Annoyed by the Current Gas Prices? Time to Ressurect the Windfall Profit Tax

[Thomas Kirby]

There are some kinds of accidents that simply need to be impossible. Emergencies will drive people to take risks, as if the last week hasn't taught us that. How about the risk not being death from trying to get your own car to run? The first time someone is stuck somewhere because a wire fell off and dies trying to put it back on, there will be a BIG wrongful death lawsuit.

 

Anyway, we still need safe gas-saving vehicles. There is a problem in how so many people drive, like in rush hour traffic down in Atlanta. People shove their way in front of you when you could swear that there isn't room to slide a piece of paper in edgewise. You really feel the need to drive a tank with at least a six cylinder engine because of the way that people drive.

[Pangloss]

I used to do the commute down I-85 to downtown Atlanta every day, so I know where you're coming from. I can't remember how many times I was cut off, blocked, ignored, maligned, and worse. It's ugly out there.

[Thomas Kirby]

I've been through Atlanta once on I-85, travelling south, during the breakfast rush hour, on short sleep, in October. If it had been raining I would be dead.

 

High mileage cars are good if you don't overpay for them. It is indeed damn hard to get anywhere in a car that can't maintain 65 miles or better. The repeal of the speed limits has created a madhouse in many places. Maybe we need extreme technology for any sort of functional electric car. How do you pay for it, I want to know?

 

I'm pushing the case for hemp oil in another discussion thread. It's a primary source of energy that does not require much energy to produce besides sunlight. We're better off taking a step back and using easy to manufacture plant-based fuels. Now, if the hybrid's primary fuel is diesel fuel we've got something. The high mileage isn't quite so badly needed when the fuels are renewable without expending fossil fuels or uranium. It's still very nice if we can get the speed and the increased range, and make better use of fuels that we can just plant and grow.

 

I still don't think that 500 volt sources are necessary. I'd rather run several sets of wires to the motors and use motors with more poles. This is costly in copper but I don't really care. We can figure out ways to build better electric motors.

 

To me the ideal electric hybrid setup would be one that could take any fuel imaginable and convert it to electricity. Steam engines are supposed to be much more efficient than IC engines and the batteries would let us take right off while the steam engine was warming up.

[Pangloss]

I think the voltage stuff you've brought up in this thread is interesting. I have not heard that discussed before, and it sounds like an important factor.

[Thomas Kirby]

There's not much more I can say about that. The hazards of high voltage at high current are very well known. For safety reasons alone they are harder to repair, and the batteries are now high dollar speciality items instead of inexpensive commodity items like the marine batteries that you can buy for 60 USD almost anywhere. These batteries do not have to be special high power batteries because they are not the primary energy storage system. The gas tank still is. They just have to hold a charge to level the load on the fuel-based engine. A pair of 12 volt 100 AH batteries is adequate for that. Four are even better and are still very unlikely to harm anyone. I would rather just have to buy wires to pass a few thousand amps. It's cheaper anyway. We are even spending more money for more dangerous technologies. Thousands of dollars, and there's a mass of cadmium in there. I'd rather pay for the extra copper. Now, a ten year lifetime on a battery is nice, but 5,000 dollars versus three replacements at 120 to 240 dollars each time? I don't think so. Almost any idiot can pull four 12 volt batteries out of a car and install the new ones without having to worry about dying by touching the wrong part.

 

We are still left with the need for a primary fuel source. Hempseed oil is the only oil I know of that can be made literally by hand, even building presses from wood. The return for the energy expended could be as much as a thousand to one. This makes it possible to use a fraction of the oil produced as energy to speed up the processing. Hempseed oil is really the only viable technology we have for primary production of usable energy. It is the only one that we could put on line next fall and have enough to make up for shortfalls in oil. We don't even have to modify the engines we use it in, just tune them for it.