quote:
Originally posted by Roy
Seems to me that if a Toyota Prius can get almost twice the miles per gallon as a comparable purely gas driven car, there ought to be a more efficient technology to drive powerboats. Any thoughts?
Seems to me the Prius is more of a marketing breakthrough than a technological one. The operating statement in your question was "comparable". Few cars are comparable to what prius has put out. If they shared the tiny size and construction and price point, it would be easier. Much easier.
Think about it. What is easier. Design a fuel efficient gas car, or add the complexity of converting dynamic energy into static storage, then back again, with all the associated inneficiencies losses, added weight and the environmental impact of creating, maintaining and ultimately recycling/destroying all those batteries and heavy metals. The problem bigger than the engineering is one of marketing. Prius is nothing more than a marketing success. It's no more of an environmental success than is the cash for clunkers deal. Neither makes sense on paper. Plus, diesel electric is often done for reasons other than purely efficiency. There are a lot of advantages to an electric drive motor, once you already have the other gear onboard. Cars usually don't and frankly don't need them either. I'm not sure the benefits outweigh the weight once eco considerations are thrown in. It's hard to beat pertroleum fuel for the efficiency of converting stored energy in the fuel directly to work.
Don't believe it. Here's comparable for you. Why don't you look at the Honda Civic HF that was around back in the early to mid 80's. Similar general size as the prius, but it could get at the high end of the 50-60 mpg range. That was over 20 years ago. Imagine what you could do today on that platform. But nooooooooo, we have to add batteries, cause you know electric doesn't generate polution because that's as sophisticated as our eco freaks can figure out.
Boats are demanding of power, so marketing tricks are harder to pull off. Then again, my 1980 Tolly with less than fuel efficient cat 3208's compared to today's standards will routinely get me better than 2.5 mpg efficiency as measured by floscan's. That's less than 5gph between both engines. On a good day with favorable conditions I'm burnin less than 4gph for both engines. Market wise, its one of the least desireable power packages for the 48. People want to go fast. Period. You can't make what doesn't sell. Prius's sell, the old Honda's didn't. Difference is a 300% improvment in marketing with a 20% improvment in technology.
Biodiesel is great....so long as there is a continued source. Used cooking oil is not quite so cheap anymore as it once was and the "free" fuel now costs more than off the shelf diesel. Plus, look at the disaster that was corn ethanol in terms of both the economic and environmental impact of actually burning MORE dino fuel overall. Will be really interesting to see if algae can come through but otherwise, yeah I'm a skeptic that the math is really working here.
So...maybe lets not be quite so quick to fall for all the "advances" in fuel technology. Sure, there is a lot to like coming down the pipe, but we really need to quit being so gullible with the half truthed eco branding going on.
Since I can be pretty low impact with my 1980 technology, why don't we all just agree to be as frugal as we can and not worry so much about rushing too quickly to things that are in fact causing more problems than they are solving just because we have good intentions. The last thing I personally want to see is more MTBE going into our waters because some eco nazi freak who smoked a little too much pot and spent a few too many mornings getting up late cutting math class but showing up to theatre in the afternoon session didn't understand the facts of the situation.
Owning a prius is about snooting your eco nose at your neighbors, not about being ecologically sound. Maybe its just a bad example, but its pretty clear boats and boaters are about to get targeted. Soooooo, yeah I'm a little hair triggered that our boats are about to be "priused" into something they shouldn't be. Just like no discharge zones that don't allow treatment systems.
You want to save fuel? Great. Stop trying to tune the 10% equations in finding efficiencies in getting more work from the fuel. Start trying to eliminate the need to use the fuel in the first place. THAT's where you can decrease not by a factor of 10% but by factors of 80%, 150% or even 200%. You want to use batteries to store energy. Great. But only if we don't burn carbon fuel to generate it. Lets use nuclear plants ONLY.
As for the sailboats.....My instincts are that sailboats ARE in usage fairly efficient. But...I think is was Beebe that figured out that the cost and maintenance of all that rigging over the course of an equal number of miles sufficient to encompass the practical lifespans of both diesel engines and rigging. Well I guess it turned out that the sailboats were consuming enough materials along with the associated costs of those materials to be roughly comparable to the costs of diesel machinery over a comparable number of miles travelled. If we consider the ecological costs of creating fittings/etc compared to engine blocks, well the ecological costs are actually not as different as one might expect. Like cash for clunkers, we really need to consider the vast amounts of energy that goes into creating an object. Whether it efficiently burns fuel to operate or not, it is VERY expensive to allow machinery to not operate over a maximum life span.
Lets not get Priused in our boating communities.
