Posted on 08/06/2002 2:08:25 PM PDT by Recovering_Democrat
To listen to automakers snipe about tightening fuel economy standards, you'd think it impossible to squeeze more miles from a barrel of Extract of Arabia. This, of course, is not the case, particularly if you design a vehicle expressly to drive far and drink little.
Forget power, space, and speed: Volkswagen AG's latest idea-on-wheels does not address the requirements of the average American family driver. What it can do is travel more than 100 kilometers on a single liter of fuel. Translation: 235 miles per gallon.
The car's designers combined highly tuned aerodynamics, exotic materials, and a 0.3-liter diesel engine to achieve 0.99 liters per 100 kilometers. The project, the brainchild of engineer Thomas Gänsicke, is an engineering exercise and therefore has rather whimsical features. Most noticeable are the car's canoe-like proportions: It's 4 feet wide and 11 feet long. Occupants sit tandem, the passenger straddling the driver's seat, both wedged under a 4-foot-long gullwing canopy.
Three video cameras eliminate the mileage-reducing wind drag of rearview mirrors. Wheels are faired in, side-cooling air inlets open only when necessary, and even the keylocks have been replaced by a proximity unlocking system. The resulting coefficient of drag is 0.159, compared with 0.30 or so for most production cars.
The slinky carbon-fiber bodywork covering the magnesium frame is just the beginning of the unobtainium-based technology used throughout. The front suspension is a combination of titanium, aluminum, magnesium, and ceramics and weighs less than 18 pounds. The single-cylinder four-stroke engine has monoblock construction—there's no separate cylinder head—and is all aluminum. Fuel is atomized directly into the cylinder at 28,000 psi. Two overhead camshafts operate the one exhaust and two inlet valves. The fuel pump is magnesium, the exhaust system titanium.
The engine produces a thundering 8.5 horsepower and weighs only 57 pounds. It conspires with a 6-speed gearbox—magnesium housing, hollow shafts, titanium bolts—to pinch miles from the diesel fuel. The transmission shifts electronically, killing the engine when an onboard computer foresees an inkling of fuel savings. A starter-generator, with energy stored in nickel-metal batteries, rekindles the engine as necessary.
Because the electric motor only restarts the engine, the 1-liter car is not a hybrid. Gänsicke explains that if fuel economy wasn't paramount, the motor could be used to increase horsepower and torque by 30 percent. "But that's not the effect we wanted." In fact, he's not terribly specific about performance, other than to say that top speed exceeds 70 mph and that it's "not very quick in accelerating."
It can, he promises, "swim with the usual traffic." Who better to emphasize that point than Ferdinand Piëch, chairman of VW? For the most recent board meeting in April, Piëch drove the 1-liter car from Wolfsburg to Hamburg, 110 miles, averaging 264 miles per gallon on the way. That works out to an ultra-miserly 0.89 liters per 100 kilometers.
Of course, "0.89-liter car" doesn't quite have the same ring.
SIZING UP THE SMALL FRIES
How VW's 1-liter machine stacks up against the shortest-wheelbase vehicle on American roads today, the Mazda Miata.
VW 1-Liter Car
Length: 143.7 in.
Width: 49.1 in.
Height: 43.7 in.
Weight: 588 pounds
Peak Power: 8.5 hp
Fuel Capacity: 1.7 gal.
Mileage: 235 mpg
Mazda Miata
Length: 155.3 in.
Width: 66.0 in.
Height: 48.4 in.
Weight: 2,387 pounds
Peak Power: 142 hp
Fuel Capacity: 12.7 gal.
Mileage: 29 mpg
No. It only seats two. At best, you can pick up chick with it.
LOL! And observe that it doesn't have its lights on while the cars behind it do.
Lights would probably bring the gas mileage down to about 50 mpg.
But what the heck!
Don't know about the rest of the car, but this isn't very impressive. A normally aspirated Ford small block has no problem approaching 1hp/lb.
Let us assume that one can, in fact, impress a chick with the car enough to get one inside. (It's "cute", so it's entirely possible that a cheerleader type may indeed be lured into the vehicle.)
At that point the car seems to offer some advantages, in that ocupants sit tandem, the passenger straddling the driver's seat.
With a bit of creative design, the male may initiate his move with a mere "here, let me show you how to start it."
Very true. This would be a menace to anyone on the road and especially fire fighters and rescue workers. Magnesium for those who don't know it's properties generates it's own oxygen in a fire. On ships if a helo {also bulit with magnesium} caught fire the helo was tossed over the side or it would burn through the decks to the bottom. No one likes a Delta Fire.
An absolutely beautiful specimen. My guess is 1948 or'49 Cadillac, with a flat head V-8. Miles per gallon = "who cares"? Curb weight = a ton! How am I doin'?
".....knees in the dash to save a little gas...
...swerved to avoid a little duck & got smashed beneath the wheels a a very big truck.....
Know why they have rear window defrosters?
So your hands don't get cold when your pushin' it.
Yeah, I think it's a '48 Caddy Fastback (not mine) -- I always liked the looks of that car.
Consider that a cheap motorcycle can carry two passengers at about 70 mpg with no modifications. Consider that _bicycles_ can be made with fiberglass fairings that can be pedaled over 70 mph. (Air resistance is by far the largest source of drag for land vehicles at road speeds. Reducing this drag would shoot up the mileage of a motor vehicle enormously.) So, to make a very efficient car, one could reduce the size of a small motorcycle engine considerably, design a frame that places the passengers in seated tandem position, reduce the height of the vehicle above the ground, add a two-wheel front axle, and then cover the thing in a plastic or fiberglass bubble. None of this requires exotic materials and could provide a vehicle that would surely get well over 150 mpg and could get close to 200 mpg.
But no such vehicles are made because gas is cheap. That is the important fact, not the state of present materials technology or aerodynamics. If people ever drive these project cars it will be because the government _makes_ them, not because these vehicles "finally" become available from commercial manufacturers. And environmentalists know this.
Whether we should be made to get into such cars is the real question. But this question the environmentalists avoid since they realize that the overwhelming answer from the citizenry would be "no". So, for now, we occasionally get green-leaning news articles about clever ways researchers are trying to "solve" the problems of low fuel economy for passenger vehicles. That, at least, will leave people with the impression that there is a problem, and that we have to solve it somehow. *Sigh*
Paging Mr. Lowry, paging Mr. Lowry: your mom has bought you a new car.
Prostitutes? I would imagine so.
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