Environment 101: Hot rod vs. hybrid: which is more environmentally friendly?

You are absolutely right, you DO have alot in common with most of the enviromentalists I know!

 

relax guys, my best guess is that cars will become a thing of hobby only.

I thought many times sanest way to deal with this issue is that people have self driving "cars" powered by electricity the same way bumpers cars or trolleybuses do, and fuel cars will be minority for those who actually like it, if you think about it, it's better for every-fucking-one.

I think most people wouldn't drive if they have the choice of not to do it.

and whether we like it or not, the oil supply will dwindle in general lines.

 

Without reading anything.... Who cares?

 

Ok, you're right. Add yourself to the giant pile of people that are better than me. Congratulations.

 

You two done being pissy? I bet you are closer on this subject than you guys think.

Other than that I am not going to comment much on this thread (was not going to at all to keep it non-politics). The linked article has many salient points.

 

In your area, it sounds like an electric car may benifit the enviroment and actually make sense.

I'm all for preserving our enviroment, but we need to take actions that have an actual enviromental benifit and make sense.

One "enviromental" program that has been forced upon us is ethanol enriched gasoline. Ethanol reduces the amont of emmisions per gallon of fuel buned by a certain precentage, but it also reduces the efficincy of each gallon burned by nearly the same percentage. This mean more gallons must be burned to do the same amount of work, producing nearly the same amount of emmisions as if un-enriched gas were used. When you consider that ethanol is derived from corn and then consider the amount of land, time and energy used to plant, grow / tend, harvest, transport and process the corn into ethanol, we see little if any reduction in vehicle / equipment emmisions. Little if any enviromental benifit, but definate higher cost to the consumer.

The true benifits of this program go to oil companies and our government. Oil companies charge a higher price per gallon for the enriched fuel, and the sell more gallons which equals higher profits. Higher prices per gallon and more gallons sold also equal more tax collected for all levels of government.

The MTBE debacle in California 15 years ago had an identical effect, with the added plus of a 400% increase in car fires in the state.

It just doesent make sense.

 

Another effect of Ethanol: it has driven up the price of corn, which has in turn made it more difficult for the poor to get food. In third world areas of Mexico and other Central American countries, the price of corn flour has risen hundreds of percentage points in the last few years.

What affects us even more as automobile enthusiasts is that the increases in food prices also drive up fuel prices. As food crops dwindle it will only get worse.

 

I'll add to the fire by saying this much: I've still to see a plain and simple real solution to actually do ANYTHING at all that really saves the environment. All I see so far are solutions to save someone's bank balance.

What we're being sold is an illusion. Electric or hybrid cars are a natural disaster in themselves as battery packs manufacture is an environmental nightmare. It actually takes 3 times more pollution on average to build a hybrid than a regular car, it's that much of a filthy business. And all the rest is debatable too... driving around lugging an extra engine and battery pack while using a smaller motor? Or the start-stop function, which saves a smidgen of fuel but requires a ginormous battery and similar starter motor so the engine can be fired up in a jiffy, so the added weight will see off the fuel saved...

All of these new technologies do serve one purpose and one purpose alone: to ease the consciousness of the general public into buying more cars, thus keeping this massively polluting industry alive. You're not saving the environment, you're just not doing it in front of everybody else! While you drive around town looking smug in your crap eco-box, the harm done to the environment is miles away all around the world (the raw materials on the battery packs actually travel at least a full swing of the globe before the cars rolls off the dealer showroom). And THAT is the REAL inconvenient truth!

The fact, my friends, is that these a-holes and all their politics are all driving us towards a completely regulated traffic. I've just been reading about a new project towards a fully automatic speed control on public roads, which will ultimately have as its goal to govern all vehicles' speeds. So driving will truly become a spectator sport. You could argue that moderns already are pretty much like that anyway...

I'll be sticking to my analogue way of life and choice of wheels, thank you very much! And I dare anyone show me a true and unabatable alternative to the traditional car in the current showroom offerings.

Cheers, Eddie

 

So I would like clean air, so from that standpoint I'd like to see folks put together responsible hot rods.

The fact of the matter is that the scene is impacted by gas prices, so we see folks running highway-friendly gears and 700R4 transmissions.

I don't think we should get all preachy about folks who drive a Prius, after all, that's their own business.

Wind is a good thing, coal plants do account for a serious percentage of air pollution. Google it. I recruit (I have a recruiting firm) in wind and solar, and this stuff is good for us in the long term.

Party on...


What was red, made 405hp, ran mid 12's in the quarter, could run on a road course and got almost 30mpg? My old 2002 Corvette Z06.

 

Well, I have both. Love my hot rod, love driving my wife's Prius to cars shows and getting 50mpg.There are an awful lot of stupid opinions here and there's a lot of room for compromise. Good grief,some of you really need to grow up.

 

I think you guys might enjoy my blog: http://www.artisanalcars.blog.com/

 

i read somewhere recently that it takes 1,000 gallons of gas to produce a toyota prius from start to finish.

now, not to bag on the poor japanese autos, lets just make a blanket assumption that all cars use this amount of fuel to make.

you would have to do some massive math to figure out a per year consumption, with alot of changing variables depending on the owner of each particular car. some folks buy a new car every 5 years, some have yet to even buy a new car. some buy used cars and throw them away when they break, some fix them until its economically impossible to maintain.
either way it says to me, without having to bust out a pen and paper (or a calculator) the older the car the less footprint its putting out on the environment.

while the worlds population has tripled(roughly) in the last 50 years, the car population has increased by almost 1200%. most all cars nowadays are in the sense a "hybrid" as the gas has at least 10% corn fuel in it(ethanol) which costs just as much to make in gas/diesel/etc as it produces in "sustainable" fuel.

save the world....drive a hot rod.

 

Basic physics guys... basic laws of physics.
ANYTIME there is a change in direction, there is energy lost. (reciprocating action to rotary motion)
ANYTIME there is a change in fuel generation, there is energy lost. coal to steam to electricity, minerals to batteries, crude to gasoline, even oats to horse feed. It all costs, it HAS to. The choice is to have the fewest changes in the conversion of matter to energy.
That's why walking is the most efficient form of transportation, and hybrids are near the worst.
That's just physics.

 

You're almost exactly right, except for the ethanol thing. Organic E96 is perfectly practical, doable at a mom-and-pop scale, even if it isn't widely available that way. Same goes for organic B100: no petrochemical input whatsoever. No kind of petrochemical fuel is in any way organic, and it just doesn't scale down. Agribusiness ethanol can readily be swapped for organic if we're running it already - but production volumes must be less.

Scale is the key to the whole issue, and what most people don't get is that generally, the tighter the technology, the more responsive it is to economies of scale. The point of the modern disposable, be it hybrid, full electric, or computer-controlled conventional, is to enable greater economies of scale in order to leverage a bigger scale. In other words, the choice isn't one hot rod vs. one hybrid; it's a few thousand hot rods vs. a few million hybrids.

The OEMs are after a bigger industry with fewer players. That's why they are doing the "eco-tech" thing, and moreover manipulating governments into "forcing" them to do so. I submit that both the environment and our creative liberty need a far smaller industry with far more players.

 

A little off topic, but some fuel for thought -- "fossil fuel" is freakin' everywhere.

http://principia-scientific.org/sup...ntists-discover-fossil-fuel-in-the-stars.html

 

I have a '52 Chevy and a '63 Grand Prix but my daily is a Prius, for the mileage. My friend has the first Prius model and still uses the original battery.

 

One of my co-workers recently had to trade his '04 Prius in for a new ride. He put over 300,000 miles on that original battery before it finally died, but the car was still in really good shape. One of the mechanics at the Toyota dealership bought the car and put a new battery in it. Pretty impressive.

 

Huh? Yea...... whatever.

 

Yeah Fred, they don't get it. Whatever.

 

Actually, I meant the whole thread. This hotrod V/S Prius crap is old and leads to nothing.

 

There are a lot of different people in this world. Let's just be glad we actually have some choices and don't have to all drive the same thing. Getting worked up and whining over Prius' is kind of pathetic.