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CONSUMER REPORTS - New Car Preview 2008

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EPA Updates Fuel Economy Figures

Consumer Reports - New Car Preview 2008

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West Philadelphia High School

"0 to 60 in 4 sec. & 50 mpg on soy bean oil"

New Li-Ion batteries in DeWalt power tools

Accord hybrid being replaced with 60mpg Diesel

Europe may restrict their oil imports to the US

Peak Oil Has Arrived!
The 3 Largest Oil Fields in the world have peaked!

Solar Cell technology & mfg. explosion in Silicon Valley

X Prize Foundation:
$25+ million prize for a 100 mpg car!

"People love their cars. They are vital links to our jobs, our community, ourselves. For everything we love about them, cars are chained to the most severe global crises of our time: oil dependence and climate change." - X Prize Foundation

"news, March 5th 2007"   "over 30 competitors sign on, Aug. 1st 2007"


"There's a very large industrial complex married to an old solution," says X Prize Foundation founder Peter Diamandis.
"We fully endorse the X Prize," says Bob Lutz, vice chair of General Motors, "but we just cannot divert ourselves from the business at hand." That business is the Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid electric car that Lutz hopes to have on the streets by 2010. "We're really not that interested in technology as a science-fair project," he says. But GM and the other major automakers are sure to be watching carefully for interesting technologies. If a team designs, say, a clever hybrid engine that bolts right onto the transmission of a Dodge Neon, it could sell the design to Chrysler and emerge a big winner regardless of whether it does well in the race.

Eric Hagerman, Wired magazine, 12-20-2007

Threats of Peak Oil to the Global Food Supply

A paper presented at the FEASTA Conference, "What Will We Eat as the Oil Runs Out?",
June 23-25, 2005, Dublin Ireland

The scale of our dependency on fossil fuels has grown to enormous proportions.

Trucks move most of the world's food, even though trucking is ten times more energy-intensive than moving food by train or barge. Refrigerated jets move a small but growing proportion of food, almost entirely to wealthy industrial nations, at 60 times the energy cost of sea transport.

But the single most telling gauge of our dependency is the size of the global population. Without fossil fuels, the stupendous growth in human numbers that has occurred over the past century would have been impossible.

Grain production per capita: A total of 2,029 million tons of grain were produced globally in 2004; this was a record in absolute numbers. But for the past two decades population has grown faster than grain production, so there is actually less available on a per-head basis. In addition, grain stocks are being drawn down: According to Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute, "in each of the last four . . . years production fell short of consumption. The shortfalls of nearly 100 million tons in 2002 and again in 2003 were the largest on record." 3 This trend suggests that the strategy of boosting food production by the use of fossil fuels is already yielding diminishing returns.

Global climate: This is being increasingly destabilized as a result of the famous greenhouse effect, resulting in problems for farmers that are relatively minor now but that are likely to grow to catastrophic proportions within the next decade or two. Global warming is now almost universally acknowledged as resulting from CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.

Available fresh water: In the US, 85 percent of fresh water use goes toward agricultural production, requiring the drawing down of ancient aquifers at far above their recharge rates. Globally, as water tables fall, ever more powerful pumps must be used to lift irrigation water, requiring ever more energy usage. By 2020, according to the Worldwatch Institute and the UN, virtually every country will face shortages of fresh water.

The effectiveness of pesticides and herbicides: In the US, over the past two decades pesticide use has increased 33-fold, yet, each year a greater amount of crops is lost to pests, which are evolving immunities faster than chemists can invent new poisons. Like falling grain production per capita, this trend suggests a declining return from injecting the process of agricultural production with still more fossil fuels.

A motor run solely by magnets was originally suggested by Nikola Tesla in 1905.

Today: "Engineers of Hitachi Magnetics Corp. of California have stated that a motor run solely by magnets is feasible and logical but the politics of the matter make it impossible for them to pursue developing a magnet motor or any device that would compete with the energy cartels."

In the late 1800's W. W. Gary patented 2 designs

On April 24, 1979 Howard R. Johnson was issued patent
No. 4,151,431 on one design. _{(more compilicated)}

2004 Volkswagen Passat TDI

Buying a New Car? Get Stability Control!

Stability We've known for decades about the benefits of antilock brakes and traction control, but consumers are still relatively unaware of the precise benefits of the latest application of those technologies: stability control. A new study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety suggests that up to 10,000 fatal accidents can be prevented every year if the system were on all vehicles, instead of the current 25 percent. That's a huge number, given that there are 34,000 car-crash deaths a year. Read this article for a good explanation of how the systems work, and don't let dealers convince you that stability control isn't necessary just so you'll drive out with a car that isn't equipped with it. According to David Champion, head of auto testing for Consumer Reports, "a big part of the problem is that, since many customers are unaware of the technology or don't fully understand it, it's easier for car dealers to tell consumers they don't need it." ?Eric Adams