Dear Tim:
Unless methanol gives much worse gas mileage your list doesn't seem very accurate. I get almost 20 mpg city with 298 HP and I have a "heavy foot" (more highway but most of my driving is city). Assuming methanol doesn't give you a lot worse gas mileage than gasoline your talking about a heavy or very poorly designed vehicle to get only 13mpg. (My car isn't light, with a driver and a passenger it might be over two tons). OTOH if you replace the engine with a 130 HP engine it would be unlikely to get 37mpg.
A 130 HP car might get 37mpg, a 260 HP SUV might get 13 mpg, but they aren't the same vehicle with different engines.
Ethanol has 2/3rds the energy of gasoline per gallon and methanol has 1/2 the energy. The thing is the ethanol and methanol are fuels with oxygenates in them (they contain oxygen). They have a different fuel air ratios for complete combustion. Ethanol uses about a 8:1 fuel air mix while methanol uses a 4:1 fuel air mix. That is why racing engines use methanol for fuel. The exact same displacement uses twice the ethanol and 4 times the methanol. So even with the lower energy per gallon, the same exact engine (with the proper fuel lines, filters and engine computer tables) can get 133% the power on pure ethanol and 200% the power on methanol as it does on gasoline. The reverse is true with diesel. It needs a 19:1 fuel air mix so the 10% more energy it has per gallon actually produces 91% the power on the above engine.
So you are wrong. The same displacement engine (no changes to compression) using fuel injection that can handle all four fuels and any combination thereof will get different power outputs depending on the fuel used. If it gets 130HP on gasoline like the standard 2002 Ford Focus 2.0L DOHC engine, it would get 118HP on diesel, 130HP on gasoline, 173HP on ethanol and 260HP on methanol. On a fuel like M85 which is 85% methanol and 15% gasoline, not including a few additives like detergents and stabilizers, you would use 2.75 times the fuel having 1.58 times the energy or about 205HP. That would make the car about 1/6th faster so 126MPH top speed becomes 147MPH. Fuel economy would drop from 37MPG to 21MPG though and M85 tends to be more expensive than gasoline. E100 though is about $2.00 per gallon here versus $2.50 for gasoline. E100 would go about 139MPH and get 25MPG (31MPG at the same cost). Diesel would go about 122MPH, but get 40MPG (37MPG at same cost (diesel here is $2.75/gal)). All of this assumes that gearing would allow max power at these points.
And if you don't believe me, just think why street racers like to use NOx. The higher resulting oxygen percentage, drops the fuel-air ratio by a factor of 2 allowing 2 times the gasoline to be pushed into the engine yielding twice the power. Boom, your lowly 130HP compact car is accelerating like you just put a supercharged V6 in it.
Driving 5 minutes to the local store is a commute.
No! Its a local stop at the store. That's "driving around in the neighborhood". Most say that if you work in your neighborhood, "That's great for you, you don't have to commute every day!"
Not even close.
Saying it does not make it true or false. The facts speak for themselves.
Even using your definition, which I don't accept, 2.8 hours ia an outlier for any metro area in the US.
Not from LA's expanding suburbs to the city (or vice versa). Have you ever been stuck in "rush hour" traffic on I10 or I5? Its a parking lot with speeds rarely above 5MPH. Its no different in SF Bay area. "101 and 880, as well as most bridges, can be pretty heinous at commute times, however."
"Finally, don't live in the East or North Bay, since crossing those bridges at rush hour can be hellish! However, if you're near a BART station in the East Bay, that's a nice & quick way to commute." city-data.com
This is where Intel's and AMD's headquarters are located. Going from them to a posh neighborhood like Marin county can be a trying time. Use 511.org to see travel times. Be sure to look at it during the commuting hours. "50 percent of the traffic (bridges) crosses at peak hours (6-9 a.m. and 3-6 p.m.)" I got times of 180 minutes at 4:30PM today going from Sunnyvale to the midpoint of Marin County.
You may scoff, but I worked in those areas when having on-site testing of my company's software for firms in that area. I only had to suffer it for 1 to 2 weeks. Fortunately, my hotels were only 6 to 10 miles from the job sites, but I still had to fight the traffic. Even "reverse" commutes that used to be quick (40-50min) are now "slowly moving parking lots" that take a couple of hours. And these stories are from people who did it for years.
Pete |
