Motorhead Messiah - Fuel Efficient Cars - Biodiesel - Hybrids
He laughs. “Think about it: a 5,000-pound vehicle that gets 60 miles to the gallon and does zero to 60 in five seconds!”
…Goodwin’s work proves that a counterattack is possible, and maybe easier than many of us imagined. If the dream is a big, badass ride that’s also clean, well, he’s there already. As he points out, his conversions consist almost entirely of taking stock GM parts and snapping them together in clever new ways. “They could do all this stuff if they wanted to,” he tells me, slapping on a visor and hunching over an arc welder. “The technology has been there forever. They make 90% of the components I use.” He doesn’t have an engineering degree; he didn’t even go to high school: “I’ve just been messing around and seeing what I can do.”
All of which raises an interesting possibility. Has this guy in a far-off Kansas garage figured out the way to save Detroit?
Probably not. Historically, Detroit has demonstrated time and again that it is far too stupid to be saved.
What I’m curious about is why somebody else hasn’t started up a new company to build cars that take advantage of Goodwin’s work? (via Glenn Reynolds).
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Probably because it’s not something that would scale up to everybody?
Biodiesel sounds great. It is, in fact, pretty cool. But the reason it’s so easy to get the fuel is that there’s incredibly low demand for used cooking grease - places still pay to get it carted away, after all. Increase the number of biodiesel drivers out there, and you increase the demand for that fuel. People start having to compete for the fuel. Eventually it gets to the point where it stops being thought of as “waste” and you won’t be able to gas up for free anymore. And it’s not like we’re going to fry ten times as many things to keep up with demand! (Damn. That sounds delicious, now that I think about it…)
Once you’re into the realm of “it has to be produced as fuel” rather than “people are happy if I cart it away for them”, biodiesel’s advantages aren’t quite so hot. Just like with ethanol, turning food into fuel is not an efficient method of production.
It’s good if more people use this stuff - I mean, hey, better than it being thrown out, right? - but it’s never going to be a mass-market solution, which means that the big car companies can’t really afford to target it as such.
I’m also skeptical about the hydrogen injection. Does that mean he’s got a hydrogen tank in there? I could see someone at GM getting the willies about designing a car with an actively explosive fuel additive, no? (Yes, yes, gasoline. But that’s volatile. Gas-fueled cars don’t really Hindenberg, they just burn.)
That said, nice, modern, quiet diesels, hell yeah.
Why not? Is there anything intrinsically less scalable about this than the ludicrous 19th century technology of the internal combustion engine?
Which reminds me of something else.
I’ve still got that 1992 Toyota Corolla I drove for a dozen years. At the beginning it was a pretty nice little car - good mileage, dependable, reasonably comfortable, and so on. Now I’ve got that 2006 Rav 4. It’s more comfortable, mostly because it’s bigger, and it plays MP3s, which the Corolla doesn’t do, but it gets less gas mileage, and in general is not a overwhelming improvement - as transportation - over that 15 year old technology.
That’s disappointing.
He’s got some neat ideas. If I could get a car that would do what Goodwin envisions, be about the size of a 1971 Duster, and have a manual transmission (I. Must. Shift.), I think it would be the perfect ride.
I strongly suspect he’s mostly full of crap. The history of vehicles is replete with various guys in backyards that have 100 mpg carburetors, etc. Trouble is, they’re the wheeled equivalent of perpetual-motion machines: when you check them out, the claims turn to dust and hot air. If he can produce a 5,000 lb vehicle that gets 60 mpg he’s just tripled what current technology - from Detroit or anyplace else - can do.
There’s nothing stupid about Detroit’s engineers. The problems with their products (and those often overstated) are due to bean-counters, marketers, and management. The engineers know better, but do what they’re told.
So let’s assume that 5,000 lb, 60 mpg vehicle is possible. Are we then to believe that GM, Ford, Dodge, Isuzu, Toyota, and Honda are *all* refusing to produce such a vehicle, a vehicle that would give them a huge market advantage? Why would they do that?
The problems with IC engines are well known, and have been for a half-century or more. Major improvements from where we are today require major increases in combustion temperature or pressure, and that requires major advances in materials. Diesels get much better mileage not because they’re diesels, but because they have much higher compression ratios. They can do that because diesel fuel has a much higher knock resistance. The downside is that the engines themselves are quite a bit heavier and more expensive to build (and that’s putting aside the noise and stink). People avoid diesels because they don’t want the downsides of them.
If or when fuel gets expensive enough, or government mandates get tough enough (if the market doesn’t produce the results you want, just put your thumb - or fist - on the scale), people will adopt diesels as the lesser of evils. Not before.
I have a relative that has had him convert a dually diesel pickup to run on cooking grease. It is truly amazing, and runs at a fracture of the cost. The conversion has already paid for itself. The exhaust smell though is initially disconcerting …not quite french fry, not quite diesel.
Gosh, D., did you read the article? It was written by some folks who, you know, checked him out. (And damn, I hate counter arguments like that).
Why would Detroit do something stupid? Have you actually looked (as in, checked out) the endless examples of stupidity that is Detroit’s history?
Did you notice that as of yesterday, the number two seller of autos in America is Japanese? And that the same company is the number one auto manufacturer in the world?
More Detroit brilliance, I presume?
Or how about their endless kow-towing to unions that has left them in an impossible financial situation? Or their smug complacency in the sixties and seventies that devastated their dominance of the markets?
Sorry, but anybody who opens an argument by trying to convince me of the existence of Detroit smarts is not going to get very far. About the only thing they know how to do well any more is bribe Congress for as many exemptions and goodies as they can buy.
As I said, the failures of Detroit were and are management failures, not engineering failures. Blame US business schools, if anyone.
Leave Detroit out of it for a moment. Toyota, Honda, Mercedes, BMW, Isuzu, all are in the 5,000 lb (or close) vehicle business. None of them make appreciably better mileage than Detroit at those weights, and none of them come within a factor of two or three to what that guy claims.
It’s physics and materials, not a lack of genius, nor business will.
As one example, aside from the basic numbers, of how what the guy claims fails the smell test. The lead paragraphs talk about using a surplus turbine that is going to “roar into action for a few seconds”. Ever been around a turbine starting up? Of course you have. Is it something that happens in a few seconds? Absolutely not. Instead it’s fairly time-consuming and very inefficient of fuel.
Another example: he claims that GM said that putting a diesel in a Hummer “couldn’t be done”. This is just silly on the face of it. There’s nothing magic about installing a diesel and no one from GM would say that. Indeed, the original Hummer, the HMMV, has a diesel.
Do a Google on the guy and show me the independent collaboration of his results. I couldn’t find any, just lots of breathless reprints of his claims. In other words, another 100-mpg-carburetor guy.
I must be a ghost.
I’ll also add that this is the first time I’ve seen someone commenting on the Duramax engine that didn’t preface it with at least three obscenities. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the subject, but everything I’ve heard is negative…
Bill, er, yes, it is actually less scalable than the gasoline engine. Those engines run on fuel distilled from stuff we pull out of a hole in the ground; if we need a lot more of it, we just take more out. (Yeah, yeah, one day we’ll run out, totally different argument.) Scaling it up is an engineering issue.
Biodiesel is derived from, well, plants. If we want more of it, we need to grow more plants, which means repurposing arable land. Arable land is not something we can manufacture more of, right?
Granted, there’s a lot of slack in the current system, and we could go quite a ways by converting waste into fuel. But once you hit that point, which is going to be well short of the amount of fuel you need to convert everybody over, what do you do? (Well, run them like normal diesels, which is fine by me, but is that going to help much?)
It’s the same reason we can’t just run everything off ethanol instead of gasoline, without Iowa corn farmers and the first caucus to worry about.
I lived in Michigan for 30 years, and worked as a drafter/designer/engineer in automotive design (mostly for GM, some work for Ford and Chrysler) for nearly half of that time, plus a few more years after moving out of the state. Therefore, I believe that I can speak with some authority here.
No, sorry, they couldn’t, and they won’t. There’s a bunch of reasons why, but they all come down to one basic reason: Money.
Car companies are not interested in - and will not invest any monetary effort in - engineering that is more efficient, better for the environment or less expensive for the consumer to own or operate, unless and until they can be convinced that either a.) it will make them a whole lot of money - very quickly - to do it, or b.) not doing it will bring down sufficient wrath (by gubmint regulators or someone/anyone else) to cost them a lot of money (or lost car sales, which amounts to the same thing).
It doesn’t matter which company we’re talking about, either, foreign or domestic - they’re all the same in this respect. They are money machines, and they are, ultimately, insensate to any other stimulus.
What this guy does works for him - and for his customers - because it’s basically one-off, below-the-government-regulators’-radar stuff. He’s a slightly higher-tech version of the sort of shadetree mechanical genius that was most of the early hotrodders and custom car freaks.
He’s having fun, doing what he loves to do - and, since he’s not subject to all sorts of rules and regulations, he’s making out o.k. He probably even makes a few bucks out of all that he’s doing, enough to keep him in cookies and car parts, anyway. He may be able to “grow” his production of custom creations into a fairly substantial “boutique” vehicle business. There’ve been such outfits before, there are some now in existence - go through some back issues of Road & Track or Car & Driver magazines, and you’ll find out about some of them; some even have ads in the back pages.
If he tries to get really big, though, he’s highly unlikely to succeed - and there’s a whole bunch of reasons for that, too. For instance, go read up on a guy by the name of Preston Tucker, who was a real automotive innovator about half a century ago. Detroit - or any other center of major automotive production and sales in the world - is unlikely to do much about his “developments” - other than buying or (more likely) simply taking anything they can see a way to easily integrate into their own work, in order to increase their sales or decrease their regulatory burden.
Meanwhile…some of the article about him makes sense, some of it is the writer’s faulty understanding or understatement - and some is the guy’s own overselling of his ideas. Getting 60 MPG from a 5,000 LB hybrid diesel/electric vehicle is not at all unrealistic, nor is getting zero-to-60 acceleration in 5 seconds out of an electric-powered vehicle that heavy - but getting both things simultaneously is probably not going to happen, unless you drop it off a cliff or operate it on the surface of the Moon.
It sounds like there’s some good ideas there…but big car companies discard lots of good ideas, all the time. I know - I’ve worked on a lot of projects that got terminated (for economic reasons, every time) that seemed like very good engineering, but that never got the chance to be built even as a prototype.
Automotive engineering, like some other things, is very much the art of the possible - and if the bean-counters can’t see financial advantage, it isn’t possible.
DSmith,
Thanks for the observation about gas turbines. As an engineer who once designed speed governors for gas turbines, I almost spit coffee on the keyboard over the magic jet with instant start capability. Our governors did a high-crank for 1 minute to ensure there was no fuel present before turning on the ignitors, a wise thing to avoid that booming noise that turns your inlet compressor into a expensive, loose collection of superalloys. Anyone who let that “instant” thought slip by so does not understand turbines that I question how well they comprehend standard IC engines at an engineering level. My dad was a brilliant shade-tree mechanic, but he was no engineer and never could have designed (i don’t mean copied) an engine to save his life.
JS,
Remember, too that sometimes initial market research tells businesses (correctly or incorrectly) that what appears to be a good idea won’t sell, or won’t sell in enough quantity to make money, or can’t be produced in sufficient quantity at the required per-unit price, or that crucial feedstocks are limited, or the regulatory environment won’t permit it, or that, well, you get the idea. If the data says we won’t make money, we will pull the plug at an early stage. In fact, once I switched to IT, I was appalled at how often management kept a project going long after it was obvious it was a money sink. Goodwin may be an excellent tinkerer (as my Dad was), but if he thinks what he’s doing translates well to mass-production and widespread use, he doesn’t know Jack about business.
Avatar,
Another problem with hydrogen injection is that there are no hydrogen tanks. There’s only temporary holding areas where we try to keep those teeny-weeny little molecules entertained so they don’t wander off. We don’t succeed for long.
Bill,
There’s really nothing that ludicrous about the IC engine. It started as a great couple of ideas, and has evolved constantly since then. As one who spent a decade with gas turbines, I am in a position to consider alternatives.
Gas turbines produce very little pollution (per MwHr, HP/Hr, what have you) and burn a wide range ot fuels. But. They are expensive — REALLY expensive. The same ultra-high temperatures that reduce all but Nox pollution require some stiff materials science and tight tolerances. Gas turbines also (a) don’t like to scale down (GE’s LM2500 is a 30,000 HP monster), (b) have a power-band that, without a CVT, is really limited, (c) produce truly massive amounts of hot exhaust quantity to deal with, (d) produce fearful amounts of angular momentum. Chrysler tried in the ’50s and ’60s to overcome this. No luck yet.
So what are we left with ? Steam power ? Uhhh, there’s a reason diesel and gas won out over that. Want to wait till the boilers warm up ? Electric ? Check out energy to weight ratios for batteries sometime. The truth is that the IC engine performs so well under the hood that most of us wouldn’t even be having this discussion, except for the growing cost of crude oil and its byproducts,
I’m not trying to stop anyone from burning french-fry oil. I just know it won’t affect the national consumption of energy by an appreciable amount.
BTW: In addition to the thoughts about using arable land for fuel production, I have to wonder what happens to soil nutrients when you create biodiesel.
Cheers.
One thing I saw that makes me think something is wrong with the article. Goodwin claims he changed the fuel for the Duramax from normal diesel to biodiesel and the engine ran perfectly. I seriously doubt that. The engines are controlled electronically to minimize emissions and maximize performance. They do this based on expectations of what the fuel is. All fuel -both gasoline and diesel- meets some basic specification. The engine makers rely on this to have some bases for performance. To think that Goodwin can change the fuel and have the engine run perfectly from the start is stretching belief.
Also, the article is from a business magazine called Fast Company, not a scientific or technical magazine like Popular Mechanics or Scientific American. I would have to hear more about the qualifications of the reporter or have the claims in the article checked by a scientific or technical magazine before I would lend much credence to the technical claims in the article.