Dybdahl,
I enjoyed the pictures, and you may be right about the energy used by a car vs. walking, but in terms of thermal efficiency, I believe cars are only around 20% efficient.
When I was in a thermodynamics course nearly 45 years ago, our instructor who'd just come from working at Allis Chambers told us while working there, he and another engineer built a modified carburator for his car. At the time he drove a nearly new Ford Country Squire, for those who can remember, with it's wooden looking side panels and 429 cu. in. engine this car weighed nearly 6000 pounds. While he didn't say so, we were studying vortices at the time he told us they'd gotten 75 MPG out of that car. They knew that what they did could never see the light of day.
Petroleum interests have prevented such monumental improvements in vehicle efficiency virtually forever. Can you imagine what the same technology would do for the 2 liter 2000# vehicles many of us drive today, look at the change in our world if vehicles got 200 or more MPG. Of course our cars no longer have carburators, now it's fuel injection, but I suspect with a little work we could greatly approve efficiency, or go back to that vortex carburator. The way I remember thermal efficiency working, a small improvement leads to major improvements in MPG. My old professor probably didn't manage more then a 10 to 15% improvement in thermal efficiency, but milage improved by about 500% as you were probably lucky to get 15MPG from that old Country Squire.
Gary |
