July 23rd, 2008 | 
Many people, including me, have espoused the idea that wider use of diesel-fueled vehicles could put a major dent in fuel consumption in the US. One can look at virtually all other countries in the world and recognize that this is patently obvious. It’s easy to find diesel vehicles in the EU, for example, [...]
|
|||
|
CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy), is the set of standards established by Congress in 1975 and subsequently managed by the NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) to limit the number and types of vehicles that Americans can buy – really. Of course, the Congressional regulations weren’t sold to the public that way. Officially, the [...] This is clearly going to date me, but as I was getting my driver’s license, gas prices were jumping from about $0.40/gallon (that’s right – only a zero before the decimal point) to an astronomical $0.75. At the time, many thought that the high prices would destroy America’s open road driving experience, ripping apart [...] For those of you who are less inclined to keep track of such things, I’m here to tell ya’ that Speed and the Mach 5 are back. The new Speed Racer movie will fill a big screen near you on May 9. The Speed Racer movie was written and directed by the Wachowski [...] I love good advertising. Well, perhaps, appreciate is a better word. The innovative messages that stick in your head and and drive you to buy a product, understand a position or, at the very least, make you want to tell others about them. I think they’re a fascinating study of human psychology. Often, the [...] I’m not going to read this, take me right to the pictures . . . My son and I just returned from our annual pilgrimage to New York to worship the gods of the almighty internal combustion engine. The New York show is not one of the most significant shows in the world [...] It seems that every journal these days, whether it be printed or online and regardless of the constituency it serves, does some quantitative analysis of quality. Of course, there are also loads of third party quality reviewers (think J.D. Power) and several quality awards (think Malcolm Baldrige) all of which attempt to gather loads [...] When I was a teenager, I felt that I made my fair share of MacGyver-esque moves. I could do a complete carburetor replacement on the side of the street using duct tape (in-a-pinch gasket replacement) and pencils (for the vacuum lines, of course). I circumvented the security on my high-school’s teletype machine using a [...] No one can say I didn’t warn ‘em. I’ve been talking about this for a while on this blog, to anyone who’ll listen and to many that are smart enough not to. Diesels are a better solution to minimizing the drain on dead and rotting dinosaurs than gasoline engines, even when coupled with batteries [...] Oh, how I love when the market research and resulting SWAGs of reputable people or organizations backup claims I’ve fabricated out of thin air! In this case, it appears that two such organizations – UBS and Ricardo – are projecting that diesels will outsell hybrids (gasoline/electric) in the US by 2012. Their report (download the full UBS report [...] |
|||
|
Copyright © 2012 William Herman - All Rights Reserved |
|||
Category: