles to return 45mpg, where is the diesel version? The latest BMW 320i petrol returns 46.3 mpg, so the puny Ford Ladybird is harder on fuel, WTF is going on? Another example of the extent of this problem is the latest small car offering from Volkswagen UK, the Volkswagon Fox, another reasonably priced small car but no Diesel version available in the UK, WHY NOT? the petrol VW Fox only returns a pathetic 46 mpg. I get the distinct impression that certain influencial people don’t want us to have access to truly economical cars at an affordable price.
MpgTips News: September 2008
The Root Cause of High Fuel Prices: 
The Root Cause of High Fuel Prices
I’m not really into conspiracy theories, but it seems obvious to me that everytime there is a threat to world oil production, the price of a barrel of oil sky-rockets. So if you happened to own your own oil company and went around stirring up trouble in oil producing areas of the world, it could make you even richer. Now I’m not suggesting for a moment that any of you oil barons do that, I think you might meet some fierce competition, and at £6 a gallon, diesel is already too expensive for anyone without a ministerial expense account. I’m just saying that if you were in a position of power and just happened to own an oil company, it may seem like the logical thing to do. With grossly inflated fuel prices, many people are asking the question ‘why are electric cars not popular?’ I read this question somewhere a while back and it made me laugh, so I’d like to set the records straight. Electric cars were never given a chance in the first place, people have been building prototypes for 70 years with nothing viable ever coming from it. We are told the problem is due to poor battery technology and the inability to store enough energy in a small lightweight package. The reality of the situation is that battery technology developed through private companies is now advanced enough to solve those problems, those same problems could have been overcome a long time ago, if anyone in government or the car industry had been remotely interested and threw some money into it. But they all shunned the idea and left it up to underfunded private companies to develop the technology, that’s guaranteed to slow the development down long enough for the oil companies to make another fat profit, not to mention all those extra taxes. The situation is aggravated by the fact that if any of those private technology companies get too close to developing anything significant, the oil barons are rich enough to buy them out and bury the technology before it ever see’s the light of day, many of you smarter individuals will already know this happens frequently.
The barebones truth is that everyone is under the influence of ‘big oil’ and pander to their whims, that’s why we’re now being offered hybrid petrol/electric cars when the same electric power plant technology could easily be used to make something much better. It’s blatantly obvious that the major players in this world still want us to use oil, and plan to make us pay dearly for it, right up to the very day it theoretically runs out. Which incidentally is widely believed to be another monumental lie, the whole ‘oil reserves will be dry in 20 years’ myth. Think about this for a moment, if you’re a salesman, and you have a product to sell, that product will have little value if you have 10 million of them in the warehouse, so in order to give your product some value, you create scarcity ‘we only have 20 left’ and ‘we want top dollar for them as nobody is sure if we can get any more’ get the picture? It’s a classic sales pitch, (High demand + scarcity = high prices) The bottom line is that if people realised that oil was actually in abundance on this planet, its value would plumment and so would the stock market, and any ‘oil based economy’ would collapse with it, as there’s not much tax to be skimmed with petrol at £0.20p a gallon.
So with all that to think about I am not quite ready to dismiss the viablility of electric cars in the future, I firmly believe that right now they ARE the future, especially when you realise that it’s fairly easy to produce cheap or free electricity, that’s probably also the reason the development of electric cars has been suppressed so aggressively. Recently I have also found myself to completely lose interest in hydrogen fuel cell technonlogy, and for all the wrong reasons. It’s not because it doesn’t work, I already know from my own experiments that it does, it’s because of the desire of certain people to make it as expensive as possible if it ever becomes a reality. Those same industry leaders already have you buying bottled water, a couple of water filter jugs works just fine for me. I’d like to take this opportunity to warn anyone who isn’t filtering their tap water at home, that they’re seriously risking the health of their family & themselves, I won’t go into the many reasons why, if you can find this page, then you can do your own research.
Extensive research on the internet will reveal, that hydrogen fuel technology has long been suppressed in much the same way, it was first developed more than 100 years ago around the same time as petrol, but with hydrogen being one of the most abundant elements on earth, industry heads realised very quickly that it wouldn’t be profitable if it can be simply made from water. When all this information finally reaches your subconcious mind, what will really piss you off is the realization that, we do not need and have never needed oil.
The sad truth is that we have all been forced onto a runaway train, and nobody with power or influence has any intention of stopping the train and letting us off. I don’t claim to be an expert on any of the issues I have just mentioned, what you have just read is my personal view of what’s going on around us, the views of an ordinary man. While I firmly believe that one man can make a difference, it helps if he has power and money, and as I posses neither, I think I’d better crawl back in my corner for now.
MpgTips News: August 2008
Road Charging
One new topic in the motoring world, which has surfaced recently, is the UK government plans for a new Pay-Per-Mile road charging scheme. Under this new scheme, motorist’s will be charged for every mile they drive, and rate’s will vary, (up to maybe £1.50 per mile!) depending on the location and time of day, with the highest rates being charged at peak traffic times, when we would all be doing needless errands like driving to work, or taking our kids to school. Like we don’t pay enough already? I would have to utilise all my swearing vocabulary to express my personal opinion, but I will keep it zipped for now. What we do know is that the chancellor slipped in research funding for the scheme in the march 2008 budget. If this outrageous scheme becomes a reality, I will move to Canada before paying one extra penny (seriously). I’d like to meet the genius who dreamed up this scheme and firmly place my boot somewhere.
MpgTips News: July 2008
Is it possible to get bad petrol in some filling stations?
The reported cases of bad petrol are increasing rapidly, and according to my garage mechanic sources the quality of petrol can vary immensely from different filling stations. The problem is increasing in proportion to the growing tendency of the major uk suppliers, to add a percentage of ethanol or a similar substitute, to unleaded petrol. My own personal view is that ethanol based petrol is of a much lower quality than straight petrol, I believe it has a lower overall energy content, and you may suffer a reduction in mpg using this new type of fuel. There has been rumours on the internet, that fuel containing ethanol may be causing engine damage. It has been claimed by nameless sources, that the ethanol in the fuel may attract water particles, and water in your fuel system is never a good thing. In summary I think its fair to say that bad petrol is the product of the new lower quality eco fuels. It is strangely convenient that the introduction of alcohol/ethanol into vehicle fuels also allows big business to offload their mounting surplus of rotten wine and other alcohols into the oil industry, it also makes petrol cheaper to produce for big oil, then as a double-shaft they continue to hike up the price of fuel at the pumps? Why does that not surprise me?
MpgTips News: June 2008
If you live in the UK, as I do, and you are paying £1.18 per litre of Unleaded Petrol or £1.30 per litre of Diesel, then you might agree that paying £75 to fill up your car is getting a tad expensive, and we all need to get better mpg. Even the Red Diesel Pirates are going to feel it this year, with the effective end of cheap Red Diesel in the UK. Car fuel economy is quickly becoming a serious problem for many motorists, we all need to tighten our belts & save fuel. Here at Mpgtips.co.uk I will provide you with all the fuel saving tips you need to increase vehicle efficiency and achieve better mpg.
The Site
The information contained within this site is based on my own personal experience of mixing petrol or diesel (and sometimes both) with various chemicals, testing driving theories and engine modifications. Over the coming weeks I will be telling you all about the joy of chemical additives, and yes, they are fun. I will also be spilling the beans on engine modifications, gas conversions, hybrid power units, the list is endless, I will post information about all of them in the near future.
Your views
Your opinions and experience on all aspects of fuel economy, would be a welcome addition to this site. If any reader has any information they would like to share on the following subjects: Electric car conversion, Gas conversion, Hydrogen / Water fuel cars, Engine modifications & other car fuel economy tips, Alan will happily post your views on the site (use the Contact Us page).
Helpdesk
If you need help, advice, or have any relevant questions, send me an email and I will try to help. Typical enquiries would be (but not limited to) car buying advice, fuel economy tips etc, some enquiries may be published in the ‘helpdesk’ section.
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