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.

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.

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.

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.

The Truth Shall Set you Free

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.

Electric Cars Are The Future

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.

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.

Conclusion

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.

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.

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?