y.m.m.v

Pony Story

Clarkson puts the Mustang into perspective, the only way he knows how.

“Add all this together and you start to understand why we have Lotus, Ferrari, Maserati and Aston Martin. And they have the Ford F-150 Lightning pick-up truck: 0-60mph in a millionth of a second. Enough space in the back for a dead bear. And on a challenging road about as much fun as a wasabi enema”

The Marines, starring Bio Diesel

My buddy Dave (who I owe pictures from my last visit), sent a great article link from Wired on the massive adoption rate of bio-diesel among the US military, especially the Marines.

The basic gist is that by using B20 blend, 20% bio-diesel/80% regular diesel, the Marines are the first branch of the US military to have successfully gone and reduced their fuel consumption by 20%, a target set by the President.

Other military branches are following in the Marines’ footsteps and many government agencies, such as NASA, are doing the “Bio-D” shuffle.

This is very good news.

More news @ BioDiesel.org

Michael "Beef" Park (1966-2005)

“It is with deep regret that we confirm that Michael Park was fatally injured following an accident on special stage 15.”

I had missed the the Wales Rally GB, and missed this sad news until now. Deepest condolences to his wife and children.

BBC News

BBC News

11 pints

Auto Express divulges their tests on on caffeine would require 11 pints to give a boost.

Turns out Lucozade Extra, which contains 60mg of glucose and 40mg of caffeine improved reactions.

I wonder though if anyone keeps tabs on what happens when the substance is no longer in the system, do you crash more ?

Wishful Thinking ?

My mum first sent me this article from the Canada.com site for the Montreal Gazette.
An hour or so later I realised it was already being debated, scrutinised and debunked on Slashdot.

“A Canadian man claims to have invented a hydrogen electrolysis box that can be fit onto any existing internal combustion engine. He claims that engines using his “H2N-Gen” box ‘produce a more complete burn, greatly increasing efficiency and reducing fuel consumption by 10 to 40 per cent - and pollutants by up to 100 per cent.’

So is there any chance that this works ?

Let the ripping apart of bogus claims commence!
by sbaker (47485) * Alter Relationship on Sunday September 18, @03:28PM (#13590710)
(http:/www.sjbaker.org)
Car runs on water…yeah…how many times have we heard that before.

Let the shredding of ridiculous claims commence!

1) 80 million miles of testing.

That’s 500 man-years of driving at 55mph for 8 hours a day. The article says he employs 15 people and he’s been in the business for 11 years. If we believe this claim at all, we know he hasn’t been doing the testing in a scientifically controlled manner. At best, we have to assume his customers are doing it. But if the savings are only around 10%, how do you distinguish variations in driving style from actual fuel savings. There are plenty of ways to get a 10% fuel saving from a typical car by limiting it’s accelleration ability for example. If he glued a half inch wooden block underneath the gas pedal he could probably get a 10% saving from most people’s driving habits.

2) Montreal Gazette drove the test car on cruise at 63mph and saw a 10% fuel saving.

Well, that’s really unsuprising. A carefully set up vehicle with properly inflated tyres and driven at the optimal speed on a single highway run can easily out-do the manufacturers milage rating because the test conditions for highway milage ratings from the EPA (or the Canadian equivelent) are less optimal than that.

3) “The tailpipe was not hot” “…proves that hot polluting emissions are not coming out of the tailpipe”

Hmmm - everything that goes into the engine (air, fuel) has to come out again - and it has to come out of the tailpipe. Even if what comes out is non-polluting, it does* have to come out again. Removing the pollutants from the exhaust would make little if any difference to the temperature of the exhaust gasses. This proves *NOTHING.

4) He’s selling this unit himself.

This is a HUGE give-away. If this thing was real and had worked solidly over millions of hours of testing - the car manufacturers would be all over this development. He could walk into Ford or GM and pick up a cheque for a billion dollars tomorrow if this worked.

5) The amount of hydrogen his system could produce must be microscopic.

The amount of water that’s in that little box lasts 80 hours. He talks about his company doing development work to shink the weight of the box down from 20lbs. If the box was mostly one huge water tank then you’d have to deduce that the only way to shink it noticably would be to reduce the size of it would be to shrink the amount of water it holds - but doing that wouldn’t require significant development effort. It would be a trivial matter of telling people to refill it more often. So we have to assume that most of the 20lb box ISN‘T water. Let’s be generous and guess that half of it is a 1 gallon (10lb) water tank.

So just how much water is consumed over 80 hours of driving? 80 hours of driving would consume - what - 200 gallons of gasoline? So one gallon of water - when electrolized in to hydrogen - drastically improves the fuel efficiency of 200 gallons of gasoline?! Mmmm’K.

6) How come the hydrogen fuel cell developers aren’t making a killing by injecting hydrogen into conventional gasoline engines? The amount of hydrogen in even a modest fuel cell would provide that tiny amount of hydrogen to the engine and last for maybe a year! Much more practical than this gizmo I think.

Electrolysis driven by a car battery…sheesh!

7) There are a LOT of unverifiable ‘facts’ in this paper.

Google this ‘Gene Stowe’ guy - who’se plastic version exploded with enough force to fling plastic disks 200 to 300 feet into the air…which we’re told were then sighted as UFO’s. No sign of him anywhere.

Oh - come ON - if you throw a plastic disk 200 to 300 feet into the air, it comes back down about 20 seconds later. How the heck could anyone ever imagine they’d seen a UFO? Furthermore, if they had a ‘lot’ of UFO sightings, that means that these things exploded an awful lot. How come the guy continued testing them after they exploded? Why isn’t this story all over the Internet?

Bogus.

Bio-Ethanol

Bio-ethanol is a sustainable fuel product made from farm crops that should get more attention. The British Touring Car Championship is an excellent way to promote such an alternative, as it shows in a competitive environment the fuel’s equivalency to petrol.

Having Fiona Leggate, a 25 year old farmer’s daughter racing such a car adds to the publicity. Great to hear she is a damn fine driver and wish her the best!

In terms of greenhouse gas, bio-ethanol is almost neutral: it is made from the fermentation of sustainable crops such as sugar beet, maize and wheat, and the car’s CO2 exhaust emissions are in effect cancelled out by the crops’ absorption of carbon dioxide through photosynthesis as they grow. Only the “well-to-wheel” costs of harvesting, fermentation and transport release energy in a way that contributes to global warming.

Props to the Telegraph’s Motoring desk and Erin Baker.

More on Ethanol and blends

Having 0 “ppm” Phosphor and Sulphur seem like a great win to me.

Super Sized

Most folks recognise Jay Leno as a funny guy, one who can use an almost British dead-pan. What some of you may know as well: Jay Leno is a “Petrolhead”, a car nut with both the passion and the money to indulge. Now, combine the two and you get some very witty car commentary. Leno writes for both in-print (ex: Octane) and online car papers. And that’s good.

His latest article for the UK’s “The Times” is about the behemoth you see pictured here, the International CXT.

Enjoy.