I have a problem with my car: it keeps running out of gas.
It seems like no matter how much gas I buy, it always needs more.
This persistent problem has endured over the entire use of the car. I didn't sign for this; when I drove it off the lot, it was already filled up, and there was no talk at the dealership of me having to fill it up again, and again and again, for all the rest of my days.
Even worse yet, the price I have to pay for this gasoline, this essential fuel, well, that keeps rising too. I can remember when gas was 80 cents a gallon. Now it's damn near three dollars a gallon; and there are some suggestions that it ought to be even higher.
Cross-posted at Diatribe
My car is not, as they say, very "economical", either. It is made of huge sheets of metal welded together. It's very heavy. And this heaviness, while ensuring my safety on the road (or so the guys at the dealership said) comes at an equally-heavy price: I hear our guys are over in Iraq right now, getting their limbs blown off in an attempt to secure the oil fields over there so we can take that oil, turn into gasoline, and put it in my car.
At which point my car (and all the others filled with gasoline) will, remarkably, run out of gas again.
Is anybody else seeing unassailable logic here? 'Cause I sure ain't.
Besides, there's just something about digging up aeons-old squished-up dinosaurs and pouring their liquefied bones into my gas tank that doesn't sit right with me.
Given this persistent problem with my car, I am constantly on the lookout for what you might call "alternatives".
Like public/mass transportation...bicycles....walking...more fuel-efficient cars....better-designed cars....cars that run on things more plentiful than gas (like air, or electricity)....
So I suppose it's only natural that a recent popular science blurb on CNN.com caught my eye:
"Mercedes' fish-inspired car"
This really caught my attention, so I dived right in.
It start out innocuous enough:
When Mercedes-Benz began to contemplate its next generation of high-efficiency small cars, it sought aquatic inspiration.
But instead of considering obvious undersea hot rods like sharks, the Mercedes team turned to a fish that resembled a car: the tropical boxfish...
Wind-tunnel testing of a clay model revealed a drag coefficient (Cd) of just 0.06, startlingly close to the ideal 0.04 of a water droplet.
Hot diggity! That's a damn slick lil car. 'Course it stands to reason that nature, having million of years of evolution (Whoops, intelligent design) to perfect them lil fishies, would make 'em pretty damn near perfectly suited for their environment. Nature (and by nature of course I mean God), the perfect designer.
With a Cd of just 0.19, the four-seat Bionic is significantly more slippery than today's most aerodynamic production vehicle, Honda's two-seat Insight (Cd 0.25).
Aww hell, I think I'm in love. It's so ugly it's cute. Annit does look like a boxfish.
Hell, I could get used to driving it around, on account of bein' able to brag to those damn Insight owners that my car has a lower Cd than them. Hah. Suckers.
The design team eschewed expensive, complicated and heavy fuel-cell or hybrid powertrains, opting instead for a 1.9-liter four-cylinder direct-injection turbodiesel
Well of course. T'aint nuthin heavier than one o' those damn-fool hybrid powertrains. Y'know, like the ones that have individual motors on each wheel. Or those using an entirely new propulsion method.
No, now don't argue, not a peep out of you America-hating, business-destroying Commie liberal pinkos. You know all those other technologies are being started in pansy-assed places like Franch and Europe, and they're all jealous of our freedoms.
Much better to stick with the tried, true, tested, good-old reliable American technology that we know. Like a turbodiesel
..that pushes the fishmobile to 62 mph in 8.2 seconds with a combined city/highway fuel economy of 70 mpg.
At a constant 56 mph, the concept car will return an amazing 84 mpg.
See? Why do we need all those limp-wristed namby-pamby electric-drive pluggable vehicles that can run off an ordinary household electric outlet, when a turbodiesel can get us so damn near 100 mpg?
After all, I'll be damned if I a drive around in something that makes me look like a hairdresser -- instead of the Rugged Construction Worker Cowboy High-Powered Executive that my V-12 American-built Ford/GMC AWD Expeditionary Canyonero Esplenada truly reveals me as.
Although the Bionic isn't coming to your local dealership, Mercedes does expect it to significantly influence the design language of its next generation of small cars.
Snark aside, this is where the article really got to me. The entire thing is the set up for one big tease: "We have this great tech concept, based on nature, that can really improve mileage -- without even resorting to the off-the-shelf alternative propulsion systems that exist. But instead of actually implementing fuel efficiency that trumps the CAFE standards by several orders of magnitude and passes on enormous fuel savings to the consumer, as well as reducing terrorism by obviating our need to rely on Mid-East oil, we're going to shelve the concept car, and instead simply promise that we'll allow our discovery to 'influence' our future 'design language'.
No really, we swear."
A commenter on the Green Car Congress link hits the nail on the head:
Automotive engines are designed for a running life of 5000 hours. During that time they make many (sometimes MANY) trips to the dealership/repair shop/parts store etc. Maintenance of the traditional internal combustion engine and ancillaries is a huge revenue source for the automotive industry.
Assuming your refrigerator motor/compressor runs 5 minutes out of every hour on average (probably a conservative estimate), after 20 years that motor will have racked up 14,600 hours of run time, and all of it start/stop, start/stop, etc. Yet how many of us have or know someone with a 20-year-old refrigerator? Rather than wearing out it's probably been moved to the basement to make way for something more stylish. And how many times has it been to the shop or even serviced in that 20 years? Once? Maybe?
The OEMs do not see this future EV trend as beneficial to them. Think about it: no transmission, a virtually indestructible motor, not even any oil changes! Where's the profit in that? Yes, the technologies mostly exist today, but you're not going to see the drive for them coming from the companies that stand the most to lose from their implementation. It's the little guys making this revolution happen.
(emphasis added)
Think about your average SUV engine. The engine itself is worth maybe $2,000.
Then think about the lifetime of the car, and how much gas that engine is going to consume over its useful running life. The gasoline consumed in that engine is worth probably $40,000.
Tomi over at GCC is absolutely right. There's no future in electric vehicles, or high-efficiency low-drag body styles paired with truly efficient power plants, because the economics are all wrong for all the most important industries. The big auto manufacturers won't roll out this new technology until all the oil is gone.
Who Killed the 70mpg Boxfish Car? Daimler-Chrysler did.