Recent Comments:
Airline Fees on the Rise: What You Need to Know {AOL Travel News}
Apr 7th 2010 6:33PM These fees are a nuisance. I would prefer to be able to pay $50-75 more per ticket when I make the reservation and return the service to the flight, i.e., give us food on flights longer than 2 hours, baggage, pillows, blankets, etc. included in the base ticket price. For those of us who spend a signficant amount of time in the air, this "race to the bottom" mentality brought on by SouthWest, AirTran, and the like has made our lives miserable.
Brabus GLK - World's Fastest Street Legal SUV for $570,000 {Luxist}
Jan 2nd 2010 6:24PM You can go that fast quote a number of places on the US. Most road racing tracks have open track days available for high-speed testing. Just because you can't do it legally on public roads doesn't mean there's no place you can.
US Airways makes soda free again {WalletPop}
Feb 23rd 2009 11:15AM 'A La Carte' pricing in airplanes is probably the worst idea I can think of. Try to think of it from the perspective of the business traveller - who pays on average almost 5x per ticket as does the leisure traveller (per the most recent business travel reports I've seen). When you are running from meeting to hotel to airport, flight to flight, and trying to get things done whenever possible along the way, having to try to keep track of every little $2 and $5 item does nothing more than add an extra layer of hassle to your day - it's adding insult to injury. What we need is to be able to book the flight, pay what it costs in one transaction, and not have to deal with any more surcharges after the fact. Simpler is better.
Please, please, please, airlines - put the service back in the air and price the tickets to cover the total cost. It won't change how much we fly, but it will take a lot of the negativity out of the relationship between the carriers and customers.
Toyota tells Popular Mechanics battery production is the "biggest hurdle" to plug-in cars {Autoblog Green}
Feb 9th 2008 10:49AM "The largest and newest cruise ships in the world run on electric motors, with relatively small diesels to charge the batteries. How do they do it?"
Simple - this is a hybrid solution, just like the Prius. Diesel locomotives run the same way, but without the batteries.
Either way, it's not comparable to the 'electric cars' being pushed in this article. Electric cars must maintain their full energy storage in the batteries, rather than acting in the manner that hybrids do, using hydrocarbon compounds to store energy, then using internal combustion to convert to chemical energy to electric power. In the hybrid solution, batteries are only used for temporary energy storage, smoothing out the demand curve and absorbing the energy from regenerative braking and excess power from the IC engine.
Toyota tells Popular Mechanics battery production is the "biggest hurdle" to plug-in cars {Autoblog Green}
Feb 9th 2008 8:55AM ^^^ I should have added that if you use a local, renewable energy source to charge your electric vehicle, it might make more sense. For example, if you have a windmill or solar panel in your back yard that feeds your charger, the net efficiency is outstanding. Unfortunately, we're a LONG way away from the average driver having this sort of renewable energy source at their home.
Toyota tells Popular Mechanics battery production is the "biggest hurdle" to plug-in cars {Autoblog Green}
Feb 9th 2008 8:38AM I'd still like to know why people are so enthralled with the idea of an electric car. Somebody please explain to me how our nation's aggregate electric generation capacity could even begin to cope with the added load without adding more gas turbines and coal plants.
The simple fact is that moving from internal combustion vehicles to pure electric doesn't change the energy source (fossil fuels); it only moves the location of the emissions.
Added to that is the fact that electrical transmission/distribution is not terribly efficient in itself. Every transformer (substation) between the generator and the point of use consumes about 5.5% of the total power in impedance losses; the cables themselves add even more loss. Thus, the more distant the generation facility, the lower the efficiency of the distribution system.
If that weren't enough, there is a phenomenon in batteries called 'self-discharge'. When a battery sits idle, it slowly loses it's charge; every bit of this energy is wasted, and cannot be recovered. This is in contrast to the fuel tank of a modern car, where the pressure and evaprative recovery system is designed to minimize (nearly eliminate) losses from evaporation.
Then, we have the unfortunate fact that batteries are still VERY heavy, while gasoline is rather light; the energy density falls far in favor of carrying around hydrocarbons vs. carrying heavy metals. The fact is that it takes energy to accelerate mass, so until you can get an electric car down to the weight of an equivalent model with IC engine (and a half-tank of fuel), you're wasting energy with the electric model.
In the end, some simple math (and I am an electrical engineer) seems to indicate that if we were to move to electric cars tomorrow, we would actually burn MORE fossil fuels, not less, and the result would be WORSE for the environment, not better.
That said, hybrids are a great idea. Short-term storage use of batteries for energy storage, combined with regenerative braking and local conversion of fuel to electricity - now you're talking about a system that has the potential for great gains. Of course, we need to increase the energy density of the batteries by a factor of 2 or more to really get there, but that WILL happen as industry starts to drive R&D based on the commercial viability of the current crop of hybrid cars.
Rare Duesenberg Sells for $2.64 Million {Luxist}
Oct 28th 2006 1:25PM $2.64M is not that much money in comparison to many other collector items. A guitar owned by Gary Moore (ex-Peter Green) recently sold for $500K. Stradivarius violins routinely go for millions. Priced a Van Gogh original lately?
Heck, a 1/3 acre building lot in my county can't be had for less than $400K.
I'm glad the car went to someone who has the resources to maintain it and preserve it as an item of historic value, and not just as a 'toy' to be used up and discarded.
