MpgTips.co.uk

Ezee Forza electric powered bike

2008 has been a tough year for motorists with the recent hike in fuel prices.

The UK government has spent years trying to get motorists out of their cars and onto public transport. For some motorists, this is just not feasible however, some have resorted to the pedal cycle.

For those who have spent too many years behind the wheel, getting on a bike can seem daunting, until you add a motor to help you along.

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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.

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 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.

Fuel prices may be at a 5 year low right now, but it’s only a matter of time before the oil barons get greedy again.  I was thinking about that this very morning, when the news came on the radio about strikes at some oil refineries in Scotland, and I thought, “here we go again”.  This is exactly the excuse the oil industry was looking for to get prices up again, with oil workers on strike it creates the illusion that oil is now in short supply.  The way the whole oil industry regulates its own pricing, reminds me of the old salesman’s trick of ‘We’ve only got 50 left and we’re not entirely sure if we can get anymore? so we want top dollar for these!’  It still amazes me that the general public think that the oil industry actually knows how much oil there is left in the world?   Scientist’s don’t even know what’s at the bottom of the deep sea yet, never mind what’s below the sea bed.  With the sea covering two-thirds of this blob we live on, i’m fairly well convinced they’re just taking wild stabs in the dark with guestimates.  When I think back to 20 years ago, scientists then (commissioned and funded by oil barons) were predicting that we would run out of oil in the next 20-25 years, they’re still singing the same tune today with estimates of 20-25 years. They just beef up the price of oil by creating the illusion of scarcity, it would’nt surprise me if they had paid someone to instigate the damn strike themselves!  I also think that Gordon Brown won’t be too happy about the strike, as he’s working hard to keep prices down, how else will the economy recover?  Oh yeh, if we all just ‘get up to our eyeballs in debt’ and use our credit card’s ‘like it’s free’, the economy will recover just fine.  I almost soiled myself yesterday, when a newsreader on ITV (uk news channel) announced that the government may be about to announce that we’re ‘officially in a recession’.  I think the banks collapsing around us and billions being lost on the stock market were a big clue!

Tips for Manual Petrol Car Drivers

This is the most common car type on UK roads today, although diesel cars with a manual gearbox will probably take the lead in the near future, still with me? It’s worth mentioning that in this type of car, with the exception of steep hills, you should never need to go over 3000rpm. Tearing up the gears, then cruising in 5^th gear, is NOT driving for economy! I have tested all the fuel economy myths, the old method of the lowest revs in the highest gear, works quite well, (eg: 1500rpm in 5^th gear) but there are other factors that you must be aware of. A method I like to employ, is what I call the Imaginary Rev Limit, where for instance on a flat road, starting from a standstill, you imagine that you can’t exceed 2000rpm but there is a rule you must apply to this method, and it is just simply, never let the engine struggle. If you are sitting at 1500rpm in 5^th gear, and the car is chugging, or vibrating badly, then you have two options. Option 1: Increase your speed in 5^th gear, until the car runs smoothly again. Option 2: Drop down to 4^th gear to lessen the strain on the engine. Whatever option you choose, the engine would no longer be stressed. Option 1, would yield the highest fuel economy on a flat road, or a slight uphill stretch. This method does not take the engine ‘Sweet Spot’ into account, but it will serve you well if you can’t find the sweet spot. There was a time in the past when even I believed the sweet spot was a myth, but it is there, you will find it somewhere between 40-60mph in 5^th gear (or 6^th if you have a 6 speed box), in difficulty to find it’s similar to the G-Spot in women! If you have a mpg computer in your car, which gives an accurate reading in real time (a lot of them don’t), you should be able to see it, by varying your speed while cruising in your highest available gear. If you have a spare £100, you could buy a scangauge, you can find them on the internet, just google the name, it plugs into the OBD Socket found under the dash in most cars. It is much more than an mpg meter, and is extremely accurate, but probably only justifiable for a serious fuel economy nut like me. To sum up the sweet spot, I think it is accurate to say that it is a product of the torque characteristics of your engine, and is usually found at the peak point in the rev range where torque delivery is at its strongest, which is why it varies from car to car. Read the article ‘Driving Style’ for a snippet of knowledge on how to keep your engine running without using any fuel. What did he just say? Alright it was a little play on words, but the point I would like to get across, is that there are times when your car is using no fuel at all, and you can exploit that knowledge if you know when it’s happening.