I can really tell a difference in our milage with the cylinder deactivation in our Charger. And yea you are right. It is a good looking car in pix or in real life. I like this GT Cobra though. It would look great as a coupe methinks. Ford has used that name for too many different rides. It's like Chevy and the SS badge.

 

Bio-diesel.

 

Any type of energy policy that uses food in place of foriegn oil is just as flawed...

 

I agree but that's not bio-diesel. (if you are referring to the post above you)

Any biomass can be run through diesel motors; soy, algae, etc. Any biomass, any diesel motor. by now many know that the first diesel motors were built to run off vegetable oil but then they found petroleum was more plentiful.

Either way, with the latter, you can even build your own 'bioreacter' (all it takes is sunlight and a decent CO2 supply (fish)) in the backyard and push your own auto fuel.. heating oil.... possibilities are endless once energy production is distributed. That's why i'm dying for something like the Opel Eco Speedster. High petroleum prices don't have to mean the end of autosport. Small, light, aero-dynamic turbo-diesels ftw!

Not if you're going to talk about ethanol production, check out brazil. They use cheap crop for ethanol and have one of the world's first sustainable bio-fuel programs. It's not rocket science, our govn't is just not interested... well their interests just lie with those who helped them into office.

bah --

 

Novel idea. Take a regular car and drop an LSX into it. Why didn't they think of this like fifty times already?

 

Should be an option on all vehicles. Even FWD and AWD ones.

 

I'm going to go flying off into off topic right field here, please standby.

That's a naive oversimplification of the entire biofuel issue. We would have to use all of our available (rotating fallow or gov't subsidized fallow) farmland, plus a huge amount of our farmland currently used for food production to put a dent in the amount of ethanol or biodiesel needed to offset foreign oil demand. This isn't just about that though, there isn't a large scale energy efficient process that can generate the amount ethanol needed, or an efficient transetherification process for the amount of biodiesel needed. Large amounts can be made, sure, but nowhere near the scale required to even start to offset the foreign oil dependence.

Brazil has nowhere near the number of people or vehicles that we have in this country. For the sake of discussion, Brazil has 28 million vehicles on the road (quick google search), and we have over 230 million (just the US, not total North America). We have less than twice the population though. The types of vehicles are completely different (we love trucks and SUVs that dwarf the fuel consumption of average Brazilian cars), the crops we are able to grow are different (unless we move North America to a different area of the globe). We can't grow sugar cane or most fairly ideal crops like that in anything but small amounts in specific areas of the country. Ok, so yearly Brazil uses 4 billion gallons of ethanol, and 4 billion gallons of gasoline. We use 6 billion gallons of ethanol, and 140 billion gallons of gasoline per year. So we already use 50% more ethanol than the entire country of Brazil, and that is a really small drop in a really big bucket.

If the amount of energy required to make it is more than the energy that it replaces, you're not gaining anything at all, and you'd be better off using a different form of energy. And before you say that you can buy E85 cheaper than regular gas, you should know that E85 costs a lot more per gallon (last year it was upwards of $6/gallon) to produce, and the government has a massive subsidy program just to make it affordable. Again, production processes and energy efficiency just isn't there yet.

Also, the current testing programs show that because of the amount of carbon and nitrogen sequestered in the crops during production, the CO2 and NOx emissions are higher with biofuels than petroleum-based gas and diesel. And forget the vegetable oil, the refining process for that only makes sense if you're making it to cook with, not to fuel an engine, and you're never going to have enough surplus used oil to power any appreciable amount of vehicles (other than a small handful of granola crunchers in each town).
Our corn-based bioethanol production caused a corn shortage in Mexico (tortilla shortage, seriously..). We've been using too much of the food crop, and aren't even producing a fraction of what it would take to displace petroleum. Corn, for sake of example (using commonly accepted numbers) would take 350 million acres to (more or less) replace gasoline as a fuel. That is just for ethanol, not animal feed or human food. We cultivate roughly 75 million acres of farmland in the US, total. Different crops have different amounts of yield per acre obviously, but we would still have a massive land shortage no matter what.

Biofuels are fascinating and all, but there isn't a solution yet. That doesn't mean there won't be, only that it hasn't been found yet.

I'm a huge advocate of alternate energy, but I'm realistic about this issue instead of blindly optimistic. I took an entire semester-long biofuels class a few semesters ago, and it was an unbiased but crushing look at all sides of the issue, including energy, agriculture, economy, and fuel refining chemistry. I was a lot more optimistic coming in then going out, that's for sure, but now I understand the gravity of where we are and where we need to be.

One of our (CSU) engines research faculty has a research company exploring large scale production of algae for use as a biodiesel base (one of only a handful of algae companies worldwide), and there are a few other interesting possibilities out there on the horizon too.
One of the interesting things that the doesn't often get discussed is the yield per acre based on crop height. Sure, you can grow X number of corn plants per acre, or the same number of soy plants per acre, but if your soy plants are only a foot tall, and your corn is 8 feet tall, which will give you more biomass yield? Which uses more water, which uses more of the soil nutrients (and how much crop rotation does that require so you don't destroy the soil), which sequesters more carbon per pound of biomass, which has a viable extraction/distillation process, etc.?

There is no easy solution to this problem though, it isn't just "let's make cars run with biodiesel or bioethanol", there is a lot more to it than that. But I hope you appreciate how much of a whitewashing the media gives this whole topic.

 

Yeah, it's actually a great idea.

Especially when that engine belongs in this car.

 

Aw, isn't the LS(insert number here) just the greatest engine? It can go in any car and make it better, I can't wait to see Lamborghini and Ferrari owners do the swaps in their cars.

 

If you were trying to be sarcastic, you did a piss-poor job. I've seen 3 Ferrari's in person with LSx's in them, so there are probably hundreds, if not thousands of them in the world.