[Spridgets] OT waaaay OT Electric Vehicles.

[bjshov8 at tx.rr.com]

> I think Smart Cars are stupid.  I read somewhere that the guys putting
> the Hyabusa motors in smart cars for performance are realizing better
> fuel economy if they drive them appropriately.  That, if true, is
> upsetting.

You can see my rants concerning design of things in other threads today.  I don't have faith that the automotive engineers are designing engines in the best way possible.  22 years ago I had a minivan with 4.3L engine, it would get 24mpg highway.  Now my wife drives a similar sized vehicle with 4.7L engine, it only gets 17mpg highway.  So in 22 years we have not improved the design of our engines and instead we have gone backwards?  Almost anybody that tunes EFI engines these days says they can give you a tune that will make more power and get better economy.  So why do the original designers not do this?


 
> As far as having "different Diesel" I think it would probably just be
> a matter of refinement.  If Euro Diesel is more advanced and better,
> then we should migrate toward it.  If not, we should keep going and
> save our migrations for something more advanced and better.

We have different grades of gasoline for sale at the same gas stations, we could certainly have different grades of diesel for sale there too.  There could be a different grade for automobiles vs. trucks.


 
> OTOH, many farmers and users of heavy duty Diesel pickups are getting
> furious when they get a new truck that gets 12-15MPG when their 5- and
> 10-year old trucks got 18-22MPG.  That, IMHO, is due to government
> meddling and is a crime against the free market system, capitalism,
> and humanity.

I have not understood the desire to mess with a diesel engine.  Diesel engines always had an injector pump and that was all they needed.  The injector pump handled the timing and the amount of fuel injected.  Air/fuel mixture was not important.  These things worked fine at the simplest level.  Now gasoline engines are different- air/fuel ratio is very important, and timing is important.  These things can be controlled precisely by a computer and make the engine perform very well.  But none of this is needed with diesel.

Now we have electronic controls on diesel engines.  All that this has done is to allow the engines to be modified in the aftermarket for high horsepower.  It hasn't helped the off the showroom floor vehicles, buy has gone the other way by making them less fuel efficient and making them very complex and expensive to repair.  If you study the fuel and injection system of the modern Ford diesel pickups it will make you want to slap the engineers around.  They are certainly not engineers in the same sense that I am an engineer.