MpgTips.co.uk

Time to break out the snow chains and the ice-scraper as February brings heavy snowfall to the UK. People in the south of England seem to be getting the worst of the snow.  Lucky devils!  call me irresponsible, but I love the snow.  I’ve had some of my best and worst driving experiences with snow on the ground. The worst being, letting the handbrake off my car in a steep driveway and it immediately sliding sideways into a skip!  The best experiences being finding an empty car park and using for a skid pan and just generally driving everywhere sideways!  It’s tremendous fun, and I thoroughly recommend it to blow the cobwebs off any car, although it won’t help to improve your fuel economy in the slightest.   On a more sombre note, car maker Honda has suspended production at its swindon plant for four months, until it clears it’s growing surplus of brand new cars, which are currently gathering dust as UK banks keep their stranglehold on new car finance , and ultimately the average UK motorist’s ability to get car credit.  Workers at Honda’s swindon plant will receive full wages for the first two months and around half their normal wage for the second two months.  The news is quite a surprise with Honda being one of the stronger manufacturer’s, it just goes to show that they’re all feeling the pinch at the moment.  Looking on the bright side, at least they didn’t actually sack anyone?

The good news is that fuel prices appear to have levelled out for the time being,  let’s just turn our heater’s up and see how long the cheap fuel period will last.

With christmas now behind us, i’m beginning to wonder what 2009 has in store for us.   It’s a great relief to see fuel prices plummet further, with local prices here in Northern Ireland down to a record £0.82.9 pence per litre. The big question now is ‘how long will it last?’,  the answer is probably not very long.  Whatever happens, it’s good to see the oil companies taking a break from fleecing the people.  With high fuel prices driving up food and energy prices in the last few years, and the price of just about everything else in our daily lives, i’m amazed that nobody has mentioned the oil industry’s part in the current global financial crisis.  While everyone’s attention is firmly focused on the greed of bankers, credit card companies and stock brokers, one of the major culprits seems to have gotten clean away with bleeding the economy dry.

The car industry in 2009

With the car industry apparently set to become a major casualty of the global recession in 2009, it’s time for car makers to have a major rethink.  While it’s nice to occasionally drool over V8 sports cars and italian supercars, for car manufacturers to continue to produce innefficient gas guzzling family cars, is really not serving the best interests of the people or the planet.  For 2009, we must ask ourselves these questions:

1) What use is a 155 mph car, when the speed limit is 70 mph?

2) How much more efficient would family cars be, if they were built to a maximum design speed of 70 mph?

Giving a man a high performance car is like handing him a loaded weapon, then telling him not to fire it, and fining him obscene amounts of money when he does.  What is the sense in all of that?  I’m not suggesting for one moment that we fill the world with one box blandmobiles,  just that we rethink our wants and needs and learn the difference between them.

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, their 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.

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 a stack of car videos.  Please bookmark the site so you can find it again.  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).

Build Your Own Hybrid?

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 Electric Motor, and power that electric 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.

Update: General Motors are currently developing a car using similar technology in the Chevrolet Volt Project, to what I described here, except that instead of using a small efficient diesel engine to charge the battery pack, they are opting for a 1.4 litre turbocharged petrol engine, you know just like the one that propels the Volkswagen Golf 1.4TSI to 130mph and pumps out 140bhp!   The American public probably think that’s a small engine compared to the V8’s they’re used to, the rest of us in europe can clearly see them getting the shaft!

The People’s Car

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.