An Alternative to Alternative Fuels and Vehicles 322
markmcb writes "While the world is working to solve energy and environmental issues with today's petroleum fuels, some vehicles simply don't have good alternatives, namely off-road platforms. For those not willing to give up their gas-guzzling habits, Matt Vea offers an innovative alternative. Using the OBDII interface in his Jeep, a laptop, and the infinite power of Excel, Matt conducts some performance tests and uses the results to tweak both his vehicle's engine and his personal driving habits for optimal fuel consumption both on and off road." Rigorous testing and good use of available technology; nice work.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Somewhat obvious conclusions (Score:4, Insightful)
Duh!
It's approaching immorality at this point... (Score:4, Insightful)
Further, fewer than 1% of SUV owners actually take their cars offroad. Most people now buy these things for their own vanity and nothing else.
Meanwhile, while they guzzle fuel at 3mpg, they drive the price of this increasingly limited and taxed resource to the point where there are news reports of the working poor having to pawn off household objects merely to make it into work.
At this point this activity is approaching immorality. I know of few other activities (besides lobbying) which actively make other people poorer for no reason.
Re:Best way to conserve energy: (Score:2, Insightful)
In the grand scheme of things, you may believe that reducing a commute to work makes a big difference in the energy consumption equation, but, it's not your major source of energy consumption. When you turn the heat off, living indoors at ambient outdoor temperature (same for the air conditioning), and stop eating, then you'll make a BIG difference. As long as you eat every day, and keep the heat/airco turned on, a little bit of driving is not the big energy consumer.
It's really trendy here on /. to whine about SUV's in terms of energy consumption, but, the fuel burned by an SUV pales beside what a semi full of goods headed into the city burns. If city folk REALLY want to make a difference, it's easy. Turn the heat off, turn the airco off, turn the lights off, and stop eating. When they all do that, the world's energy problems will be solved. Until then, you are just as much a part of the problem as everybody else.
Re:Works for a limited audience (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Works for a limited audience (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's approaching immorality at this point... (Score:2, Insightful)
Say what? Maybe if they've got a 1400hp 600ci V8 in them. Granted it's still not great but many of the new mid and large SUV's are now getting 20mpg or better now. Yes it's not great, but it's a far cry from your over-exaggerated 3mpg crap.
Re:Works for a limited audience (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's approaching immorality at this point... (Score:3, Insightful)
Further, fewer than 1% of SUV owners actually take their cars offroad.
How many drive them on snowy roads? Everyone who owns one and lives where it snows, I bet.
How many people need to tow something? Not a huge percentage, but they won't be doing it in a honda civic.
How many people have a couple of kids and have to fit a car seat? A lot. Sure they could drive a minivan, but the mileage isn't too much different in a lot of cases.
Most people now buy these things for their own vanity and nothing else.
Um, so what? You're using energy to post on Slashdot. No vanity there?
People should buy the cars they want. For everyone that makes a "wrong" choice, there are hundreds who would make a better choice for thier own situation than some government car-choosing authority would make for them. People understand their own lives better than anyone else -- enough even to understand which car they should choose.
Meanwhile, while they guzzle fuel at 3mpg
Which new SUV gets 3 mpg?
...that they are apparently still readily able to afford...
Yeah. News reports. Never exaggerated. Never over-emotionalized. Always a good gauge of exactly what's going to happen to you and everyone you know.
How's that case of the bird-flu BTW? Have you died of that yet?
At this point this activity is approaching immorality.
Yes. Tut-tut. We'll have no more of that choosing your own car. It's not seemly. It's not fashionable. It's against the natural order of things and it will cause the downfall of civilization, I tell you.
I know of few other activities (besides lobbying) which actively make other people poorer for no reason.
Did your senator vote to help those people get cheaper gas by allowing oil drilling in ANWR? Or did he choose the convenience of caribou over the well-being of these poor people? How about drilling off shore? How about cutting the gas tax?
How about ethanol? Ethanol costs more than gasoline these days. So mixing it into gasoline raises the pump price. What about the poor guy on the news who has to sell his kidney for gas money to get to work? Did the Ethanol boosters think of him? Are they immoral then?
aeordynamics, mass, and speed (Score:5, Insightful)
For instance, when driving one has to impart some amount of KE into the car. KE is mv^2. What this means is that a car going 85mph has twice twice the KE as a car going 60mph . Now, if a car is light, like a roadster at 2200 lbs, one could go 85 and not gain any more than a Pilot going 60. And yet every day I see these huge cars going 90 mph, while I am going 70, and all these people complaining about gas consumption? It makes no sense. If they were truly concerned, they would go slower than me!
I really applaud this guy. He really tried to maximize a solution using reasonable constraints. If everyone did the same, instead of whining that they are being crunched by the price of gas, we would be in a much better place.
His recommendations are good. Accelerate slowly, especially if you have a massive car. Any physics or engineering person knows how much this helps in energy expenditure. Keep tires inflated well, and if you car came with improper tires, buy new one. You SUV is not a car, and should not drive like one. Don't drive fast, especially if you make frequent stops. The energy profile will be against you. This is why hybrids are do good for the city. Do not drive fast period. Not only does it waste gas, but if imperils all other drivers.
The day that I see most SUVs in the right two lanes, going 5-10 miles under the speed limit, is the day I believe that gas prices are too high. Right now gas prices are just inconvenient.
Re:Best way to conserve energy: (Score:5, Insightful)
It is much cheaper -- and more fuel efficient -- to transport 2 tons of food in a single shipment than it is to transport 2 tons of food in a thousand 2kg shipments inside separate vehicles. Yes, the food you buy from the grocery store had to be shipped there, but economies of scale apply to the pre-grocery-store shipping.
Change engine sizes (Score:1, Insightful)
Lower the engine size some, that'd save fuel.
Why an 'old' station wagon? (Score:3, Insightful)
But it's not as cool.
Re:Alternative Fuel Offroad Vehicles (Score:3, Insightful)
No, smacks of poor rhetoric (Score:3, Insightful)
Either you don't quite know what "fascism" means, or you think that some government agency is modding down comments you like. Neither of those positions is any more lucid than you would appear to think the modders' opinions are.
You combat uninformed contrary opinions (in mod format or otherwise) by making unassailable, rational, non-whiny points. If you can't rise to that standard, then perhaps moaning about the mods is the more comfortable venue. Better, though, to work on the subject at hand, than to blame the audience for how poorly some comment landed on the thousands of people here who will see it.
Re:Works for a limited audience (Score:3, Insightful)
Those SUV are great for making sure the other car gets completely destroyed and the occupants killed.
Re:It's approaching immorality at this point... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Gas Dependant Hobbies (Score:3, Insightful)
Myself, I take part in many of these fuel consuming activities. My favorite activity is skydiving, talk about waisting fossil fuels for fun, we burn gallons of jet fuel per person everytime we go up, and we do this multiple times a day. It's my money, my free time, and I'm gonna do whatever I enjoy! I also enjoy speed boats (fuel hogs), and like the author, 4x4 offroading.
I enjoy having a great time, and I have faith that we will adapt and overcome before we run out of oil. At least I hope we do, because solar powered planes are gonna be a bitch on cloudy days.
Earth First, we can drill the other planets later
Re:aeordynamics, mass, and speed (Score:3, Insightful)
Like it or not, most people would gladly pay an extra 30% in annual fuel costs in return for an extra 72 hours of free time.
Re:Best way to conserve energy: (Score:2, Insightful)
If I make the assumption that the cost of a useful Kj is constant across electricity and gasoline then your math doesn't add up. I just switched from driving to work (gasoline) to using light rail (electricity) and that has reduced my monthly energy bill by 75%.
-- Ecks
Re:Works for a limited audience (Score:3, Insightful)
So, those people who choose air travel expect to cash in on their life insurance plans (as opposed to their medical insurance) in the event of mechanical failure?
And those people who drive cars instead of motorcycles expect to destroy and kill the drivers of those motorcycles they hit?
How'd you get insightful from a troll/flamebait?
Re:No, smacks of poor rhetoric (Score:3, Insightful)
Your opinion: The slashdot mods are a vast right wing conspiracy
My opinion: Weak posts deserve what they get, and even the largely left-leaning slashdot audience calls BS when they see a nonsensical comment or one that makes their philosophical camp look bad.
I'd say the mod system (including its meta-mechanism) work extremely well, considering the local demographic.
I don't consider you an authority on this at all
Since when does anyone need to be considered (especially by you!) an "expert" when simply pointing out that more speech is the cure for bad speech, and that members of a community forum disagreeing with you are not "fascists" (what are you, twelve?). Come back after you look up that word [m-w.com] and realize that trotting it out in a lame attempt to shout down a opinion other than yours just makes you sound shrill and erodes your credibility.
Re:Best way to conserve energy: (Score:4, Insightful)
The average SUV [wikipedia.org] weighs 4242 lbs and gets 19 MPG. Larger ones like the Escalade are rated at 13 MPG in the city [chicagotribune.com]. The cargo for your average grocery store trip is, let's say, 100 lbs. A tractor-trailer rig is somewhere around 25,000 pounds empty, gets 5-6 MPG [whyfiles.org] when loaded, and carries up to 40,000 lbs cargo [geocities.com]. Let's assume that the average is half that. If I did the math right, moving groceries by semi is then 57 times more efficient.
As a kicker, truckers use 13% of fuel [geocities.com] purchased in the US versus 63% for cars and other light vehicles. So you're right about the "pale" part, but it appears to be the other way around.
Re:It's approaching immorality at this point... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why should he... ?
Cheaper gasoline.
My reasoning is simple: if you do the same thing you did before, but more efficiently, it has to be good.
I agree. As long as "more efficiently" takes time, money, happiness, and everything else into account. For example, spending $1000 to save $100 worth of energy isn't "more efficient". It's also not more efficient to spend $100 to save $100 worth of energy if it also makes you unhappy.
I guess I don't see the future in such limited terms. Depriving the current generation to allow the next generation to deprive itself, so that future generations can continue to be deprived until an inevitable sad end -- it's not my view of things.
In my view, the current generation should prosper and be happy and produce technological advances that future generations will use to solve problems. I forsee a future of wealth and prosperity where everyone can afford pollution-free energy. Making the current generation artificially poor through inefficient energy conservation is unnecessary and counter-productive to that goal.
Re:Best way to conserve energy: (Score:3, Insightful)
Economy of scale: it costs less energy to ship in bulk than seperately. Plus, cities have shorter distances, so they'd be perfect for use of electric vehicles. Unload goods from an electric train at the freight terminal. Use an electric "milk float" type truck that can plug in to a ubiquitous charging station whenever parked and has regenerative braking to deliver the goods to customers. How to make the electricity? Nuclear, hydro, geothermal, wind, solar - plenty of "clean" options...
If city folk REALLY want to make a difference, it's easy. Turn the heat off, turn the airco off, turn the lights off...
Guess what? City folk usually live in smaller spaces than their suburpan brethren. Smaller spaces take less energy to heat and cool. And, by "city", I'm not necessarily meaning something as overwhelming as NYC. There are plenty of smaller towns/cities that are walkable, and where the average house isn't a 4000 sq. ft. McMansion.
The McMansions are a real problem because they're huge and often really cheaply built, making for poor efficiency. If houses were a bit smaller (~1200 sq ft avg) and incorporated architectural features that made them capable of passive climate control - areas of glass in the appropriate place to catch the sun in winter and passive air circuation in the summer. As I said before, we had a beach house in NJ with a broken furnace. I went there during the coldest part of winter in 1996 - it was about 10 deg. out for a few days and the indoor temperature didn't drop below 55 deg. The large glassed front porch caught the sun and trapped heat - the masonry floor stored that heat and radiated it evenly through the day. In summer? The windows could be opened or removed, and the house was pretty comfortable, even without A/C.
-b.
Re:Best way to conserve energy: (Score:4, Insightful)
Ha! I don't even bother running my AC (Saturday was 100F here in Denver); in the winter I keep the heater at 56 most of the day (raising it to 64 in the morning, 'cause 56 is miserable when getting out of the shower); I drive a 15-year-old car which gets 35 mpg. Oh, and I normally cycle to work (in fact, I recently completed a month without driving to the office).
I'm like the Green Avenger or something. Only thing is they won't let me into the local environmentalist meetings since I always vote a Republican/Libertarian mixed ticket:-(