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To: energyplay who wrote (64012)	5/20/2005 5:05:20 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Here's another big improvement in fuel efficiency = no more traffic jams. With highways priced correctly and with electronic controls, the number of vehicles which could travel on roads and their average speeds and fuel consumption could be vastly improved. 10 times the traffic could be handled, safety could be greatly improved [suicides would be hard to stop but not many other deaths and injuries would happen], fuel consumption halved, travel times halved [or much better]. Fiddling with compression ratios isn't as good as fixing the real problems people face all day. Reducing fuel consumption while stuck in traffic jams isn't as good as getting rid of the traffic jams. Mqurice

To: energyplay who wrote (64012)	5/20/2005 11:27:13 PM
From: Slagle	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

energyplay Re: "hybrids" If you were to take a 50 year old British motorbike design and optimise it (while sticking very close to the original design) using the best available current technology you would have a better and more efficient motorbike. The same could be said for a 50 year old car design, say something like a MiniCooper or Morris Minor. But if you larded up the design with lots of the features consumers have been convinced they must have along with all the stuff the DOT and the EPA say you MUST have, then all you have is a piece of junk. A very expensive piece of junk. These hybrids sound great but from what I have read about the actual mileage (40mpg actual vs. 60+mpg EPA estimate) I don't see what the fuss is about. I had an early 80's VW Rabbit diesel that would get 60mpg at 40mph. Why not just buy something like that off ebay and save the big bucks if high mileage is the object. As power is torque times shaft speed you are saying that efficiency peaks in the upper end of the RPM band but at a lighter than maximum load. OK, maybe. There are some pretty complex relationships involved. There is whatever goes on in the combustion chamber. Then there are a whole slew of parasitic loads, mostly nonlinear that increase with speed (and maybe torque). Then there are parasitic loads that follow the square rule. But look at it this way; if you want to build a vehicle with a many-fold increase in fuel economy...all you have to do is to build it very small and light; no need for any new technology. A 2000 pound car would take half the energy to move around that a 4000 pound car; indeed much less than that. Rolling friction is a function of mass and speed. Energy required for acceleration is proportional to MV squared. But there is more to it than that. For a vehicle of half or quarter size the engine and drive train are also half and quarter sized and all the many parasitic loads therein are reduced accordingly. A less massive vehicle will also likely have a smaller frontal area and this smaller frontal area (whatever its aerodynamic characteristics) will have less aerodynamic drag than a larger vehicle. And as speed increases this can really be a big deal as drag follows the square rule. Whatever the initial drag amount is, it is going up as the square of the increase in speed. At real low speeds (10, 20 mph) this matters not at all. A shoebox shape is as good as a Clark Y. But around 35-40mph aerodynamic drag equals all the other loads combined and rises with the square rule. The above is the reason that none of the cars we build today get the mileage that the little English Ford or French built Simca that were imported here in the 1950's did. For whatever reasons we are going backwards with all this, not forwards. Slagle