Current ridicule

[eatenbyagrue]

.

[sarkeizen]

Things are not going to improve cause most people behave like kids uncapable of learning new things and, more difficult, changing concepts.

I agree.  People need to stop acting like kids.  Like that complex problems (How do we best use the raw materials we have? How do we best treat disease?) have ideological simple solutions (The government is suppressing the electric car, the pharmaceutical companies are suppressing natural remedies). 

That's what it really means to act like a kid:  To be ideologically driven.   To sort things into a simple "good guy/bad guy" dichotomy.  Many important questions are rarely that simple.

Until we identify the enemy things will get worse and worse.

We are the problem.

[raburgeson]

All right, check out the top stock holders in oil and auto and compare the lists. You will find the lists for railroads and others are about the same too. Bottom line is we pay monopoly prices for everything plus hidden taxes on all services rendered in between. We do not need a car that is hard to handle because it is over powered. We need cheap transportation until we can move to overunity. It can be done, the government has done it, killed for it, and stolen it. It's up to us to figure it out. They do not want us to have it. That would give people freedom. If you want to know their view on that watch this.

http://www.disclose.tv/action/viewvideo/175971/Obama_Briefly_Explains_New_World_Order__2014/

They feel you are allowed to do what they allow you to do. They do not want you off the grid or traveling freely period.

[sarkeizen]

All right, check out the top stock holders in oil and auto and compare the lists

Since you've obviously done this perhaps you can show us your work?

[MarkE]

All HP and no torque. I noticed that they must be using those 1 foot tall dinosaur horses now days too. Look a 383 magnum would flip a charger right on it's back if you let it when I was a kid. That 62 Jetstar with the 400 Rocket Olds ran like this! First gear terrible screaming of the tires. Shift. Tires slowing down and catch. You can't miss second when car jumps ahead. Engine slows and car jerks slower. You bounce ahead and floor the accelerator. There is a brief squeal from the rear tires and you hear the countershaft of the transmission ricochet off the pavement and hope it doesn't hit anything expensive. The Hurst Olds transmission couldn't take half the beating a super T could. I tell you that from experience. These new cars don't have it. They have had a lot of time to figure out how to improve engines.

Take 150 inch engines. 4 cylinder, six cylinder, 8 cylinder, 12 cylinder as the number of cylinders go up so does the horsepower. The reason why is the higher the number of cylinders the more power overlap you have. Power overlap is more than one cylinder in the power stoke at one time. 4 cylinders have no power overlap unless they are 2 cycle. I think there was one tried in the past (4 cylinder) that fired on both sides of the piston. It didn't pan out and was never developed. Brickland Turners joint effort developed an engine that was very interesting, check that one out. It was all horsepower and torque. It could have been scaled down to 300 HP and used. It wasn't to bad on gas either. The test engine had a single barrel carburetor and had around 700 HP, to much for a factory car.

One more time, what happened to the guy building ford V8s that was well over 200 MPG and fighting to get 300. He has disappeared from the net completely. Some one in here must remember.

In your diatribe asserting that there is a conspiracy against fuel efficiency you incorrectly claimed that power to volume has gone down.  You cited 1 HP/in³ as how wonderful power / volume was in the great old days.  I have shown your claim is false:  Japanese and American car makers alike mass market production engines with almost twice the power density you cite. 

Now, you have switched to claiming that it's cylinder count and torque that is what's needed.  Once again you talk through your hat.  Friction losses per cylinder follow ring contact area which follows bore diameter.  But energy per stroke follows cylinder volume which follows the cube of the diameter.  Having lots of smaller cylinders to realize the same displacement runs up the relative friction losses.  As to having all the HP at the low end with lots of torque, that is another bad idea for automobile fuel economy.  A wide rpm range with a relatively flat torque curve coupled to a wide gear ratio transmission allows a car to operate at low power and low SFC at low rpms and high power when needed at high rpms.  This deals reasonably well with the stochiometric limit problem.  Over the past 40 years car makers have developed the variable valve timing, direct injection, and sophisticated engine controls to get amazingly flat torque curves compared to the cars of our fathers.

The guy who claimed several years ago to be building 300HP, 200mpg engines was a fraud.