getting off foreing oil

we shouldve been worrying about this *************** 20 years ago, and we wouldnt be in the predicament were in....mark my words its only going to get worse, methanol is not the answer, I look at my cars now as a total expense just like i look at the gas bill at home and at home i dont turn up the heat in the winter to 80 degrees and i dont leave the windows open because you dont want the gas bill to skyrocket, this is the mindset Americans need and needed the mindset 20 years ago. everything we touch, everything we eat in some way has to do with oil and if oil prices go up so do our everyday things we touch go up. most Americans live paycheck to paycheck and with this in the equation what do you think will happen? take a stab at answering this or sitback and wait....it really is going to be a problem if the price keeps rising

Tim, now you really got me thinking

I don't know about the coal and water blend, but it seems a lot of other fuel sources are suppressed in the U.S.

Even the ethanol is being made the stupid way so big business establishment can profit.

ADM makes most of the ethanol in the states from corn. In Brazil (the nation to most successfully use ethanol as a fuel) they make it from sugar cane. You get three times the ethanol from an acre of sugar cane than you do from an acre of corn.

i asked this before and wonder why they cant take coal and turn it into a fuel to power a car, has anyone ever heard this, grind it up throw in some water and your ready to go...

these guys can tell me what color my underwear are right now, i really think it was a tactic to draw us into the beehive were in and im talking trillion and billion dollar contracts, all this other crap about nerve gas this and that, propaganda
I'll second that Kris, money makes the world go around

I know its not poisenous either cause a guy stopped by and told me his son in law shut the garage door and fired up the old diesel, it made him sick but it didnt kill him....btw he finally did it right the next time.
lobbying?? Ive been asking those same questions for years, as why dont we produce more diesel cars, the technology has been around for years,
As americans we keep our eyes glued to a box that tells you what someone wants you to hear and you have a tendency to believe it. I still have a very hard time with the Twin Towers, you see how those people live over there, how in the hell can those people put something like that together, hit those buildings in the exact right spot and they know there were going to collapse, and to this day they cant catch a very sickly man on the run, we caught noriega, we caught all responsible death camp people, *************** we even caught Sadaam and his sons but we cant catch a guy who needs dialysis every 2 days.
This is the way it is and alot of it is Greed and secret hand shakes and deals that our president cant even control....dammit its a conspiracy lol, just giving you something to think about today

You guys could really get me up on a soap box with bringing up the VW Diesels. My wife and I have been driving them for years, we both have had a couple. The only one we have right now is a 2002 Golf TDI. It consistently gets around 46-48 MPG. None of our VW cars have gotten the 50+ MPG that folks talk about, but we do live at altitude in the mountains so that may play a part.

We have loved the efficiency and good power the turbo charged diesels give us in the mountains as well. We run 20% biodiesel in them, and have had no problems with it. The VW diesels run for about 250,000 miles pretty well, but the car tends to fall apart all along the way.

The thing I get up on a soap box about is the price of diesel. Why the hell is it so expensive these days. From what I understand it's cheaper to make than gasoline. It makes me think someone is trying to discourage it's use in the states.

When we traveled to Australia we found new diesels made by Mazda, Toyota, Subaru, and Ford. Not trucks, nice practical cars that all got the mileage of our VW. Why don't they sell those cars here?

I think diesel is the best "bridge the gap" technology currently available. Even my diesel Dodge 3/4 ton, 4X4, Long bed,crew cab truck gets 19-20 MPG empty and 16-17 MPG pulling the Nautique. That's better than many of the mid sized SUVs that have less than half the towing capacity. Why don't we have more diesels in this country? I have never heard a good reason.

eric lavine wrote: tique, i always got a story, in the 80's where i worked some idiot was mig welding on top of a empty thinner barrel

I too have see this! I was working at a metal fab shop and one of the helpers decided he wanted to get a promotion to be a welder but felt he needed to practice. It was coffee break so he went and got some scrap metal to weld. That scrap just happened to be a empty 55 gal drum of MEK. As soon as he struck a arc, it burnt through the barrel. It then split the bottom of the drum open and the drum took off like a rocket rattling around in the bar joists for maybe 2 seconds. He too was lucky that he didn't get hurt. The only damage was to the MIG gun that the handle broke off of. He didn't get the promotion to welder!!

Eric, I worked for the fire department for a while and saw a few gasoline explosions. One was a fuel tank on a old pick up in a wreck, it makes quite an impact.

I was making the point that we comfortable with the gasoline danger in vehicles. I think we would   
be fine with the batteries as well. However I think the ultimate solution to lower consumption vehicles will need to not use batteries for reasons other than safety.

I kept telling my nephew who at his age knows everything that i kept smelling his battery overcharge, 10 minutes later it let loose and scared the *************** out of him, he didnt get hurt but i bet he learned a lesson..the gases from overcharging are whats flammable, if i smell the gas i'll turn off the charger and walk away for a while

Tim D wrote: quote A Ford Escape hybrid has $8,000 worth batteries in the back. If someone hits you, that's a lot of money. When the car gets some age on it, thats a lot for insurance to cover, you know they total out older cars now just because of the cost on air bags when there's really not very much body damage.

I would worry about batteries shorting out from the impact. If you ever saw one short out you know what I mean.

My job requires me to drive about 25k a year. Gas is killing me, but everytime I look at cars that get 30 mpg or better, they seem so small that I don't want to risk riding in a little POS, so I have a full size short bed 2 wd that gets 19 mpg. I think we need to start drilling our own oil and get away from OPEC.

hey Joe, when calculaters first came out they were 800 bucks, now you get them in a box of cereal

plasma tv's 5 or so years ago were 15k

hmmmm,...... maybe I should "deep-6" the idea of putting that evil gas-hog 300 horse Crusader engine of mine in the 'cuda and go for 3000lbs of batteries..
   Or... Kristof...you got any spare BBQ cylinders laying around?

well they are throwing around the hybrid word out very generously now a days because it should be labeled electric assist and not hybrid because a true hybrid doesn't have to have batteries to power it as it has IC engine that drives a generator to create the power and batteries are only need as a back-up to high current demands.

Also the drive motors are A/C induction motors that's why there is an inverter in the systems.