1000 MPG car?

There is a short documentary about how back in the day shell researchers managed to get a car to achieve amazing fuel economy. What do you guys think? Do you suppose that this could be true?

 

If it was a viable technology, we'd be using it today. We aren't, so it obviously wasn't.

 

Didn't watch the video, but it wouldn't make much sense for a company to find ways of helping people use less of their product, viable technology or not. As for the environment? America.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eco-marathon

"A world record was set by a French team in 2003 called Microjoule with a performance of 10,705 mpg"

 

I think its kind of thease guys job to find extremely fuel efficant tech, and stop it. remember that guy in the 70s who made a modification to his ford (think it was the fuel delivery system, idk) allowing it to get over 100mpg? was a big thing, made one trip with it to prove what it could do, never heard of it after that.

you also have to think of how impractical a vehicle made soaly for mileage would be. heres my favorite example
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XUKOUbp_PA

 

Yeah generally when something like this comes about it either isn't practical for mass production or many times the big automotive or gasoline companies will go and buy the patents to the idea so that they can just stash it in their patent portfolio to keep it from being put into production.

 

One thing that really makes me wonder is that we have gone so far with technology but we car barley improve our MPG. I have actually done an experiment where I have put gasoline in a jar with a tube that goes into the gasoline and a shorter tube that collects the fumes and feeds it into the engine. The MPG improvements are insane! It was a primitive fuel system but even that worked far better then traditional fuel systems when it comes to saving fuel.

 

A company will not invest in its own demise. If I sell paper and make billions from it why the heck would I one teach every person how to make there own paper? The money would stop.. This is a company's thinking in a nutshell


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Probably because car buyers don't want it. Think about it for a second, Europeans have had 50-70MPG diesel hatchbacks for decades. Yet in America we're still happily buying and daily driving 15-18MPG SUVs and pickup trucks. We clearly don't care that much about fuel economy. If we did we'd be driving Golf TDIs, not Escalades, and selling a diesel to Americans wouldn't require that diesel to make north of 700FT LBs of torque.


You can make all the efficient cars you want, but if the buyers want a V8 you're not going to shift a single unit. It's not some great big-oil conspiracy to bury efficiency tech, it's simply car buyers not wanting an underpowered econobomb. And I speak from personal experience on that one, slow but efficient cars bore me to tears and I wouldn't keep one for more than a week if you just gave it to me. I'd sell it off to someone else and buy a muscle car with the money.

There's a whole lot more to it than just "Oh look how miserly this fuel system is!" Engines are fickle creatures at times, and so are buyers. Your experimental fuel system is not a new one, vapor carbs like that have existed since the dawn of spark ignition engines. They suck. Yes, you can get a lot of run time out of a given volume of gas, but you trade that off with a lack of power, no throttle whatsoever, being prone to vapor lock, complete inability to control emissions beyond passive filters, and a fuel system that's especially picky about the angle it's at. There's a reason they never used vapor carbs on cars.

 

Aye, there is more to it than "hey I'm consuming no fuel", you have to produce some power from it too.
Carbs in general don't like orientation changes, the spitfire in ww2 was incapable of going into a straight dive as it would starve the engine of fuel, instead spitfire pilots developed that kinda awesome looking bank left then right and go down almost on your side thing. The german messerschmitt bf109 rival however was fuel injected and did not suffer from this issue. Vapour carbs have been known to be temperamental when stationary on a flat surface let alone when moving

 

Heh, yeah, automotive carbs are a bit picky. But not all carbs are. They're simpler and lack midrange, but the carbs on 2-cycle engines generally don't have the float bowls that cause problems with severe angle operation.


That being said a float type carb will work just fine at any angle a passenger car will ever find itself at. They don't start acting funny till they're tilted 70 degrees or more, which is only really a problem in severe off-roading or aerospace use.

 

I don't know if anyone has ever heard of this project : Polyjoule.

This is a project for students which is developped since 15 years in a high tech school in France.

They've made some very light cars with very very small engines. The record : 10 017 km with the equivalent of 1 L of fuel at a medium speed of 31,1 km/h with an electric motor.

More informations here : http://polyjoule.org/index.php

 

I agree with most of what you say, however engine size doesent determine fuel mileage, gearing does (well to a point anyway.). for instance I use to have a little Chevrolet tracer with a 1.6L 4cylinder, it had a crap gearbox (way to low geared for what it was) and as such got crap for mileage. in contrast my current truck gets slightly better mileage, yet has a much larger engine (4.9L), and is 20 years older than the tracker. what is even more hilarious is the tracker was TBI and had a SOHC, while my old ford is pushrod and carb.

simply put, if you have a more powerful engine you can run smaller gear ratios without trouble and if you have a proper transmission only your top gear(s) will be extremely small. as such you sill get all the power you would get from your large engine in the low gears, and still get your fuel mileage in top gear, simple really. you only run into trouble if you have a HUGE engine, because in that scenario the gears you would have to turn to get proper mileage would have you breaking the speed limit. an engine that big however, would be found in CMVs, not passenger vehicles. lower RPM at higher speed = better mileage, its all about gearing, not engine size. that's not to say the engine doesent play a part in mileage mind you, but gearing tends to have a greater effect on fuel economy.

in reguards to the vapor carb, your right on the money. there are reasons we don't use them. same for wood gas, steam, wind-up cars, etc, etc... but to be fair, there have been a few fuel saving ideas that were working well in testing over the years that have mysteriously dissaperaed. heres a one good example:

now, before you bring up supply and demand, remember these were experimental engines. they had no intrest in "hot rodding" prototypes. even so, HP isn't all that important, torque is.

ofcourse there were also things like the Cadillac 8-6-4 (look it up), that were brilliant in concept but, due to the technological limitations of the time period, didn't work well in practice. if something like the 8-6-4 were to be produced now, with current tech (instead of that crap vacume based system) I imagine it would be quite successful.

 

Yeah I've got three F-150s with that same I6 in 'em. One with a granny four, one with an OD four, and an '89 with the 5-speed and 4WD.


The '89 gets the best mileage, followed by my '85. The '84 is geared so low that the motor's just screaming all the time, and my '85 is lugging itself around at 1600RPM or so. Actually gets better MPG at 80 than it does at 70 because it's in the powerband. The spread's not that big, though, the best is averaging 20 and the worst 17, with all three being north of 200K on the clock.

It didn't work any better a few years ago with electronics than it did with the 8-6-4 Caddy motor. It was a huge selling point for a while but it just dropped off the face of the earth again.

 

nice to see im not the only one, these engines are just about unkillable, mines got close to 300k on the clock. I get 21mpg, or if the planets align 22, better than my buddys 06' Tacoma v6 and 1/6th of the price. mines a 79' model with a 3 on the tree. that 99' tracker got 18 on a good day, of course at the time it was quite an upgrade from my 84 f150 that got 7 freeking mpg.

they tried it again? I guess I never heard about it. in recent years ive seen something similar used as a safety feature for overheating (v8 engine, temp gets to a set degree, goes to a 4cylinder mode that alternates cylinders to allow more cooling time) but I hadent heard of a true 8-6-4 type of engine being produced sence 81'.

 

No, that was an attempt at multi-displacement engines for fuel economy again, the idea being electronics would stop feeding fuel, spark to the disabled cylinders AND hold the exhaust valves open.


It didn't work any better than it did when caddy tried it.

 

huh, well it is pretty complex. the concept is good tho, just another one of those things that's real good in theory, but im sure well figure it out eventually. the caddy 8-6-4 wasent really that bad either, that same 6.0L v8 with the 8-6-4 disabled would get about 14mpg, with the 8-6-4 connected you could* manage about 20mpg highway, well when it worked. a friend of mine had one when we were going to coledge, of couse by then the car was over 20years old, so I was surprised the 8-6-4 system worked at all. still, when it worked it worked good, id chalk most of the problems he had with his system up to age and miles, and the fact he couldent own an engine and not try to screw with it in pursuit of more power.

 

I remember reading of an ingenious - albeit flawed, like every crazy concept - engine called the Crower Six-Stroke. It basically weeds out the thermal inefficiency of internal combustion by using four strokes of fuel to heat the cylinder, and following those with two strokes of water to create steam. This allegedly results in insane levels of power, but I can imagine the adverse effects on the structural integrity of an engine are quite dire.

Autoweek has a good article on it:http://www.autoweek.com/article/20060227/FREE/302270007

 

I wouldent be too worried about the structure, it could fail yes, but I see other problems. as for power output, it should make a ton of torque, steam is good at that, but keeping steam from turning to water in the cylinders after turning the engine off could be a real issue, especially if he were to further develop the design into a multi-cylinder engine. this may lead to the engine trying to compress water on start up, witch would hydro the engine. then there looks like there would be an issue with inconsistency of power, as I understand it, you have 4 stokes on gasoline and 2 stokes on steam. steam is going to make much more torque than gasoline will on its stroke(s), now on a test stand this dosent mater much, but under load is a different mater. it may be running smoothly on the stand, but when you have it pull something your going to feel the difference between the gas strokes and steam strokes, and so is your transmission, and I imagine what that would do to your transmission wouldent be pretty. and lastly theres the problem with running water in general, it can freeze. this can cause many problems, be it something simple like freezing your lines (witch would stop your engine getting water to run) or something more devisating like water freezing in the engine (water expands as it freezes), it would be a problem that would have to be overcome. to do that you would have to keep the water heated in winter, not a problem when the engine is running, just add a tank heater and that's solved as it shouldn't freeze in the line with the engine running. however when the car is off it seems issues would arise, you would need a power source to keep the tank heater going, you would also have to heat the waterlines, and possibly the head itself to stop the water from freezing and causing problems. so it would probably have to be plugged in when not in use during cold winters, witch is fine, unless your at work, or shopping, or at the doctor, or your stopping anywhere eltse for several hours that dosent allow access to a power source.

nice concept, but if your gonna do steam, do steam. if your gonna do gas, do gas. I cant imagine the way that would buck and shudder under a load. still, props to him for getting it to work in the first place.