Posted on 03/29/2006 3:43:18 PM PST by kellynla
(CBS) The star at last week's Philadelphia Auto Show wasn't a sports car or an economy car. It was a sports-economy car — one that combines performance and practicality under one hood.
But as CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman reports in this week's Assignment America, the car that buyers have been waiting decades comes from an unexpected source and runs on soybean bio-diesel fuel to boot.
A car that can go from zero to 60 in four seconds and get more than 50 miles to the gallon would be enough to pique any driver's interest. So who do we have to thank for it. Ford? GM? Toyota? No — just Victor, David, Cheeseborough, Bruce, and Kosi, five kids from the auto shop program at West Philadelphia High School
The five kids, along with a handful of schoolmates, built the soybean-fueled car as an after-school project. It took them more than a year — rummaging for parts, configuring wires and learning as they went. As teacher Simon Hauger notes, these kids weren't exactly the cream of the academic crop.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
It's my understanding VW engines burn a lot of oil.
Gasoline averaged about R$2.50 per litre (about US$4.00 per gallon) and ethanol averaged around R$2.00 per litre (about US$3.00 per gallon).
I don't remember seeing any cars at the ethanol pumps. Just a few panel trucks and delivery vans.
All the tractor-trailor rigs we saw were diesel. I don't remember seeing any alternative diesel fuel.
The fleet from which we rented our gasoline-driven car had no ethanol-driven cars. When I asked, I was told that ethanol-driven cars still have a lot of problems including initial cost, performance, and maintenance.
A lot of people use little gasoline-powered motorbikes to commute.
Brazil's public transportation, on the other hand, is excellent. Where we stayed, they had these articulated busses they called "The Tube". ALL the busses ran on diesel.
I'm amazed at how distorted and hyped-up Brazil's ethanol program is here in the States.
.
"Ethanol accounts for more than 40% of the fuel Brazilians use in their cars.
Ethanol's rise has had far-reaching effects on the economy. Not only does Brazil no longer have to import oil but an estimated $69 billion that would have gone to the Middle East or elsewhere has stayed in the country and is revitalizing once-depressed rural areas." \http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/02/06/8367959/index.htm
And for even more FACTS about ethanol and alternative fuels all you have to do is google. While Americans have been sitting on their hands for the past thirty friggin' years, Brazilians have been busy getting off the "oil addiction" Bush talked about.
I was in Brazil on business for over six weeks.
I saw what I saw, and I saw almost nobody at the ethanol pumps; not in Curitiba, not in Rio, not in Caioba', not in Matinhos, nor anywhere in-between. ALL the cars and vans I rode in and rented were gasoline-powered.
Unless they're doping their gasoline and diesel with ethanol, there's NO WAY that 40% of their fuel consumption is ethanol.
Hey, but why take the word of an eye witness when you have sources like Google and Fortune Magazine?
A little trivia about October Sky: that wasn't the original name of the book it was based on. I guess the title wasn't good enough for Hollywood. Can you guess what the original title was? Here's a hint: it's an anagram of "October Sky".
Btw, the words "October sky" do get uttered once in the movie, but the radio announcer while the folks are outside watching for Sputnik to pass overhead.
Yes, google and the media and academia are so reliable and trustworthy and they have so much documentation ... generously provided to them by the Lula machine .. er government.
These sources are so much more reliable and trustworthy and "voluminous" than anybody whose actually been there observing without an agenda or without being led around by the nose by Brazilian government agencies, whom we can so well depend upon for their accuracy and candor.
Just ask any Brazilian how good their government is at keeping its promises and living up to its hype. It should be easy to find one, since so many hundreds of thousands of them have moved here to the States for opportunities they can't get in "ethanol-driven" Brazil.
You may want to ask yourself why Brazil is the only country in the world to have such a great success with ethanol.
You may also want to ask why they are seeking sweetheart deals with the Venezuelan thug Chavez to get more oil, if their ethanol program is such a resounding success.
Thanks. Will keep an open mind.
"Thank your Mom for me, she let you stay up way past bedtime"
My Mother passed ten years ago;
so keep her out of your personal insults, genius!
And if you can't bring anything but personal insults to a thread then stay off mine!
"Nothing out there yet can beat oil. Ends up taking more energy to produce these alternative fuels than burning the original oil directly as gas or diesel in the first place."
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, for every one unit of energy available at the fuel pump, 1.23 units of fossil energy are used to produce gasoline, 0.74 of fossil energy are used to produce corn-based ethanol, and only 0.2 units of fossil energy are used to produce cellulosic ethanol.
Now I'm done with this thread. You folks will have to do your own further research.
Got a link for that info? Or was this just a drive by posting?
"I was just getting by with the skin of my teeth, C's and D's," he says. "I came here, and now I'm a straight-A student."
So a public school comes up with a project that gets kids interested, motivated and excited to the point that a near-failing student is now a straight A student and all anyone here can do is laugh at them and make fun? I think it's a great example of what a good teacher can do with kids. We need more of this type of teacher in the schools.
I think part of the problem is that this is a public school project. Substitute "home schooled" for "public schooled" and then there would be nothing but raves and cheers for this project.
I was reading the DOE site last night...
if I have time later today, I'll look for it but you're welcome to do it on your own...kinda tired of doing everybody else's research for them.
I spent entirely too much time on naysayers yesterday, thank you.
Boys Rocket?
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