Enough election talk, it's time to put some honest-to-goodness car news in the Gristmill (so this one's for you, JMG!).
Volkswagen is about to unveil a new Golf hybrid, said to feature an all-electric mode at low speed and regenerative braking to compete with the Prius and its ilk. The difference is that this is a diesel-electric hybrid, which VW says will get 69 mpg and exceed Europe's (and California's) tough emissions standards.
The point is somewhat moot, as this internal-combusion-perpetuating monster will not be for sale in the U.S. But is this just another indicator that clean diesel cars are greener than hybrids?
Perhaps. But filling one of these new Golfs with locally produced, organic, fair-trade biodiesel made from waste vegetable oil by a worker-owned biorefinery will certainly help.
Oil: enough energy to melt glaciers!
Comments
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GreyFlcn Posted 9:39 am
04 Mar 2008
The bigger news is that next month, all 50 states will be able to purchase diesel cars which meet the worlds most stringent emissions standards.
These cars will include a NOx Filter, a Particulate Filter, and use 15ppm Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel which has been mandated since October 2006.
http://www.autobloggreen.com/2007/01/04/2008-vw-jetta-tdi ...
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odograph Posted 11:08 am
04 Mar 2008
A car I bought 3 years ago ...
Man, all you need is a time machine and you're in!
(I've long understood the theor
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odograph Posted 11:09 am
04 Mar 2008
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Pangolin Posted 12:58 pm
04 Mar 2008
As more people get squeezed out of the car market it's going to be important to have efficient, comfortable taxi's available to take up the slack that public transit can't fill.
The 'O4 Prius with it's ability to be able to convert to plug-in hybrid with a battery swap and charger has a lot of advantages. Hopefully the Golf has both plenty of room and plug-in conversion capability. A real choice would be good.
Put the Carbon Back
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JMG Posted 1:42 pm
04 Mar 2008
But filling one of these new Golfs with locally produced, organic, fair-trade biodiesel made from waste vegetable oil by a worker-owned biorefinery will certainly help.</biorefinery>
Insert after produced and before organic
"by tall, tanned vegan biochem majors working in tight organic cotton t-shirts made nearly transparent from the honest labor that causes the tiny downy hairs nearest their mocha-color flesh to glisten in the warm spring day, punctuated only by the almost inaudible whirr of the windmill smoothly slicing through the fresh air scented with daphne that reminds them of the smell of the line-dried organic bamboo sheets on which they laid down with their lovers the night before, when they whispered of their shared passion for"
Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.
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Erik Hoffner Posted 8:41 pm
04 Mar 2008
Now build me a time machine or work it into a novel cuz I wanna GO there.
Erik
The Orion Grassroots Network: 1,100+ grassroots groups working for conservation & more
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Sean Casten Posted 12:11 am
05 Mar 2008
Back in the mid-90s when I lived in Boston, I was in the market for a new car and looked pretty seriously at the Jetta TDI. Got something like 45 mpg and (thanks to the "T") was a heck of a lot more peppy than the crappy Peugeot diesel my folks had in the early 80s. Not a porsche, to be sure, but quick enough that I didn't find myself worrying about whether or not I could accelerate to get through the traffic light before it turned back to red. And then I started looking at how many gas stations sold diesel. Nationwide, it was only about 10%. I haven't looked since, but my gut feel is that it hasn't changed much.
(This all led to a very funny exchange with the dealer when I raised that concern, and he responded by telling me not to worry, since even when the needle says empty, you can still drive another 80 miles. And I pointed out to him that when the needle is on empty, I don't want to have to drive 80 miles to fuel up...)
Anyway, I ended up with the gasoline Jetta as a result - but have always been struck by the fact that if it's that hard to get sufficient saturation with diesel to not make that the limiting factor in vehicle purchases, how much have we understated the challenge of shifts to other alternative fuels? Which is not to say those aren't noble causes - just that it's a lot more time & effort than we realize.
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amazingdrx Posted 2:24 am
05 Mar 2008
If 6 kwh is used in an hour to go 55 miles. A 10kw diesel generator will do the backup job nicely.
With a conventional diesel generator a turbine generator can be added to improve efficiency and get many time the stadard internal combustion driven vehicle efficiency. Turbocharging is a fairly normal option on cars now, so it would not be a stretch to mass produce this feature.
I think that solid oxide fuel cell/turbines are the next step, but it doesn't matter. Diesels with the turbo efficiency booster are good enough. And both of these options can be adapted to use biogas very easily.
Making your vehicle backup power, backup for you home or local grid when hooked up to biogas. Compressed biogas to run plugin hybrid farm equipment is also an option.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Delay And Deny Posted 4:54 am
05 Mar 2008
The thing about hybrids, is I don't find much critical analysis about their design.
The VW still has a diesel engine. Since it has an "all electric" mode at high speed, that means it either uses the diesel (parallel hybrid) for motive force at faster speed.
A diesel engine in a hybrid (parallel) and a diesel engine by itself get the same mileage per se.
What the hybrid does is put the car into an "idleless" mode for low speed so it doesn't burn gas while it's going slow or stuck in traffic.
That said, the simpler solution to me is to look for an idleless technique so cars don't burn gas when they don't need to -- but without having to carry around a second entire drive system of batteries and a 2nd engine.
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human power Posted 3:48 pm
05 Mar 2008
When will we get serious about the need to reduce our emissions by 80-90% in the next fifteen years? In order to do that, pretty much all cars will need to become planter boxes. Or does the joy of driving offset the climate change-induced genocids in Africa, South America and Asia as well as water wars and deprivation in North America?
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crisrich Posted 4:31 am
07 Mar 2008
This presented a huge problem for the refineries, because, from what I've heard, they aren't flexible at all. It seems that they are built to obtain fixed fractions of different oil sub-products. You can't suddenly say: I don't want the gasoline fraction any more, increase the quantity of something else in the process.
The result was, that during all those years Brazil had a huge surplus of gasoline that nobody wanted, including other countries. Apparently they had to rent a large amount of tanker ships just to increase storage capacity.
If the consumers in the US started to demand more diesel and less gasoline, how would the refinries cope with that?
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