Love my VW Golf TDI - I get 40-42 mpg and can burn B100 (genuine Maryland soybean oil…). 120,000 miles and no problems so far. Too bad deisel is now 25% more expensive that it should be (it usually was approx the cost of regular gas).
Can’t fit a 10’ longboard in it though… but a 9’6" will (with no passenger).
"Most people’s roofs are just sitting there all day reflecting and/or absorbing energy in the most wasteful/inefficient way.
very true, there are just so many way to get electricity with out harming the environment but, it cost more money so its impractical for a big corp to go green. But that isn’t to say that you can’t go green and power your house by solar panels, hydro-electricity, wind,and such. If you where to just put one small turbine in a creek by your house and built a small dam out of a fallen tree you’d get enough energy to power a radio for as long as theres water flowing. It would cost more at first but in the long run you wouldn’t have to use as much or maybe any power from an out side source.
“If efficiency can be high enough, small generating stations i.e make your own run off solar cells or wind generator? Then pretty green”
Seems like an obvious leap: solar on your house could fuel your hydrogen hybrid car. Most people’s roofs are just sitting there all day reflecting and/or absorbing energy in the most wasteful/inefficient way.
That’s in my eyes a really good idea.
Because linking solar panels and other private energy resources are very difficult to link to the electricity net. Because the net-company need to know how many electricity will be produced at what time. Solar and especially wind are nod so easy to predict and certainly not when they’re produced privately.
The production of H2 would then be a good solution!
Love my VW Golf TDI
Love the TDI bit. Is it nice and white?
I have a mid size (not small) 3 year old Honda Accord,2.4L manual 5 speed.
60mph on cruise control in the slow lane gets me 36mpg.
Have a scangauge (www.scangauge.com) arriving in the mail
next week $160. Look forward to improving my city/highway mileage.
With gasoline quickly catching up to the price of bottled water and cups of coffee,
you gotta learn to conserve.
just finish my first one still need to fine tune it toy forerunner from 18 mpg to 28 mpg after tuning expect 35+mpg yes it dose work but it is a lot of work
I have a mid size (not small) 3 year old Honda Accord,2.4L manual 5 speed.
60mph on cruise control in the slow lane gets me 36mpg……
Small and light pays off if you travel alone:
1986 Honda CRX Si, 156,000 miles, 1.5L, 5-spd, traveling 65-70 mph on freeway with freely moving traffic yields 42-43 mph; Carlsbad to Palm Springs mileage (with camping gear) drops mileage to 39 mpg (presumably a consequence of the traffic lights between Temecula and Hemet). “Around town” average drops to around 26-27 mpg. Carries my 9’-2 x 23" longboard (with fastback tailgate lifted open ~3 inches and board not extending past rear bumper). Still has half the rear cargo area available (but no space for a passenger).
a former car of mine a 1991 Honda Civic Hatchback 1.5 or 1.6l
got >40mpg going 75-80mph Las Vegas to LA on a regular basis.
Tried hypermiling it once, 55-60mph, go slower uphill instead of applying more gas pedal.
Achieved 55mpg.
All these figures were way in excess of their EPA stated mpg.
All my car choices over the years have been driven by my board size, memories of the 70’s gas rationing and high prices, EPA mpg estimates
and Consumer Reports.
My latest little project, yet to build the board trailer for it but it’s in the pipeline. I can get 200km (120miles) from one tank (approx 2 litres).
Motor cost me $A220, two bikes to make one bike $A10 from local recyling depot. Top speed 50kph. If the hill gets too steep I just help the motor along with the pedals but I haven’t had to do that yet…
66cc of pure grunt!!!
Benny, You stated, “Can’t say there’s any carbon balance taking oil or coal out of the ground.”
Got me to thinking…Oil and coal both come from decayed plant matter. Plants that, as you said, suck in carbon and breathe out oxygen. And they did it for thousands of years. Could it be that burning fossil fuels has already been paid for in carbon “credits” by the hard working plants of ages gone by?
Doug
kai- it was the malloys. check bend to baja at patagonia website
It is actually highly likely that we’ve been getting oil for practically free all these years and thus building our entire lives and economies around it, and now the reality of our addiction to a finite supply commodity just started to come into focus-- it took the guys around the corner getting hooked too before the tightening supply and price shocks started to make a dent in Americans’ lazy brains.
Tried hypermiling it once
Hypermiling is fun and interesting…but the people who do it as “lifestyle” are going to burn and die in populated areas. The news media interviews them and they arrogantly and condescendingly talk about people honking at them. Gauls me every time. In their personal quests to increase their personal mileage they create completely insane and unexpected traffic hazards…heard one guy who runs 10-20 mph under speed limits in some circumstances. Everybody else who is trying to maintain the legal flow, as determined by traffic and civil engineers, comes upon these elitist geeks and have to slam on brakes etc. Appalling and very, very dangerous in areas with any kind of traffic.
I’m just back from the PNW (U.S.) where green living is a big thing but distances are great outside cities. Used hybrids are big, and I didn’t hear much good spoken of latest and upcoming electrics as their range was nearly useless. Even the most hardcore greens I met felt old Hondas outperformed highest new tech. Scooters (like Vespa etc, not kick scooters) seemed to be the upcoming thing for areas where hills made pedal bikes more than a chore. You’re probably screwed in the rain or with a longboard though…and like one kayak guy said they’re so new that up there you can get the used Japanese or Korean car for about the same price plus have that funk on the outside, if not other places. But you have to like a kayaker who is thinking about how to run his life on a scooter.
"Benny, You stated, “Can’t say there’s any carbon balance taking oil or coal out of the ground.”
Got me to thinking…Oil and coal both come from decayed plant matter. Plants that, as you said, suck in carbon and breathe out oxygen. And they did it for thousands of years. Could it be that burning fossil fuels has already been paid for in carbon “credits” by the hard working plants of ages gone by?"
basically NO,
any Carbon those plants took from the air were put back as they decomposed. Nature works on a balance. burning fossil fuels disrupts that balance enormously. The idea of carbon credits is pretty much a scam, designed by economists to greenwash not changing current destructive practice.
Changing to veggie or bio diesel or ethanol may be saving you personally a bit of cash, and is a good start to thinking about change. But it is really doing little to combat the overall problem of excessive CO2 production/ disruption of earths atmospheric balance. The only real solution is a vast change of lifestyle and reduction of consumption primarily in the western world but also globally. smaller more efficient vehicles, living spaces, mass transport and less plastic or disposable junk in our lives along with intensive recylcing efforts will make a much greater impact and probably not require any large immediate shifts in technology to do so. As a society and a culture we collectivly need to change our thinking away from what is best for our economy or our bank statement and towards what is best for the world we live in and the generations who will inherit the choices we have made. Ask the average resident of Beiging if a successful economy is worth not being able to breath the air around them.
cheers
No I think he is fairly right.
But the problem is, the carbon is sucked out of the air thousands of years ago.
The thing is, plant are build with organic molecule which are build up with carbon.
plants don’t suck up carbon from the ground, they get it from the air. And there is no way to make new carbon atoms (except with some nuclear reaction and I don’t think plants have nuclear reactors).
So what he says is true I believe.
But problem is now the carbon is in the fossil fuel and it better stays there 
Population control. We can’t count on using up this planet then trying to find another.
Noone ever wants to talk about population control though, it is taboo.