Re: Almost like a slow motion civil war


"Tim_Miller" <replytonewsgroup@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:gga7ig$du8$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
RickyBobby wrote:

"Tim_Miller" <replytonewsgroup@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:gg9uf2$pdq$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
RickyBobby wrote:

Everybody who knows how to read knows that the two best passenger cars in the world are the Toyota Prius and the VW diesil Jetta.

If by "best" you mean "most boring".

The two best prestige cars are the BMW and the Mercedes-Benz.

Every Mercedes my old man ever owned was a worthless pile
of garbage. That's why I never bothered buying one. BMWs
are only marginally better. People who buy them are generally
clueless. People who admire those people are just plain
deluded.

The best sports car is the Ferrari

How would you know?

and the best luxury car is the Rolls-Royce.

Another unsubstantiated opinion...

You are not very helpful in this.

No one is surprised you've got no rebuttal, cupcake.


I have no fear on behalf of Ford. In spite of the silly Mustang they have a good lineup. They should try to market the Focus and Fusion a little more. The Escape is okay and the Explorer is more than okay. The Crown Victoria Police Interceptor is the only cop car left. Obviously the pickup and van are the best of class. The minivan and crossover selection changes names so often I cannot keep track but they should light on a couple and keep them for a few years. They should drop the Mercury line completely. The Lincoln line should consist of only three cars and no trucks. The squared off Town Car, the rounded off Continental, and one specialty type car would do the trick.

Ford should not even mess with battery powered cars. Hybrids and cutting edge diesels would do just fine. Fuel cell cars are a joke and they should not waste a nickel on that. The fuel cell looks good in a lab or even in NASA where money is no object but in the real world the membrane is the limiting factor. For the cost of making the original membrane and then replacing it repeatedly you can buy a barge full of diesel fuel which is getting 65 MPG in the Escort in Europe.

The problem with battery powered cars is that batteries will never be good enough to make a usable car. And if there happens to be a crash, which there will be, the batteries will kill the first responders. It is a pipe dream to think that the battery makers will make incremental improvements to batteries until they pack the wallop of a gallon of diesel fuel. There is no more chemistry left in chemistry and that is just not going to happen.

The energy cost and environmental cost of packing a huge amount of lithium ion batteries into a car is a much worse solution that a clean diesel such as VW and Mercedes already have at a reasonable cost. Make that no cost because a clean diesel costs no more to make than a spark plug engine.

You can pay me now or you can pay me later. It is true that the cost of electricity at your home outlet to run a super efficient electric car is about seven times lower than buying gasoline. The problem is that your glorified golf cart cannot go very far and the batteries that store the electricity are very expensive and the dollar cost and environmental cost of the total life of those batteries is higher than just having a 65 MPG diesel that will actually go somewhere and can pull some weight.

The perfect car would be a hybrid diesel with a solar panel on the roof. Front wheel drive from the engine and a couple of motors on the rear wheels. One battery that captures the regenerative braking. A solar panel as the top of the vehicle that turns sunlight into electricity when the vehicle is parked outdoors in the daytime.

You would have to work out the math to see the cost of a four foot by six foot solar panel and how many years it would take to pay off the original cost. Sunlight is pretty powerful and that semiconductor stuff is getting cheaper by the day so the turning point may not be that far off. And if the solar panel is still working right when the vehicle is junked there could even be a residual value.

This vehicle stuff is really not all that complicated. If you want a car that looks like something that James Bond would be proud to drive there are plenty out there. If you want a vehicle that is energy efficient there are or could easily be plenty out there from two passenger to fifteen passenger to a 12,000 pound trailer hauling rig.

I am not some sort of tree hugger or clean energy freak and I readily admit that the solar panel that turns sunlight into electricity may not work as well on a vehicle as it does on a calculator. But if you can buy a light energy calculator at the dollar store for a dollar why would the same technology not scale to the roof of a fifteen passenger van?

UPS and FedEx operate a huge number of deliver trucks with a huge roof. And they keep them in service for a lot of years. I wonder if a solar panel roof would ever pay off or if the amount of energy collected over all of that time is just too small?

That is the problem with clean and renewable energy. The amount of energy is usually minute.

.

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