On 8/1/13 12:05 PM, Adam Wilson wrote:
If we've learned anything at the shop it's that people can't be bothered with the facts. They seriously don't care if you have studies backing up the environmental damage, they believe they are green and will take those beliefs to their graves. Ideology is funny that way. :-)
You betcha. Related, you destroyed the myth that engine braking is any bad, but I bet money nobody changed opinions.
About green driving, Prius, and Tesla - it's all about what industry you want to sustain. Everything that stands behind the Hummer as a road car is an abomination, pure and simple. Of course I'd agree plenty of Prius drivers are as snooty as it gets in a different way. Yet the reality remains that the Hummer is an evolutionary dead end, and hybrids are a stepping stone to a better future.
My current car is a nice and economic Honda Fit. It is the very last internal combustion engine I'll ever own - I hope my next car will be a Tesla (regardless of what anyone thinks about it being a status symbol). Buying a dinosaur juice-based engine at this point is as much fail as buying a carriage with horses in 1915. I predict that internal combustion engines will be seen in less than a hundred years as weird inefficient contraptions, like we think of steam engines today.
Also, there is a beauty about electrical engines - their theoretical efficiency is 100%, they are simple, principled, entropy-neutral, and work on conservative laws. (Batteries are more unwieldy though.)
Andrei
