What would drive for the ultimate fuel economy?
150 MPG?
No wait...there's more.
157 MPG?
But we don't stop there, how about
1800 MPG?

We can now offer you 3000 miles per gallon!!! Yes sir. For just one low price of extensive engineering, and lots of publicity and hype, you too can own a one of a kind product to cloud the issue of what the vehicle really runs on.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

Shell Oil Company has been sponsoring these mileage contests for years. The fact that an oil company is sponsoring it might be illuminating about the practicality of these ultra-efficient vehicles (none). They're great learning exercises for the students who build them but totally, utterly impractical as actual vehicles on real highways.

Exactly; And I'm sure the contest entries have a clause that give them some right to the technology, so that it can't be used against them.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

How possibly could a 3000MPG car be used against an oil company? By the company allowing the tech to be developed so that they look like they are part of the solution instead of part of the problem and getting congress all up their backsides?

Oil companies know best how much product they have to sell. They know how long it will last. Since they are out to make big piles of money, they are really not interested in a suicide pact by running out the oil.

Tell me, how do you make more money, by selling a trillion gallons of oil as quickly as possible, or by selling a trillion gallons of oil slowly and by getting a payment for every car sold because of the patent you developed into a tech that obsoleted every other car ever made?

That and also in getting the market for alternative energy. If your market's drying up, you want to adapt.

From a technical perspective, running out of oil is roughly equivalent to a massive switch to a new technology. But from an oil company's perspective, a run-out will drive demand (and prices) way up until the switch happens. A societal paradigm change would drive demand (and prices) way down.

Running low is very much in Big Oil's interests, because they can then use that money to leverage themselves deeply into whatever new transportation technology gains traction (either due to popularity or raw necessity).

But to get there from here, they're going to need money. Lots of it. A run-out, artificial or natural, will get them there. Minimizing refining capability is one way to sneak in margin raises. Speculation churn and worldwide instability are others.

I guess I don't disagree with you (much), but I do disagree that a run-out is necessarily a suicide pact for Big Oil. It is not.

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In Fallout 3, 'happiness' is a warm junkyard dog and a loaded gun. It's mostly the loaded gun.
- Moose's one-line review.

"your going to regret that one. You are now a colonoscope...
- Chrissy, corrupting PraedSt's wish.

One important thing to understand is what business you're in. 100 years or so ago, railroad executives were proud to be known as "railroad men." They didn't understand that they were in the transportation business. By limiting their focus to just railroads, they didn't adapt well when technology changed. The same thing is happening to many of the legacy newspapers. If they think they're in the newspaper business instead of the news/information/data business, then they're in trouble (as their declining revenues suggest).

If the executives at Shell, BP, and the other big name oil companies think they're just in the oil business, then in the long term, they're in trouble. They're in the energy business. That's why you see companies like BP advertising how they're investing in alternative energy sources. The better companies will adapt to changing technology and regulatory environments to survive. The rest will get clobbered.

The old myths about oil companies buying up patents for 100 MPG carbs and the like are just myths. Consider who also has a vested interest in higher mileage vehicles, say the auto companies. Back in the 1970s following the OPEC oil embargo, the price of gasoline doubled practically overnight. Suddenly, a lot of American auto buyers were interested in buying more efficient cars. The top 3 small cars made in America at the time were the Chevy Vega, the Ford Pinto, and the AMC Gremlin (winners, all). A lot of buyers started looking seriously at small cars made by companies with funny names like Toyota, Datsun (now Nissan), and Honda and liked what they saw. In short order, imported cars made up over 25% of the cars sold in America.

For the American auto makers, it's been all downhill ever since. If there were easy technology to suddenly make high gas mileage cars, don't you think they'd adopt it ASAP? After all, they have everything to lose.

Seems like the only difference between us is that I think that the oil corps are trying to develop the replacement for oil now, instead of in the future.

It's absolutely clear to me they are.

The real difference between our positions is that I suspect you're understanding my hypothesis as some future thing. The hypothesis I described above is based on my observations of what's happening right now.

I think I 'heard' the first rumblings of Big Oil shifting from their "slow-and-steady" position to "leverage all alternatives" sometime around 1995.

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In Fallout 3, 'happiness' is a warm junkyard dog and a loaded gun. It's mostly the loaded gun.
- Moose's one-line review.

"your going to regret that one. You are now a colonoscope...
- Chrissy, corrupting PraedSt's wish.

Technically, that would mean that we said exactly the same thing

Larry Jacks wrote:

Not necessarily. I remember the Japanese 'invasion' and the response by Detroit was to go to Congress to get import quotas. Summed up well here:

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The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

I've been convinced for years that during the 1970's and 1980's the big three automakers deliberately and consciously made bad small cars so that customers would buy the more profitable large ones. Hence the Vega, Pinto, and all too many others. They ended up turning the market over to Japan, Inc.

My wife had a Chevette when we married. A complete piece of junk, for which she had paid $1000 more than I had for my first-generation Honda Accord at about the same time. And hers was a demo with 5000 miles on it.

Back slightly on topic, I did watch the video. Apparently in the TV business, 2800 MPG = 3000 MPG. Round numbers are just easier. At least they acknowledged that the vehicles are impractical.

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Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant.

The US auto industry has nothing to lose except (US) employees which they consider "liabilities" anyway.As long as they can operate offshore plants and buy cars from foreign mfrs, they don't care! The only ones with anything to lose are the "grunts" who actually build the cars!

Ford, GM and Chrysler (already a division of Daimler-Benz) are not in the business of making cars. They are in the business of making money and if they can do that without having to deal with the dirty business of actually building them, that's fine with them (especially if top management can still get their obscene salaries for making such brilliant business decisions).

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

There are 3.94 kilocalories per gram.

When I right my bicycle, I average around 20 mph, which according to this calculator says I'm generating 337 watts and burning 1159 calories per hour, which is 1.159 kilocalories per hour. (the kilocalorie, or "large calorie" is the one commonly referred to as the "calorie" with respect to food).

Thus, I consume about 3.399482312 grams of sugar per hour to go 20 mph on a level surface.

That's just 0.11991321 ounces of sugar per hour, or 166.7872956 miles per ounce; also 2668.596729 miles per pound.

I don't know what the density of sugar is, otherwise I'd give you a figure for miles per gallon of sugar...

Sounds pretty efficient to me.

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol. Human.

Whoever says "perception is reality" is daft. It's merely an abstraction, and often not a very good one.

http://www.sugartech.co.za/density/index.php

You could probably go with that for an estimate.

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[nitpick]Not any more.[/nitpick]

Nick

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Nick Theodorakis

Mildly altered:
Kaptain K also recently said "Ma Bell."

It looks to me like that calculator displays its answer in kilocalories, not calories. So you might be off by a factor of 1000.

I thought the big foreign auto makers moved manufacturing onshore precisely to get around import/export restrictions. So workers here in the US are "manufacturing" the car. This is a loose term.

Can Americans Still Build Cars?

Disclaimer: As a short survey article, there is likely another side to the story that more "foreign" plants are opening here.