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.

The UK has seen a steady increase in electric bike sales as one of the worlds largest user base. As many new and more attractive models become available with battery technology moving forward, the future of the electric bike looks sweet.

Although prices of electric cycles are still a little high, they are coming down, with some budget models available from £300. For the serious biker, lightweight, quality bikes with powerful motors and sophisticated battery saving technology can be had for anything from £5,000 and up. Expect the average bike to set you back around £500 – £600 such as the Synergie Mistral, my personal favourite.

In addition to the electric bike, car drivers who passed their driving test before 2001 automagically have full moped entitlement. Mopeds are another area to get excited about with chinese imported motorcycles now available on the net for the small sum of £500 new.

Baotian Tanco – 49cc 4 Stroke Scooter

These are not your old 49cc Thomas bike, no!! These are 4 stroke (no mixing oil/petrol 2 stroke mess), 49cc single cyclinder bikes with electronic ignition (CDI), electric start and alarm/immobiliser to boot. Better still, these scooters don’t even look like mopeds, they look more akin to full size road bikes, with the exception of the step-through design.

In my opinion, the Baotian Tanco looks quite nice and I wouldn’t feel too stupid riding it, hence why I went out and bought one – Marshy’s Motorcycles.

Not only are these bikes very competitively priced against european makers such as Peugeot etc, they are also very reliable. Parts are also readily available and reasonably priced. Fuel economy obviously plays part to their success, with up to 130mpg, giving the two-finger salute to the fuel price hike.

I’m not a betting man but if fuel prices continue to rise above inflation, this new “two-wheel-trend” is sure to continue.

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 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.

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.

The majority of UK motorists, probably spend 30-90 minutes of their daily commute in heavy traffic. Traffic jams & queues seriously hurt fuel economy & ultimately your pocket, so I would encourage you to explore alternative routes to your destination. This may seem obvious to some, but there are a lot of sheep out there who just ‘follow the herd’, they drive the same route every day, get stuck in the same traffic jams etc. If you are one of these people, you may need to go take a Bungee jump/Rollercoaster ride/Sky dive etc . An eye-opening experience of that nature should snap you out of ‘Robot Mode’ and start you thinking for yourself.

Imagine for a moment that you work at home. You get up at 8:15, send the kids off to school, grab a coffee, lounge on the sofa & write fluff on your laptop till lunchtime. You don’t watch Televison news or buy a paper, only robots do that, they are used to misery & depression and think it’s normal. Instead you take a drive out & visit friends or family for a few hours, and get back in time for the kids coming home from school. Then after you help the kids with their homework and have your dinner, you play online poker for the rest of the day, or watch a movie, play your guitar/piano etc, no traffic, no boss, & no stress. Well that’s my average day and I love it! I am not a rich man, but life sure is sweet! Most of you will not have a choice, and you must suffer the daily grind through the jams. Something you should be asking yourself is, if your car is suitable for the environment you spend the most time driving in? If you are planning to buy a used car in the near future, you should be looking for a diesel car. With fuel prices so high these days you need to get the most miles for your money. There are many frugal Petrol hatchbacks I could recommend, but if you rack up high miles, or you need anything larger than a Fiesta, Corsa, Clio etc, a diesel car is the way to go, the benefits are obvious. If you spend half your daily commute stuck in traffic at tick-over, the diesel car will use a lot less fuel, probably less than half of the equivalent petrol vehicle, simply because diesels are much more efficient at tick-over than an equivalent petrol engine. Also let’s not forget to mention the generally better economy for the remainder of your journey, add in stronger reliability, longer engine life, lower depreciation and higher resale value, its just plain silly not to buy one! Some of you may be thinking ‘but Diesel Fuel costs more than Petrol on UK forecourts’ yes it does, and a new diesel car usually costs more to buy in the first place. When you do the maths on petrol v diesel, at 12,000 miles per year, it really only begins to pay off AFTER 3 years, this is also the point in ownership, when a lot of people would change their car for a new one, eliminating the savings. For higher mileage driver’s, it starts to pay off much sooner. I would recommend that if you buy a brand new car, you should keep it for as long as possible, at least 5 years if you can, to really feel a difference in your pocket. With depreciation being the 2^ndlargest motoring expense for UK motorists, it makes far greater financial sense to buy a used car. An example of smarter thinking, would be to buy a 3 year old car ,with warranty, at your local car auction (pay trade price), drive it for 1 year, then sell it privately to get all your money back! Zero depreciation? Well maybe for you! We call that one ‘The depreciation game’. As any good used car guide will show you, there can be a huge difference between Trade Price & Private Sale price of any used car, and that is the Wave you get to ride on, for up to a year. Anyway, this article is supposed to be about driving environment and I am way off track.

The reality of your daily commute is more likely: up at 6.30, quick breakfast, you then bolt out the door, into your car, and you spend the next 90 minutes stuck in traffic, flicking mints at the car in front. You eventually arrive at work, just in time to hear a lecture on punctuality. If that sounds like your typical day, then i’m smirking right now, for the simple truth is, if you work for someone else ‘they’ decide how much you earn this month, and unless you inherit a few million, you will always be poor. I’m not trying to make you feel bad, I just want you see that in the real world, there is no such thing as job security, and there are only sheep & wolves in the business world. Don’t be the Sheep.

In diesel engines, air and fuel are both infused into the engine at different stages, as opposed to petrol where a mixture of air and petrol are introduced. The fuel is injected into the diesel using an injector where in a petrol engine, a carburetor is used for this very purpose.

With petrol engines, fuel and air are sent into the engine at the same time, then compressed. The air and fuel mixture will limit fuel compression, and thereby hence the overall efficiency. Diesel engines only compress air, and the resulting ratio can be much higher.

Advantages

Diesel engines are much more efficient and preferable as compared to petrol engines due to the following reasons:

1. Diesel engines have overcome the several disadvantages of earlier models that featured higher noise and maintenance costs. Now, they are quiet and require less regular maintenance when compared with petrol engines of a similar size.

2. Diesel engines are more rugged and reliable.

3. There is no sparking at all as the fuel ignites. The absence of spark plubs or spark wires also helps to lower maintenance cost.

4. The fuel cost produced is 30 – 50 percent lower than petrol engine fuel prices.

5. Petrol burns hotter than diesel, and therefore they have a shorter life span when they are compared with diesel engines.

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.

The UK has seen a steady increase in electric bike sales as one of the worlds largest user base. As many new and more attractive models become available with battery technology moving forward, the future of the electric bike looks sweet.

Although prices of electric cycles are still a little high, they are coming down, with some budget models available from £300. For the serious biker, lightweight, quality bikes with powerful motors and sophisticated battery saving technology can be had for anything from £5,000 and up. Expect the average bike to set you back around £500 – £600 such as the Synergie Mistral, my personal favourite.

In addition to the electric bike, car drivers who passed their driving test before 2001 automagically have full moped entitlement. Mopeds are another area to get excited about with chinese imported motorcycles now available on the net for the small sum of £500 new.

Baotian Tanco – 49cc 4 Stroke Scooter

These are not your old 49cc Thomas bike, no!! These are 4 stroke (no mixing oil/petrol 2 stroke mess), 49cc single cyclinder bikes with electronic ignition (CDI), electric start and alarm/immobiliser to boot. Better still, these scooters don’t even look like mopeds, they look more akin to full size road bikes, with the exception of the step-through design.

In my opinion, the Baotian Tanco looks quite nice and I wouldn’t feel too stupid riding it, hence why I went out and bought one – Marshy’s Motorcycles.

Not only are these bikes very competitively priced against european makers such as Peugeot etc, they are also very reliable. Parts are also readily available and reasonably priced. Fuel economy obviously plays part to their success, with up to 130mpg, giving the two-finger salute to the fuel price hike.

I’m not a betting man but if fuel prices continue to rise above inflation, this new “two-wheel-trend” is sure to continue.

The future has been revealed: a day will come when there will be no more oil.

The first step that science and industry can provide to help out is innovative, energy-conserving vehicles. Recognizing this need, Hybrid cars have sprung up everywhere from almost every auto manufacturer, with more models being planned and produced in the coming months.

GM introduced the EV1 electric concept vehicle several years ago. While it never went into wide-scale production, that technology will definitely be analyzed and possibly brought back to the market.

Companies and municipalities are beginning to include Hybrid and bio-diesel powered vehicles in their fleets, further increasing the demand for alternative-fuel vehicles.

Celebrities have stepped into the picture, as well as businessmen, women, and environmentalists. While bio-diesel is an affordable alternative, it is still a major polutant, and not all cities have convenient bio-diesel stations in which to fill up.

Many car companies are “going green” – Saturn even calls their environmentally friendly line of vehicles their “Green Line.” Solar cell technology, biodisel, electric engines – everything is on the table for these vehicles. The next few years will see some interesting new designs to improve fuel economy and use less energy in the process of transporting people and things from one place to another.

One real advantage, other than saving money at the pump, is that wide adoption of newer, “Green” vehicles will mean less polutants in the air. This in turn will help with the man-made components of global warming, and in larger cities, with the smog problem that has been with us for the past several decades.

Industry experts are quick to point out that alternative fuel green cars have higher efficiency, thus increasing their EPA miles per gallon rating over traditional gas and diesel vehicles – a pleasant surprise when you see the vehicle’s sticker at the dealership.

The downside is the higher cost of these vehicles. Over time, this cost will come down as competition will force auto makers to find more economical ways of producing their lines of environmentally-friendly cars and trucks.

It has even been theorized that less automobile polutants will have a positive effect on the health of metropolitan areas. While this won’t be an overnight change, it will be interesting to see the statistics on asthma, allergies, and respiratory infections over the next few years.

And that’s just the start. As more and more of the world’s nations can afford their own personal transportation, gas will be in shorter and shorter supply, with more pollution yet to come.

However, there may be better ways to fuel your car and cut down on the cost of gas, as well as the pollution.

Sometime’s called “Brown’s Gas” or HHO fuel, more and more people are turning to simple tap water to improve their fuel economy and save money on gas. Different from water hybrids or hydrogen fuel cell technology, water-enhanced vehicles are not currently available from major automobile dealerships.

Still experimental, there are at least 10 different ways that water can be used to fuel your vehicle. To confuse the issue even further, designs and step by step procedures have been scattered across the internet and book stores with no clear path in sight.

Now, for some good news.

Coming soon: groups of at-home engineers motivated to find a solution to higher fuel prices and cut down on harmful emissions have found feasible, low-cost ways to modify your car to run on HHO Brown’s Gas. They have been working on ways to make the modifications simply and painlessly such that anyone with basic tool skills could implement a change in their car or truck. Some of the recent work that I have seen claims 35% to 70% improved fuel economy. The possibility of cutting down emissions and reducing rising the effects on the environment are impressive. Not only that, but adapting your car to this new form of “Water Hybrid” can mean less carbon build-up in your engine, reducing wear and tear on your vehicle.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t really have a special garage, special tools, or the know-how to do a lot of work on my car. However, one of the plans I saw claimed even *I* could do this, with easy step-by-step instructions that wouldn’t void my car’s warranty.

I’m trying to get my hands now on these plans. Stay tuned – before I make a recommendation I want to check this out myself – and I’ll keep you filled in on my progress along the way.