Hydrogen lacks a distribution network- gas has gas stations, plug in hybrids / full electrics have the electric grid. How do you get a hydrogen filling station network off the ground? Do you generate hydrogen at each location with wired electricity (or solar?), or do you ship it or pipe it? Until you solve that I don't see what near term there is for fuel cells.
What your beef with Priuses? Everybody I know who has one reckons they're OK.
I knew I shouldn't have put in the part in brackets! I'll respond, but only after a hundred comments or so on the more serious science/environment/technology questions.
Natural gas as used now produces about half the CO2 per kilojoule as coal.
Burning natural gas with a carbon tax would buy a lot of time for developing renewables. Fracking is practiced by lunatics with no capital. I don't know what effect state regulation would have on that.
How do you get a hydrogen filling station network off the ground?
Surprisingly easily.
Unlike the Prius [which sucks, but that's for the culture blogging section not the science blogging one], the Honda FCX Clarity is actually very green
Looking past the part in brackets... why do you say the Prius isn't "green"? Just that it's still ulimately pteroluem? (Even if very little of it by modern automotive standards?) Or something else, that I'm missing?
what exactly is the cost-benefit analysis of fracking natural gas, compared with coal or renewable sources?
Still, scientists would like to know if human activity can trigger a larger event. The National Academy of Sciences is studying the seismic effects of energy drilling and mining and will issue a report next spring."This is an area of active research," said Rowena Lohman, a Cornell University seismologist. "We're all concerned about this."
One issue is that areas that are prone to earthquakes are also places where oil and gas flow along fractures, experts said.
google "fracking earthquakes"
Absolute science for Richter 3s and 4s.
PS, h-g:New doc The Big Fix on the murder of the Gulf, is a killer
6 -- Oh, a Prius is more green than a standard internal combustion engine car on the market, but the mileage isn't that great compared to compact cars of pretty recent vintage, and you still get fairly substantial carbon emissions (although much lower levels of smog-creating pollutants).
The missing but important question is: where does the hydrogen comes from? What is the cost/energy expenditure to arrive at the hydrogen for the cars? Unless things have changed very recently, hydrogen production takes lots of energy which needs to be factored in to the fuel cell efficiency equation.
re the Clarity, how much does a kg of gaseous hydrogen cost at retail? Also, isn't a "designated hydrogen refueling station" at risk of exploding if anyone does anything stupid? (Normal gas stations aren't completely immune from this risk, of course.) Also, that car is ugly. (No moreso than a Pruis, but that's damning with faint praise.)
9: I wonder what the ratio is between square-footage of solar and the energy equivalent of a gallon of gas. I'm sure you couldn't run a gas station off a solar panel on the roof turning water into hydrogen, but I wonder how many orders of magnitude it's off by.
Also, aren't these two F.A.Q. answers, which Honda had the audacity to put right next to one another on their website, basically internally contradictory?
Q. Is the FCX Clarity FCEV fun to drive?
A. If you like smooth, strong acceleration, great handling and a quiet ride, then you'll find the FCX Clarity FCEV to be one of the best cars you've ever driven....
Q. How fast does the FCX Clarity FCEV go?
A. The FCX Clarity has a top speed of 100 miles per hour on a test track, so you'll have no trouble driving at the posted speed limit.
Likewise with making the roof of the car a solar panel, and having it refuel itself while it sits in the sun. I'm sure this doesn't work, but I wonder how far from working it is.
I think there is a model of the Prius that runs the A/C on power from a roof-top solar panel.
In May 2007 a partnership of Canadian companies led by Hymotion altered a Toyota Prius to use solar cells to generate up to 240 watts of electrical power in full sunshine. This is reported as permitting up to 15 km extra range on a sunny summer day[6] while using only the electric motors.
15 km range is all I need except for emergencies, but close to my limit (5 mi each way). I don't know if that includes battery storage or not. Of course, it would also depend on load and speed.
My guess is that it is practical.
Wiki wasn't much help.
Electricity is also bad for carbon. Based on US average rates of CO2, an all-electric vehicle only get 60 miles/gallon. Better than a regular car, but not orders of magnitude so.
Sorry that should read: Based on average rates of CO2/kWh.
Pure coal-based electricity is even worse. On the other hand, west coast power companies use a lot of renewables, so they're much better (up to the equivalent of ~100 miles/gallon).
7: I remember reading recently that the number of earthquakes in OK jumped from something like 6 in 2009, to ~50ish in 2010, to ~1000ish in 2011.
If you take into account the full cycle of gas->electricity->hydrogen, it's terribly inefficient and not really any improvement in overall carbon release. If, someday, this becomes solar->electricity->hydrogen, then we are carbon-free, but I don't think that's where we are yet.
12 -- I actually drove a Clarity on Saturday (an acquaintance has one and let me try it after we talked about it for a bit). Def more fun to drive than a Prius in terms of acceleration and handling, but I didn't try to top out the speed.
Bette from link in 13
The area of photovoltaic modules required to power a car with conventional design is too large to be carried onboard. A prototype car and trailer has been built Solar Taxi. According to the website, it is capable of 100 km/day using 6m2 of standard crystalline silicon cells. Electricity is stored using a nickel/salt battery. A stationary system such as a rooftop solar panel, however, can be used to charge conventional electric vehicles.
That is a trailer of solar panels behind the car. And 100 km a day id 5 times what I need. As far as load (me & my dogs?) they do call it a "taxi"
However 16 & 17 make the point serious energy people make. How much energy to make a solar cell? How much for the battery, the carbon fiber chassis?
Conversion will be brutal and we probably lack the energy/materials to do it at current pop levels. I often believe we should just go balls-out human resource growth and pray that 10-20 billion will give a genius/es who finds the break through.
Otherwise we may be looking at one billion in 2100.
Doing a little arithmetic:
* the FCX carries 4.1kG of H2 for a range of 240 miles,
* electrolysis of one mole of water to O2 and H2 consumes 237 kJ ideally,
* electrolysis of water to hydrogen can easily be 50% efficient, so about 475 kJ of energy per mole of H2 (2 grams),
-> 971 MJ to fill up the hydrogen tank.
Readily-available commercial solar panels seem to be reaching 200W/square meter; let's assume they get there for this project (and that SoCal is always sunny). Producing 971 MJ thus takes one hour with 1350 square meters of solar panels, or if you have all day (I'll be generous and say 16 hours), 84 square meters of panels. Not quite 1000 square feet, so a dedicated system on a generous-sized rooftop could plausibly do one fillup a day.
Thinking in terms of on-the-road generation, let's say you want to go 60 MPH, so you need the equivalent of a fill-up every four hours. That means 340 square meters of panels, and the roof of a car is more like 1-2 square meters.
Not quite 1000 square feet, so a dedicated system on a generous-sized rooftop could plausibly do one fillup a day.
Although since most people don't need anything like a full tank per day. If you just need a 16 mi/day round trip commute, and you car sits out in the sun in the parking lot for 8 hours all day... I'm not going to do the math, but it sounds like we're not too many orders of magnitude away from the right ballpark.
Say 2 square meters on top of the car; that gets you 2h45 for every mile of charge. Not so great with current tech; I think you're better off arranging for a plug-in station at both ends of your commute.
dedicated system on a generous-sized rooftop could plausibly do one fillup a day.
So you'd need to dedicate a fair-sized surrounding neighborhood of rooftops to run a service station without net pulling from the grid, and of course that only works where you have sun.
Or you could generate the hydrogen via solar or wind power offsite, and then transport that to the service station.
I think that may be the one solution for how to get power from wind farms on the great plains to coastal metropolises. Instead of big-ass power lines blighting the landscape and requiring electricity to be used as its generated, have wind turbines store the power by generating hydrogen on-sight, then transport said hydrogen via rail or blimp or something.
Our Prius has been getting 44 mpg and up. Few non-hybrids come close. I'm not buying the "not really green" argument.
I just bought a 2012 Hyundai Accent that's been getting me 44mpg highway. Its a bit smaller than a Prius, though.
We get 40+ on the highway. Not sure about city. On the other hand, we barely drive.
Yeah, when I owned my CRX and got ~50 MPG, the joke I made was that for the amount of driving I do, it would be a net environmental win for me to swap it with the Hummer that a friend commuted in (The friend eventually got a more reasonable everyday car, though the Hummer is still fun).
I'd think a big part of the social value created by the Prius and other currently available "green" cars has been making the idea of a hybrid or other alternative to a standard internal combustion engine much more credible to the consuming public -- even if the carbon-equivalent mpg isn't a huge improvement all by itself for current models.
Then again, it's possible I'm merely engaged in making creative excuses for SWPL.
Solar roofs for parking lots/garages are becoming more common - Apple will (supposedly) be putting them in their new flying saucer campus. Entirely conceivable to basically refuel your am commute while parked at work, and refuel your pm with (stored) electricity when you get home.
But this is all imagining that you can be suitably green with people doing 30+ mile, solo auto commutes each day. It's a bit like "What's the green way to heat/cool my 3500 SF exurban house?"
Not trying to dismiss the issue at hand through holier-than-thousim; just saying that, if we're talking major upheaval (and people commuting in electrics refueled purely through solar is in that category), other paradigms need to shift first.
Given mountaintop removal and suchlike, it's almost impossible for tracking to have worse collateral damage than coal, and it's obviously better along GHG dimensions. The difference is that it's happening in areas that haven't been coal-ravaged in the last half century, so people are understandably reluctant to engage. But in world where both carbon and environmental damages were priced properly, fracking would beat coal (although at that point renewables almost certainly beat both).
Tar sands oil is the stuff that's maybe even worse than coal - all the side effects of shale gas, all the carbon badness of coal.
28 et al: Part of what's happened, between the Prius selling huge and the gas spikes/economic collapse, is that conventional cars and light hybrids have been able to just about close the gap without the price premium and tradeoffs involved with the Prius (the tech involved is largely stuff that Rocky Mtn Institute and its hyper car program have been promoting for ~20 years).
The difference between 40 mpg and 44 is tire inflation, or maintaining the speed limit, or dropping out of gear and coasting to red lights.
If I had access to clean electricity, I'd take a Volt over a Prius any day of the week. Well, I say that having driven neither. But in terms of greenness (OK, and appearance).
Would solar panels on a roof serve to keep the house cooler in hpt weather? It would seem that it would, in which case in hot climates you'd double your payoff with reduced airconditioning costs, whereas in cold winters you'd only break even with increased heating costs.
Topically, I just noticed that the shitty grocery store by my house has a charging station for electric cars. Nobody with money enough to buy that kind out car would tolerate their produce department, so assume it is some kind of corporate PR, but still.
it's almost impossible for [f]racking to have worse collateral damage than coal, and it's obviously better along GHG dimensions.
Not necessarily. The amount of methane released by fracking may outwiegh the amount to CO2 saved by not burning coal.
In January someone from Nissan will be coming to our house to give us an estimate for the recharging station for the Leaf we are going to buy. By the formula F gives in 16, this is a ~50% improvement over our current 43 MPG civic hybrid. On the other hand, all our electricity comes from the ancient coal fired plant 10 miles up wind from us (Featured on NPR's Poisoned Places!) we may need to get some solar panels to really be doing any good.
Between 37 and this comment, I repaired a garage door opener's people-smash prevention sensor. I'm practically an electrician except for the qualifications, skills, and aptitude.
39: I've heard better things about the Leaf than the Volt; I'll be interested to read your post-acquisition comments, rob.
As for the OP, I have never attended a seminar on energy and/or infrastructure in the U.S. that did not spend roughly 20-25% of its running time emphasizing and re-emphasizing the present and expected future dominance of coal in the generation sector.
OT: The guy playing Moriarty in the new Sherlock Holmes movies looks all, all, all, a thousand times wrong. Did they lose Ciarán Hinds' agent's phone number or something?
I've been wondering about a Neighborhood Electric Vehicle. Since I'm very dull, I spend most of my life within a circle of six miles in diameter, so range wouldn't be an issue.
42: Why not just buy a white belt, move to Arizona and have done with it?
so range wouldn't be an issue
Other things that wouldn't be an issue: using birth control, having a sex life, any hope of ever gaining the respect of your peers, not looking like you're one step away from getting a Rascal mobility scooter.
OK, OK, I should shut up. I shouldn't feed the carbon-auto-industrial complex. This is a post about SCIENCE, people, not cars.
Hydropower is awesome from a physics/carbon standpoint. Shitty for the salmon, though.
43, 44: I think I could pull it off if I wore that cyclists tweedy stuff somebody keep posting here.
I have never attended a seminar on energy and/or infrastructure in the U.S. that did not spend roughly 20-25% of its running time emphasizing and re-emphasizing the present and expected future dominance of coal in the generation sector.
This is a key consideration in thinking about stuff like electric vehicles, as well as cleaner electricity sources and so forth. We're currently at about 50% coal nationwide, with considerable regional variation. Shifting over to electricity for transportation without changing our mix of generation sources would be ineffective at best carbon-wise, and possibly make things much worse. Petroleum emits less carbon than coal, but big power plants are more efficient than internal-combustion engines, so the actual net effect depends heavily on the specific numbers. This is true on both an individual and societal level; i.e., whether switching to an electric car lowers your carbon footprint depends on where your electricity comes from, and the same is true if everyone switches at once.
On the generation side, regardless of whether electric cares take off, replacing that 50% coal is a hell of an uphill climb. Gas is the easiest way to do it (many modern coal plants can be adjusted fairly easily to burn gas instead, and new gas plants are pretty cheap to build), but it still only gets rid of half the carbon. Solar and wind get rid of all the carbon, and are basically technically feasible at this point (although on a large scale they still potentially pose issues for grid management), but they're still hella expensive.
Yes, nothing suits the morbidly-obese golf carter better than houndstooth plus-fours.
45 is true too, plus there aren't that many rivers left to dam in the US. Except in Alaska, of course.
47: Mumble nuclear mumble might as well just get used to it mumble.
49: For pumped-storage, all you need is a hill.
And a bunch of money to build reservoirs, pumps and turbines and stuff, of course.
As for hydrogen fuel cells, 9 gets it right. Hydrogen isn't a source of energy, it's a medium for it (the relevant comparison is electricity rather than oil or coal), so it all depends crucially on how much energy it takes to make the hydrogen, and so far that's a lot and it's only really practical to make it on a large scale by burning fossil fuels.
51: Plus the energy to pump the water up.
37: Lots o' Russians in your hood. Do they even recognize green vegetables as food?
[Note: cultural stereotype based on my German FIL's attitude]
38: Right! I forgot about that methane thing.
Cripes.
Hydrogen isn't a source of energy
Says who?
48: Technically, I'm overweight but not obese. And it's all muscle.
54: There aren't even good potatoes.
I've heard better things about the Leaf than the Volt
How so?
To me the tradeoff is having enough batteries* to create an acceptable range vs. having a backup plan with effectively unlimited range.
A pure electric car can never be anything but a limited-range vehicle (because charging en route is entirely impractical), while a plug-in hybrid could be used cross-country, even while never using any gas in daily driving.
Maybe I'm being wholly solipsistic, but a Volt MPV (which they said they'd build and then changed their mind about, goddammit) would be a 100% match for my needs as a 1-car family, while a Leaf would only serve as a half-solution, even if it held 4 people plus a dog. We'd use like 20 gallons of gas per year, and we'd never need to rent for day trips or weekends out of town.
* equals weight equals inefficiency equals lost space equals mining equals cost
56: We're already using all the hydropower the Lord was willing to provide.
50: Speak up, son. All you've done around here for months is mumble.
57: Okay, okay, a hydrogen fuel cell isn't a source of energy.
"The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a giant nuclear furnace."
They Might Be Giants has a children's album which has 65 as a lyric. It occurred to me that everybody might not get the reference.
Ahem. The sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma.
No thread with my name on it can contain They Might Be Giants references. No! Let's get back to the SCIENCE, people.
27: transport said hydrogen via...blimp
Can't think of any potential problems with that at all.
No! Let's get back to the SCIENCE, people.
Is that a Thomas Dolby reference?
Here comes science. And a link done correctly.
Goddamn it I hate that group so goddamn much. It says right there in the sidebar -- HALFORD IS TAKING OVER THE BLOG. Where are the lamentations, craven attempts at toadying, and absence of They Might Be Giants references I expected?
Where are the lamentations, craven attempts at toadying, and absence of They Might Be Giants references I expected?
Mm-hmm.
I just found out that TMBG is playing here on my birthday, for which I thanked the guy who books that venue. What fun!
HALFORD IS TAKING OVER THE BLOG
I'm imagining dark glasses, fringed military epaulettes, and a self-promotion to Colonel.
I, for one, welcome Halford as our overlord!
79: I'm concerned about the Meal Plan.
Back to science! The main model used to calculate emissions and so forth in transportation is GREET, which is freely available and not too hard to use (as these things go). It's a good way to see the potential effects of wide adoption of various alternative transportation technologies.
One of my favorite bits of straightforward applied math is that we should be measuring efficiency in gallons per mile, instead of miles per gallon. When you think about this it's obvious: people decide to go somewhere and buy gas to get there, they don't buy gas and then drive out into the desert until the gas runs out. But it has really important effects. A car that gets 10 mpg uses 10 gallons to go 100 miles, while a car that gets 20 mpg uses 5 gallons to go 100 miles. In order to get the same gas savings you would have to replace the 20 mpg car with a car which *does not use any gas at all*.
I'm not sure that someone who hates They Might Be Giants that much should legally be allowed to have children. I accidentally taught my daughter science through 8th grade by letting her listen to "Here Comes Science" a hundred thousand times.
84: dude, I know.
41: having done a google image search, I am in agreement.
One thing I don't understand is why the best American cars, hybrid or not, get about half the MPG of the best European cars (many of which are diesel). I know it must have something to with emissions and the like, but why Ford produces a car in the UK (the Ka) that gets 60 + on highway on normal gasoline and 40 + in town and not in the US is really confusing to me. Citroen has come out with a diesel (I think) that gets 80 +! (I know that last number is their estimate, but a family member has a new Ka and it definitely does that.) And of course, all are smaller than the Prius or the like, but still, I would think that there would be a market nonetheless.
I'm pretty confident that grid transmission will always be more efficient than moving H2 about. One of the problems with H2 as a fuel is that it's not very dense, so you need an enormous container to hold it. You can partly get over this by liquefying it, but it takes quite a lot of power to cool it down to a liquid, and then you have to store it cryogenically, all the while knowing that if it warms up it expands a great deal and leaves you with an explosion *that creates a huge fuel-air mixture*. Cigarette? Also, it's hard on materials so you can't repurpose natural gas pipelines.
Researchers in the UK have been trying to design an aircraft to burn H2 (Rolls-Royce already ran a jet engine on it on the test stand years ago). The major challenge is accommodating the huge volume (although not much weight) in tankage within an airframe that isn't hideously anti-aerodynamic*, while also leaving room for a payload.
Also, the grid isn't actually so bad. The usual RoT figure is 1% loss per 1000km, which is certainly far better than electrolysis-liquefaction-shipment. (Mind you that applies to the European supergrid, which is pretty damn cool.) Further, if you're producing H2 by electrolysis you need a big supply of water near the power source. If you did for some reason insist on H2, it would make more sense to move electricity and produce the H2 close to the point of use (probably also closer to the sea). Even if you're using natural gas for the H2, I wouldn't be surprised if burning the gas in a state of the art combined cycle gas turbine to make electricity, and then using the electricity to drive electric motors, wouldn't be a better deal.
But the H2 economy was a stupid Bush idea, for reasons I think I've made clear.
LH2 is indeed extremely explodey. See Ben Rich, former head of Lockheed's Skunk Works, who wrote about trying to build a hydrogen-powered aircraft in a chapter of his book (Skunk Works) called "Blowing Up Burbank". And it leaks like anything. Small molecules, you see.
Flywheels are another option - you can get similar amounts of stored energy per kilo as with batteries, and they're faster to recharge (spin up) and not as likely to degrade with cycling.
87: Spike supplied the missing ingredient for hydrogen up above -- we should transport it via blimp.
Here's some good news that an old friend of unfogged, the erstwhile bitch phd, is joining joining crooked timber.
http://crookedtimber.org/2011/12/05/welcome-to-tedra-osell/
Made me wonder where we should stick ogged if he decides to take up blogging again? The awl? Back at washington monthly?
Hi guys, it's me! Have I ever told you about how Ben is my BESTEST FRIEND??!!
One thing I don't understand is why the best American cars, hybrid or not, get about half the MPG of the best European cars
Also, why do they get healthcare that's better AND cheaper! AND the Philly cream cheese formulation there is tastier!
1 and 2 can be explained by lower obesity rates in Europe, but 3 rather argues against that.
I meant, of course, Blume's first and second points in 92. Sorry. Poor citation format.
I just did the math on blimp-transported hydrogen. One Hindenburg of hydrogen (7 million cubic feet) is equivalent to about 19,500 gallons of gasoline, which is 5.6 railroad tank-cars at 3500 gallons per tank-car.
Catching up on this thread -- boy is it depressing.
95: Wasn't the safety problem with the Hindenburg more the shell construction than the hydrogen? I remember the issue being that the shell was something hyperflammable, and that a reasonably safe hydrogen-filled airship isn't an insane idea. But I should google.
I may be wrong about that last.
Mythbusters said that the shell was not really hyperflammable, and although it may have been a contributing factor it was not the cause.
97, 98 - The list of accidents put up against a similar list of heavier-than air aircraft accidents in the same time period would make Zeppelins look much better - also note that quite a few of those accidents had hydrogen fires secondary to the primary cause of the accident. They went out of service for economic as much as safety reasons - they are expensive and slow compared to fixed wing aircraft.
A modern Zeppelin with advanced fire suppression and leak monitoring would likely be quite safe. I certainly wouldn't have issues with riding in one. With my cloned Wrangel Island Pygmy Mammoth, if we're daydreaming here.
Pygmy Mammoths are the ultimate fiber animal. Nice warm knit wooly mammoth hats...
Honestly, who cares if a few of the hydrogen-filled blimps blew up? Just adds to the spice of life.
Long before I saw Up I thought traveling in a luxury zeppelin would be an excellent way to go on safari.
100: give me my Ekranoplan yacht, like Hubertus Bigend, and you can keep your Zeppelin.
Topically, I just noticed that the shitty grocery store by my house has a charging station for electric cars.
Our library has priority parking spaces for hybrids.* Because hybrid drivers really are better than the rest of us.
I think the rest of the parking lot should similarly prioritized by MPG. Take that, you jackasses driving F150s and Suburbans!** I hope your kids are really, really whiny about how far they have to walk.
*And, presumably, all-electric cars.
**There are up to 5 people in the world who can justify driving either one. Those drivers will be exempted.
Presumably H2 tanker blimps would be driven by robots. So if one did blow up, there probably wouldn't be much loss of life.
Isn't an F-150 much less of a nuisance than a Suburban? I always thought the problem with SUVs was that they had the impact of trucks without the regulation of trucks. Whereas F-150s are trucks.
I think Suburbans are trucks and are regulated as such. I think the problem is that regulation of small trucks is less than that of cars, especially with regard to gas mileage requirements.
Presumably H2 tanker blimps would be driven by AWESOME!!!! robots
Wasn't the original popularity of SUVs driven by the facts that (1) trucks were exempt from fleet mileage limits and (2) there was some insane tax break for vehicles over a certain gross weight?
I thought they were exempt from emissions standards, too, originally, under the premise that only small business owners used vehicles over whatever weight.
My understanding is that 111 and 112 are both basically correct, though 111 is really saying one thing instead of two things. The MPG/fuel economy standards are based on applying a gas guzzler tax, that increases over time. Large SUVs (I think it's 6,000 pounds) and trucks are exempt from the gas guzzler tax. Thus the MPG requirements and the tax break is basically the same thing. Emissions standards from 1990 through 2003 distinguished between cars and "light trucks" (which included most SUVs); that distinction has now been phased out.
Also large SUVs are legally required to drive on truck routes, but that law is not really enforced.
113: I thought I was saying two things; there are fleet fuel economy standards for car companies, and then there was a tax break for consumers on vehicles over 6000 pounds.
Ah, no, I see I introduced confusion and got some things wrong. There are three things going on at once, all of which at some level wrongly favored SUVs over cars:
1) CAFE standards (fuel economy for a fleet), regulated by NHTSA. These discriminated between "cars" and "light trucks" (aka, SUVs), and some of the largest SUVs were omitted from CAFE altogether.
2) The "gas guzzler" tax, imposed on manufacturers, collected by the IRS, which applies to cars only and not SUVs.
3) Emissions requirements, which through 2003 distinguished between "light trucks" (SUVs) and cars, but now do not.
All of this, obviously, created an incentive to produce SUVs over cars, which only extremely high gas prices have put a dent into.
But I swear there was a fourth thing, which was a personal (business?) income tax credit for the purchaser of a vehicle over 6000 pounds.
I think you're thinking of this, which for a while produced the phenomenon of $50,000 yellow hummers with a tiny sticker on the door advertising someone's business consulting or life coach business.
Also large SUVs are legally required to drive on truck routes, but that law is not really enforced.
Wouldn't it be an awesome fuck-you if suddenly that law were enforced?
re: 119
I'd also like a compulsory change to driving licenses so that drivers of large SUVs are required by law to be referred to as 'The Needle-dicked Mr ...'.
re: 121
I think we can probably come up with some alternative.
||
My chair let me see the letter he wrote for my tenure application. In the middle, he inserted the sentence:
I think Heebie is a bad, bad girl. She argues over everything and never listens. She is also a bad mom, and she doesn't let me be a role model to her son, or teach him about dancing and drinking.
I love my chair.
|>
Wow, I'm terrible at anonymity.
124: If only you had seekrit editing powers.
Well, if I went and edited now, 125 would give me away.
I should probably pin this on neb somehow.
@86: Make sure you're not comparing Imperial gallons to US gallons. They have bigger gallons in Britain and automobile gas mileage is sometimes stated in Imperial MPG.
Also, I believe the US EPA's standards for what you can advertise as the fuel mileage of a car are now extremely strict, and often understate what you'll get in practice. Combine that with Imperial/US gallon differences, and you can explain a large chunk of the difference.
The rest is probably real differences in the cars: aside from emissions/safety controls, companies selling on the American market believe, probably correctly, that US buyers value size and power over fuel efficiency to a greater degree than British buyers (given the difference in gasoline prices it could hardly be otherwise), and this is reflected even in subcompacts.
...Also, diesels get dramatically higher mileage than gasoline-powered cars, pretty much always.
Clarification: He didn't submit it to the tenure committee with that sentence. He added it to the version he printed out to show me.
123: That is awesome. Except that if it happened to me, the version with the extraneous bit would end up being the one submitted.
The article I read about it in was: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/hey_wait_a_minute/2004/08/californias_suv_ban.single.html
Looks like it's mostly local laws. But link rot has made it hard to dig up the statutes even though the original article had links. But google pulls up Lomita city code Ord. No. 515, § 1, 6-21-93 for a random example.
http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/traffops/trucks/routes/restrict-list.htm gives several routes with 3 ton limits, though some of them only affect commercial vehicles. (Though keep in mind you only get the tax write-off if it's being used as a commercial vehicle!)
Here's Minneapolis http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/ward7/Ward_7_FAQs.asp
"Trucks over 3 tons must use the appropriate truck routes for as much of their travel as practical. They may divert to other streets for the last few blocks to reach their final destination. A diversion onto non-truck route streets is determined by the driver based on turning restrictions, on-street parking, and the approach direction to the destination. Trucks under 3 tons (UPS two-axle delivery truck, for example) may use any city street."
141 -- That appears to be per axle. The chart linked in 140 is more or less what I expected: a few short stretches.
|| My son just opened his first college acceptance letter. Woot. |>
Great. Don't run it by Halford. He's too picky.
Congrats!
You're definitely right about 141.
Here's a better list of places in LA (SEC. 80.36.1. of the Municpal Code):
http://www.amlegal.com/nxt/gateway.dll/California/lamc/municipalcode/chapterviiitraffic?f=templates$fn=default.htm$3.0$vid=amlegal:lamc_ca$anc=JD_80.36.1.
Again it's a list of specific streets, but it's not a tiny list of streets.
143: how long had he been trying to open it?
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The brief world wide trending of #hurricanebawbag on twitter is a thing of excellence.
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130/131/133: I'm comparing family members cars and what I have actually seen them get, day in, day out, but I'll be advised regarding the Imperial/US differences. I think some of it too must be running the a/c, but .... yeah. It's still remarkably different in my eyes.
Makes for great twitter, but it can't be a lot of fun on the ground.
re: 151
Yeah, my 19 year old nephew is supposed to be driving down from Scotland today/tomorrow to spend Christmas with my wee sister and it's touch and go whether he'll leave or not. Motorway with 90mph winds and flying stuff not fun.
ffs tell him to stay in. There are people tweeting from the roads wondering if their time has come.
re: 150
It does cause a bit of confusion. My little car gets about 43mpg UK, which is only 36mpg US.* That said, a modern small diesel will exceed that by a huge amount.
* driving to work, which is a mix of over-the-speed-limit motorway driving, and being stuck in traffic, so that's driving the car in a fuel-inefficient way. It'd get better official 'extra-urban' mileage. I've had closer to 50mpg UK out of it when I'm not hammering it back and forth to work.
re: 155
Yeah. He'd probably be driving down through that area, too. M74. I'm assuming he's not leaving. He can delay till tomorrow.
Wait. Is that 90 Imperial miles per hour, or regular Freedom miles per hour?
(But seriously, good plan to delay. Driving in high wind is white-knuckle-making. But I'm glad I learned what a bawbag is, even if I'm unlikely to use the term any time soon.)
86, 131: Don't crash-safety standards also have something to do with it? I recall reading somewhere that the American Smart Car gets much worse mileage than the European version, because the former is built pretty much like a tank.
the former is built pretty much like a tank
I didn't know that. Every time I see one of those (or one of the new Fiats one sees motoring around), I think (1) fun! and (2) deathbox!
159: Probably less safe in a crash than a Hummer is, but probably a smaller difference than you'd think just looking at them.
re: 159
Those have decent (Euro) NCAP safety standards for a small car. Which are, I gather, essentially similar to US NCAP/NHTSA standards.*
http://www.euroncap.com/tests/fiat_500_2007/298.aspx
Also, from wiki:
A 2003 study by the U.S. Transportation Research Board found that SUVs and pickup trucks are significantly less safe than passenger cars, that imported-brand vehicles tend to be safer than American-brand vehicles, and that the size and weight of a vehicle has a significantly smaller effect on safety than the quality of the vehicle's engineering
Emphasis added. Which seems rather to run against 'US vehicles get shitty mileage because they are safer'.
* Euro impact tests are actually carried out at fractionally higher impact speeds.