Chevy Volt Panned...

And gravel car parks... As for the rest, that's one reason I had fat tyres on the back. Some people used to have a slab of concrete in the boot

The overall efficiency is still better than most ICEs

A gasoline engine's energy efficiency is still worse than everything that's wrong with EVs and the electric grid. In some places there isn't much wrong with the grid anyways.

The efficiency of coal fired stations isn't that high, fwir, but much better if they use the waste heat for district heating, as they do in some countries. There will have to be be a whole range of such underused solutions in the future. All that's lacking is the political will...

Regards,

Chris

That would make you walk funny. :)

Only if you were a waiter :-)...

In fact, on the 3ltr Capri, if the front suspension was a bit tired, the whole front end would float at anything above about 60mph. This was not very helpfull when cornering or any other change of direction. Cement in the boot helped to keep the back wheels on the ground where they should be though...

Regards,

Chris

I found the Capri OK in corners. I much prefer the back end to drift out rather than the front

Because fuel is cheap. When oil is permanently about $100 per barrel all kinds of other tech becomes viable

be=20

energy.

Can any of you, Robert, Dirk, Kevin, Chris, find some numbers to back up your claims?

Top 3 or so links from google:

The last one says average efficiency worldwide 31% for coal, while better boiler design can raise this to almost 50%

Still pretty dismal.

For combined heat and power:

Can raise the efficiency to nearly 90%, which starts to look good...

Regards,

Chris

"Even when aided with turbochargers and stock efficiency aids, most engines retain an average efficiency of about 18%-20%" (primary sources quoted)

Coal fired power station effciency:

Typical thermal efficiency for electrical generators in the industry is around 33% for coal and oil-fired plants, and up to 50% for combined-cycle gas-fired plants.

Compare it to a diesel engine than. Hard to beat that.

Diesels are great.

They should try hemp oil.

In , Dirk Bruere at NeoPax wrote in part:

That sentence implies that turbochargers are supposed to improve fuel efficiency. They don't - they only increase engine power.

A turbocharger does not in 1st order decrease percentage of the energy produced by the power stroke being needed to accomplish the intake stroke. The engine gets the added load of compressing air from atmospheric pressure to that at which the compression stroke begins. A turbocharger tends to reduce the allowable compression ratio for a given fuel octane level. The same is true with superchargers other than turbochargers.

A turbocharger is merely a specific kind of supercharger - driven by a turbine - though the engine loading by it is theoretically eliminated if without it the exhaust exits the exhaust manifold with pressure greater than that needed to turn it.

Same make, model and engine displacement and number of cylinders, early-mid 1990's Oldsmobile Delta 88 with 6 cylinder 2.8 liter engine has less fuel efficiency for the supercharged model than the non-supercharged model.

For a more general example, in the early and mid 1980's, I noticed a general trend that similar cars with similar engine displacement and same number of cylinders had less fuel efficiency for turbocharged ones than non-turbocharged ones.

Where turbocharging does gain in a measure of fuel efficiency: Fuel efficiency, in distance per unit fuel consumption, has been increased in comparison to a non-turbocharged engine of the same power. For equal power, a non-turbocharged engine has to be larger and heavier than a turbocharged one.