DailyDirt: Get Your Motor Running, Head Out On The Highway
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Changing the way people drive could actually save more resources than switching to exotic hybrid drivetrain technologies. But it's so much more convenient to speed along at 70mph than to try to coast as much as possible and maintain a steady 55mph. Here are some car projects that are trying to break speed/mileage records and maybe create more environmentally-friendly cars.- Faster than a speeding bullet, but less powerful than a locomotive... it's a rocket car. Driving at over a thousand miles per hour? Now that's podracing! [url]
- An 11yo girl driving at 1,325 miles per gallon isn't breaking the sound barrier, but she's saving a lot of gas. Too bad the car is just a one seater. [url]
- Toyota is working on an electric motor that isn't as dependent on rare earth metals. Rare earth metals aren't actually that rare, but China seems to have cornered a significant part of the market when it comes to mining and processing them. [url]
- To discover more interesting car-related content, check out what's driving around StumbleUpon. [url]
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Filed Under: hybrid car, hypermiling, rocket car
Companies: toyota
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This is a significant breakthrough. Even if larger vehicles wouldn't get that many miles to the gallon, it would still be a huge increase over what we already have. It could easily be used for scooters and such.
Which is why you will NEVER see this technology used in any production vehicle.
It's not a conspiracy theory, it's just the way the world works. Someone announces some miracle breakthrough that is going to revolution the world, or at least a single industry and then you never hear anything more about it. Remember years ago when IBM was able to manipulate individual atoms to spell out "IBM"? That was going to revolution all sorts of things, such as enabling computer storage systems that could store terabytes of information on something the size of today's SD cards. Did I blink and miss those devices? Years ago I read a news story about how doctors used a small external pump to allow a person's heart to rest for a month or two, healing significant damage to it. They said that this treatment was going to revolutionize cardiac medicine and significantly reduce the need for heart transplants. How common is this treatment today?
Everyone gets excited about these announcements, but I've yet to see any practical/commercial application of probably 99% of them.
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It seems that making practical versions of "proof of concept" demonstrations is really really hard sometimes!
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Fuel Economy
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And you got the e-bykes that help you go over that hill.
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