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. By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.
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Filed Under: hybrid car, hypermiling, rocket car
Companies: toyota


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  • identicon
    Rekrul, 18 Jul 2011 @ 7:15pm

    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.

    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.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      Michael Ho (profile), 18 Jul 2011 @ 10:49pm

      Re:

      Don't forget the room temperature superconducting metals that were supposed to make the electrical grid nearly perfectly efficient....

      It seems that making practical versions of "proof of concept" demonstrations is really really hard sometimes!

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Lawrence D'Oliveiro, 18 Jul 2011 @ 7:33pm

    Fuel Economy

    I remember back in the 1970s a VW Beetle did 400 miles on a single gallon of petrol. As I recall it ran on aircraft-style bald tyres inflated to 8x normal pressure, and never went above 16mph (in top gear!). And the engine was probably knackered by the time the run was over.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Nicedoggy, 18 Jul 2011 @ 11:16pm

    I still like the old bicycle it goes everywhere using zero gas and emissions :)

    And you got the e-bykes that help you go over that hill.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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