Ethanol is all fine and dandy but if we're all so concerned with improving fuel economy then why are we ruining it with ethanol? Sure maybe some more modern vehicles are designed to burn the 10% ethanol petrol more efficiently but not everyone has or can afford a new modern vehicle and the older vehicles suffer from what I've seen and heard from others who sometimes go to the Native American reservations and buy non ethanol petrol they see about a 25% gain in fuel economy. Audi synthesizing 100 octane petrol is the first step I've seen to sort of move past the ethanol issue. I'm all for renewable energy but if governments truly cared about it we'd have solar fields in as many of the deserts worldwide as possible and we'd likely be able to power the whole planet with them. Then we use than clean energy to power our electric vehicles, etc etc. Problem is the petroleum companies are lobbying to keep that from happening because they don't want to lose their source of income or have to change into another industry.
Perhaps it tends to come out that way, perhaps it is that way. The thing of it is, all the cool modern stuff that supposedly improves emissions and everything else tends to ruin car from an enthusiast point of view. There should be a direct, mechanical connection between man and machine, but try telling that to manufacturers with their automatic transmissions and their flappy shifters and their everything-by-wire. A car should be light and simple, but now it's apparently normal to have a touchscreen in a compact car. Forced induction should be something special that you add to an already-adequate engine to make it fast, not a mechanism by which a pathetically small engine pretends to be normally sized. So basically, yes I do. I hate mass taste too. The problem with that is, when someone finds a place (like the California high desert) where solar power might be even halfway viable, the environmentalists start crying again because construction might disturb burrowing owls or something. You can't win with those guys.
I actually agree with this completely. Very well said, kudos. Drive-by-wire provides no advantages to the driver of a car. Nothing better about it than a throttle cable on the consumer end of things. It only benefits the car company by reducing warranty claims by reducing shock on the drivetrain. All of your throttle inputs a nullified and what your foot is doing is but a mere suggestion as to what the computer actually does with the throttle plate. I hate drive by wire.
Regarding solar power, http://www.csmonitor.com/Environmen...any-solar-panels-would-it-take-to-power-Earth. And I hate the nutso environmentalists that try to stop things like this. Anyway back to the future of cars. I really hope when I am looking for a new car that my requirements will be possible. No fly by wire, actual emergency brake (no stupid electronic crap), actual spare (as standard), button controls and not all touchscreen. I currently drive a lil '02 Saturn SL2 and it's not a bad little car, simple as hell and since it's mostly plastic it's pretty easy to replace any body panels. I just feel like once I get a real job and get a new car nothing will be anywhere as close to as simple as the Saturn. Sure it's not the best thing to drive but for getting from point a to b it's fine. I'm kinda hoping autonomous vehicles are around by the time I'm looking for a new car so I can just get one of them and then find an actual good car like something from the 20s, 30s or 40s.
My dad did work for Shell and they say there's enough oil in Brunei for more than 150 years. Brunei is a small part of Borneo if you dont believe me look it up in google maps and Brunei.
I like muscle cars, so I'd like gas (petroleum to all you Europeans) to stay around for a while, but at the same time I'd like global warming to go away. And it would be NO fun to drive around without controlling your car. So I'd like car companies to sell self driving cars AND manned cars.
The cars won't be electric either. Electric cars aren't as efficient as people may think. It costs a bunch of money and resources. I think myself cars will run on basically water.
Well if Liberals don't get their way we would be using nuclear power for cars (because we can make cars run on Nuclear power) but since Liberals are Liberals we would never have that and still be using gas power because some one died in a Tesla and so no one should have a Tesla only modern 50 grand cars that don't work.
With everyone being hyped for "eco-friendly" EVs that contain 600 kg of dangerous chemicals, nuclear-powered cars don't seem so bad to me.
I found an interesting missive elsewhere on the internet; one that details a major problem with the Shiny Happy EV Future that not a lot of people give much thought to. We just assume, because we use so many electrical devices all the time, that electricity is always easy to come by. Well, maybe not. Some of the faster chargers can apparently get very demanding in terms of power - like, "first guy who wants to use one has to pay the power company another few grand for upgraded equipment on their block" levels of demanding. Then what happens to the grid when a bunch of people come home from work and plug in all at the same time? Stuff to think about.
It is possible to run a car on nuclear power, but it's not very practical. You'd need a whole lot of shielding for the radiation produced by the uranium, and also batteries to store the energy produced by it. At the end of the day you'd have a car that weighs as much as a semi truck, just so it can be safe to drive. It's more sustainable to simply use nuclear plants to produce power, and then use that power for electric cars
You know, the more I think about it, the more I think that autonomous cars should never be allowed and all development should cease. I mean, just think about all the electronics in your life. Do they work flawlessly? Do they even work at all? I think about the credit card machines I use at work. They reboot themselves randomly. They lock up in mid-transaction, refusing to either finish or cancel, requiring a reboot of the register terminal to jar them back to normal operation. They take wildly unpredictable amounts of time to complete transactions. The register terminal itself is another example; due to the way it's programmed, it's much easier than you'd think to get it stuck on one screen or even in an infinite loop with honest mistakes or attempts to modify someone's food, again requiring a reboot, and things that should be easy are often not, though some of that is because voids are apparently a potential theft vector (though I still to this day haven't figured out how you would do that without getting caught). The system was, for a long time, littered with old coupons, deals, and food items that no longer existed but were in the system as if they did, and one still is, now with an annoying glitch to go with. Then you go on to the screens that tell the kitchen staff what to make and the front-end staff what to bag and hand out; sometimes, things won't show up, including modifications to people's food if they're entered the way a normal person would think you'd enter them. Meanwhile, here at home, some security certificate or other will randomly expire, and suddenly Firefox won't let me connect to those sites, sometimes won't even give me a "no, I know this place, do it anyway" button, until it gets all updated. A computer foul-up at work is a minor inconvenience that, if you're sharp and lucky, can be parleyed into additional time for getting secondaries done. A computer foul-up in a self-driving car could cause people to die. I think, as untrustworthy as some people are with their machines, trusting a computer with same machines is a much, much worse idea, unless manual operation capability is required and involves physically disconnecting the autopilot from both power sources and the vehicle's controls so that it cannot interfere with the operation of the vehicle. Actually, scratch that, considering that certain auto-braking systems already extant are easily spooked and will nail the brakes when there is no reason to, just forget the whole thing and keep cars manual.
