Posted on 06/30/2004 12:18:44 PM PDT by xzins
Hybrid fizzle So pumped was Cincinnati resident Pete Blackshaw about getting his Civic hybrid, he gave the car a "MO MILES" vanity license plate. Blackshaw got the opposite. Instead of the advertised 47 mpg, Blackshaw gets about 32. The hybrid enthusiast turned critic blogged away his frustration with his underperforming gas-electric car. But it could be worse. Consumer Reports found most Civic hybrids get only about 26 mpg on average. Regular Civics usually score above 30 mpg.
According to a J.D. Power survey, hybrid car owners may not all be as discouraged as Blackshaw. The study revealed that more than wanting to save money at the pump, hybrid drivers want to save the world with their hands on the steering wheel.
The attitudes and opinions about economics, technology, and the environment held by owners of hybrid-electric cars distinguish them from the other groups. Issues on which the owners of hybrid-electric cars hold extreme positions are: interest in helping reduce vehicle pollution, willingness to pay extra for "green" products, and thinking of oneself as an avid recycler. Owners of hybrid-electric cars also have the most extreme expectations that fuel prices will be higher in the future.
In just about every SUV thread you'll find on here someone invariably says "Well why don't they outlaw those unsafe small cars".
Guess what, they did, for the most part. I'm of the opinion that those small cars aren't unsafe, it's the driver that makes them unsafe and that can apply to ANY vehicle.
Resistive heating is 100% efficient. Every watt that goes in as electricity comes back out as heat.
Generally, if it starts up in cold weather without giving you fits, it's fuel injected.
I think that used to be known as the "Geo Metro". My friend had one, and we had to be careful on long highways where there was any wind at all.
I will take safety over saving on gas money. Even a few hundred dollars extra a year is not worth that much of an increased chance of getting seriously hurt. I now drive the safest car I could possibly afford (that still met reliability requirements). I get about 24 MPG, but it's worth it to be safer, even though I drive 30 miles to work. I already tore a disc in my back in a car accident when I was in my '86 Nissan pickup, and I still feel it years later. My little pickup bounced off of a Lincoln Continental (not my fault at all). There was barely any damage to the Lincoln, but my pickup was totalled. I had bought it with paper route money I saved for four years, and it was the best I could do at the time, but when it comes time for my kids to drive, I'll make sure they have something a bit safer, even if they do have to earn a lot of the money themselves. No chiclets.
The biggest safety feature of any vehicle is found between the seat and the steering wheel.
You have no control over what the idiot driving next to you decides to do. If some crazy drunk person decides to run a stop light on a busy street, then good luck to you if you're driving a chiclet.
To maintain normal cruise (65+) you have to run the gas engine full out. Not ideal for best economy. In town, if you are at stop light, everything shuts down to save gas (providing you have the AC off).
Had something like that back in the 60's. Dang needle moved down as the pedal went down.
But not as energy efficient as reverse-cycle heating! You get more BTU of heating per watt with reverse-cycle heating.
Correction. Watt >>> Watt-hour. Watt is not energy, it is power.
You can look before entering the intersection to make sure that some crazy drunk person isn't going to run the red light.
By the way, it's not good practice to drive next to someone. I try to avoid it whenever possible. Many of the idiot drivers I see around here will drive right next to some other idiot with nobody in front of either idiot. One of those idiots, like the one in the left lane, could do the safe and curteous thing which is to speed up for a few seconds and move over to the right and then slow back down, but they never do.
Too many people on our highways think that "chance" dictates whether they get into an accident, and therefore assume that all they need to do to be safe is to buy the largest vehicle that they can.
Just like too many people in our country think that "chance" dictates whether they make something out of their life, and therefore assume that they need the government handouts because they have bad luck.
Either way, people are not taking responsibility for things that they ought to be.
Yes, heat pumps can be more than 100% efficient, at least until the outside temperature drops too much.
Isn't the relationship watt-hours per BTU-hour or am I missing something?
You're assuming people don't run red lights that have been red for a minute. You can't see the traffic on your left if there are large vehicles driving on the opposite side of the street. Sometimes, crazy people floor it even though the light is red, and they pop out from behind large trucks.
I'm not talking about driving next to someone. I'm talking about someone suddenly driving next to you. As in, towards you, not alongside you. Sometimes people driving other cars decide that they want to be next to you, in a perpendicular fashion, whether you like it or not. And there's not a thing you can do about it if the pop out from behind corners on one-way streets going the wrong way, or from behind other large vehicles on the streets. Most accidents could be avoided if both people had been looking out and driving defensively. However, there are some accidents where one person was totally at fault, and there was nothing the other person could do.
Sometimes large trucks like to rear-end you while you're stopped at a stop light, too. Drive a chiclet all you want, but I'm not doing it. My husband was rear-ended by a moving truck, and I'm glad he was in a full-sized truck himself or he might have been more seriously hurt. If we'd been in my Civic, where his knees hit the dashboard, I think he would have been hurt worse.
No.
or am I missing something?
Yes.
I thought only SUV's had such evil intentions.
Yes, that is my point exactly. While the efficiency of resistive heating is only 100%, minus duct losses, the efficiency of a heat pump is about 200 to 300 percent because it concentrates EXISTING atmospheric heat taken from the air passing through a condenser. Taking this a step farther, a geothermal/ground source heat pump cam achieve efficiencies of over 500% because of the relatively constant temperature of the earth.
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