Posted on 05/01/2005 6:19:00 AM PDT by MississippiMasterpiece
Bud a if you want an engineering education - go to school. I don't have the time to explain the concepts of velocity, drag, work, and energy to you. Suffice it to say that moving an object through the air at 75 compared to 55 will require a larger force and an even larger use of energy.
"Eschew Automatic Transmissions"
Not so, I changed my PU from a 3 speed standard trans to a 700R4 automatic and increased my milage from 12 to 15mpg and it weighs 4960# empty with the tools that I carry in 2 cros boxes and 2 side boxes.
Yeah that's what I thought. You know nothing.
Not too many kids sin the 3yr to 10yr range can drive a manual, but plenty can seem to make an automatic go (from reading news reports). That makes them a danger and they should be banned (for the children!).
It seems like the more we progress, the stupider we get.
OMIGOD - Maybe there was one of those devices the oil refiniers and auto manufacturers "know" about and hide that they forgot to take off your vehicle!!! Don't let anyone else know. They and the oil companies kill people to keep this secret. I would be scared - very very scared!
Sorry, but speed (air resistance ~= air density * V^2 * Cd * Frontal Area) does have a lot to do with fuel economy. Since it is proportional to speed squared it becomes the largest factor for most vehicles by 55 mph. You can prove this to yourself by driving the same long distance trip at 50 vs 80 (assuming the same temperature and wind speed) and measuring your FE.
In the liberal mind there is no problem that a massive tax can't solve.
Please the facts may ruin a perfently good argument! His vehicle actually uses less gas and air to go faster!
Paladin2 offers a valid argument. You offer insults.
The people who propose such nonsense obviously don't spend much time driving across place like Nevada, or need to travel I-5 in California.
When I drive to visit my Mom in SW Idaho, I take I-80 across Nevada to Winnemucca before turning north. I put the car in cruise control, where the limit is 75, and watch the miles clip along.
55 mph adds hours to a trip.
I believe that he lives in the Rockies and may find that his FE is better at 80 mph down the mountains than it is at 60 uphill. No broken laws there.
But if history is any guide, there is one thing he could do immediately: bring back the 55 miles-per-hour speed limit.[snip]
For example, driving at 10 miles an hour above the 65 miles-per-hour limit increases fuel consumption by 15 percent;
This is a clever bit of political gambitry by the NYT; if the Bush administration were stupid enough to follow their advice, the backlash of angry US motorists at the ballot box would assure a Democratic victory in the subsequent election.
Now; on to the sophistry of the the final paragraph of the article: they artfully claim a 15% increase in fuel consumption at 75mph compared to 65 (which may, or may not be valid, but that's an issue for another time), in the hopes that the educationally challenged American public will incorrectly assume that DECREASING the speed from 65 to 55mph will produce a 15% DECREASE in consumption. The hidden reality is that at constant highway speeds most of the fuel conspumtion goes into overcoming aerodynamic drag, and aero drag increases with the SQUARE of the velocity! If a 10 mph increase from 65 to 75 produces a 15% increase in consumption, the savings from a similar decrement in speed from 65 to 55 will result in vastly smaller reduction in fuel consumption.
The morons touting this "solution" also fail to comprehend the effect of such a speed limit reduction on economic activity; truck drivers are paid by the hour, not the mile, and to the extent that long-haul trucks reduce their speed, the labor cost component of shipping goes up. Additionally, every additional hour an American worker spends on the road each week is an hour of lost potential economic activity by every one of those workers, with concomitant negative economic consequences.
Lastly, there is a safety issue that no one wants to consider: artificially lowering a speed limit INCREASES the accident rate! Traffic engineers have known for decades that for any road, there is one unique speed limit which produces the minimum accident rate for that road; that speed limit is has been shown to equal what is called the 85th percentile speed -- the speed at which 85% of all vehicles will travel at or below on that road in the absence of any speed limit signage. Anyone who has travelled on US interstates knows that the 85th percentile speed is well above 55 mph, and anyone unfortunate enough to have travelled the nation's interstate sytem under the previous federally mandate 55 mph speed limit will recall just how boring it is (and consequently how inattentive the driver becomes) to travel at that speed, and the margin by which it was ignored by commuters in metro areas (the average was about 75, not yhe mandated 55).
Finally, consider that only about one third of US highway driving miles are driven on highways on which the speed limit is ABOVE 55, IOW, a federally imposed 55 mph speed limit would NOT apply to 2/3's of the miles driven in this country! Whatever energy savings the 55 mph speed limit produced were paltry (in the 2-3% range of total consumption, as I recall), and were more than offset by the unintended adverse economic and safety effects.
In short, the 55 mph speed limit is an idea being floated by authoritarian anal-obsessive assholes who drive trundling, unexciting cars (picture a "Citroen" with a "Save the Whales" bumper sticker) that match their trundling unexciting anal-obsessive personalities, and they won't rest until the can force the rest of America to drive just like they do. And they want the Republicans to get blamed for it!
That 700R4!! What a piece of work...
Got one in my Blazer, make SURE you have the throttle cable adjusted correctly, or you will burn it up.
Hogwash! Small cars in the 70s got 25+ mpg in the city and 40+ on the highways. My '75 Honda Civic, btw, weighed in at 1800 lbs and was only 150 inches long. It sported a 53 HP engine and could barely go 75 mph!
Hated the 55 speed limit - home town was Tucson and went to school in Logan, Utah - 900 miles that wasn't meant to be driven at 55. That said, some of the stuff on this thread is foolishness. The vast majority of cars get better mileage at 55 because the air resistance increases with the square of the speed. And SUVs aren't known for outstanding aerodynamics.
Dropping speed limits guarantees more cars in transit longer... more traffic jams, etc. Here in NC many of our highways are posted at 70. We go 75-80, and we're at our destination sooner and the roads are clear than if we poked along at 55.
I can't drive 55!
I think that I'd be white-knuckled too at the thought of bailing out of a car moving at 100 mph. Or was the parachute a drag chute for stopping the car? :=)
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