Winfree

CO2 and greenhouse gases I can breath - but the mess that comes out of a piston engine, especially in LA or Frisco, is cough gasp nasty! I can't choke down ozone even if it is poltically correct and fills up holes in the arctic. Big trucks seem to be the worst - you can see the blue stuff blowing out the stacks and I think I'm feeling the stings of those evil little particles of half digested stuff - too bad we can get a car to run on it!

BlueSky

I think its important first and foremost that we just clean up emission for the health of our environment. Although the effects of humans on global warming is debateable, the effects of pollution on our health is not.

New Yorker

Actually, global warming—and when I say global warming I mean warming beyond natural, long-term, cyclical climactic change—is now thought, by most people, to be a fact. I realize there are some people who don't believe it (hell, some people still think there are weapons of mass destruction!) and yeah, it IS difficult to prove, but hey—all that stuff we've been pouring into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution has to go somewhere, right? Doesn't seem like a huge stretch to think it won't affect climate sooner or later.

I agree, hybrids seem to be not worth it. Consumer Reports just said a Prius might save you about $500 after 5 years of ownership! I do miss the EV-1 electric car, though. Seems like it could've been the PERFECT second car—the car you just use to go to work and back. I haven't had a job yet where my round trip to work—even with an errand or two—hasn't been well within the range of the late EV-1. Why didn't they sell it that way?! I kept hearing about its limited range, but for driving to work and back, it didn't have limited range. Oh well.

saturn

If you'll read carefully he said "the effects of humans on global warming is debateable" not that global warming doesn't exist.

Clavius

Question though.. is Ethanol or howeva you spell it bad for Rotary engines?? I only ask because alot of people are hyping the hell out of it and now alot of the newer Fords I believe are coming out as Flex Fuel hybrids which is all the rage down in Brasil. If your not sure what Flex Fuel is, pretty much the engine can run on Ethanol or normal Gas. But I am curious as to the effects it has on Rotaries since as I stated in my first post on this thread I got horrible milage when the mix rate was 10% (only some gas stations around my area have Ethanol mixed in and even then its 5%).

captain mercury

hahahaha

therm8

The biggest problem with ethanol as far as I know is that it will not mix with oil. Since we need oil in the combustion chamber for sealing purposes, I'd imagine that high percentage ethanol fuels could prevent the oil from getting where it needs to go. However, some synthetic oils will mix with alcohol (and that would be an ironic turn of events..."MNAO doesn't recommend using oils other than synthetic in your Rx-8"). With all the chemists in the world someone could make it work.

I don't think the rotary would survive on only ethanol, though. Take an already inefficient engine (when compared to piston engines), and add a less effient fuel, and you'll be burning alot of alcohol. As a hybrid it could work, but a piston engine would do it better.

daisuke

Brazil has had an Ethanol program going for the past 30 years, they run their cars on up to 100% Ethanol, you get worse gas mileage and less power from it, but it burns pretty clean. It makes sense to use ethanol in brazil where the sugar cane industry is so huge.

I don't see why you couldn't burn ethanol in a rotary, but then as therm8 said, the question is more why WOULD you want to.

What this world needs is a diesel-hybrid car instead of gasoline-hybrid, now THAT makes sense, a hybrid that can run on biodiesel.

saturn

Actually, what the world needs now is love sweet love. It's the only thing that there's just too little of. Technically speaking of course.

Clavius

Yeah but the Ethanol is dirt as cheap compared to gas in Brasil, and why the Flex Fuel car's are soooo popular.

I dont think any of us would want to put ethanol in our rotaries but sadly we may be forced to soon if more and more gas companies or stations rather put or are forced to have a certain Percentage of Ethanol in their gas mix. Just curious what Mazda would say or do to help us 8 owners out.

I'm also all for Diesel-Hybrids, I've seen enough truck shows on Bio-Diesel and all the host's seem to love it and hype it as the next big thing. Personaly knowing you can make that stuff from used cooking oil is just yeah amazing.

As I somewhat jokingly said but I was serious, Imagine if McDonalds or Burger King decided to use their used cooking oil to make Bio-Diesel and sell it from their stores or open up their own Bio-Diesel Stations (with mandatory resturant attached haha)? I think the auto-makers would realize there is a definate market for those kinds of cars beyond trucks since Audi and VW and BMW(they have a diesel right I forget bah!) currently produce diesel cars which get great performance. With the right marketing they could flip peoples misconception of a diesel being loud, dirty, and ineffient(sp?). 'eh I am ranting a lil bit I believe sorry guys.

daisuke

everyone makes diesels, including ford, they sell them in europe, just not here

DrDiaboloco

Hmmm... Total hybrid sales since yr2000 are over 400,000 (over 200,000 last year alone).

I guess there are a lot more "celebrities" in the US than I thought!

DrDiaboloco

Well you'd better plan on that, since not only "may" we be forced to have gasoline with a percentage of ethanol, we WILL be forced to have gasoline with a certain percentage of ethanol. The "oxygenated" fuels some of us have had to buy (esp. in northern climes) will go away and ethanol is coming.

The June or July Car and Driver had an extensive writeup on this, and like it or not, we will have ethanol in our gasoline EVERYWHERE in the US by government mandate. I believe the percentage by volume is something like 5-6%, and C&D made the claim that ALL cars produced in the last few years have been designed with this contingency in mind (to take up to 10% ethanol)... If that puts your mind at ease. Presumably the Renesis was designed to handle it.

Winfree

[QUOTE=New Yorker] (hell, some people still think there are weapons of mass destruction!) - Sure there were none John Kerry and Teddy Kennedy both said so and you know how upstanding and reliable those Gentlemen are...

Only, it Seems that just 2 days ago some Army Intel people on CSPAN (the public TV station that covers house and senate hearing), reporting before the Senate, testified that they had found over 500 munitions containing or prepared to contain Sarin, plus a lot of other goodies that they were willing to discuss in a classified hearing... It was wonderful - Senators, including your New York reps were asking things like - can degraded Sarin still kill, if someone dropped it in a New York subway would it do like it did in Japan and only kill 12 people but send about 5000 to the hospital? This couldn't really be a WMD, right? right?

Yep, no weapons, nothing to worry about, everything is lovely.... There were no trade towers (look around do you see any), there are no terrorists, everyone is a friend just waiting to be discovered... but it is getting warmer .... so be afraid, very afraid.... then again it might just be summer, with November elections on the way!

daisuke

don't you know? there's one born every minute!

Winfree

I would like to see some real test results on different gas formulations in the engine and also on the cars plumbing. With possible sensitivity to low test gas, just because of gas tank chemistry, I would worry about additives like ether, or solvents that would make the ethanol more mixable with oil - might run the engine but take out, gas tank, seals, or hosing.

DrDiaboloco

Unfortunately, I don't think any test results are going to be forthcoming.

If what I read is correct, our car was designed to handle a gasoline/ethanol mixture that has more ethanol in than we'll actually be seeing, so I wouldn't worry TOO much about it.

As for the properties of ethanol and it not mixing with oil... If it doesn't mix with oil, guess what else it doesn't mix with?

Gasoline.

It must obviously mix with gasoline, or it couldn't be used as a fuel as it is now... So it will mix well enough with the incredibly minute amounts of oil that are injected during combustion in the Wankel.

Winfree

Thanks, good to know about it being able to handle alcohol-gas mixes - right now gas is still the cheapest but the grain growers who got the MTBE and other mixers added to gas so they could sell their products (with a little boost from Clinton) worry me. We have had a lot of water troubles on our coast because of MTBE, and I hate it when laws are made without a full understanding of what really works and what doesn't.

DrDiaboloco

The good news is that MBTE will be going away with the new Ethanol requirement.

The "bad news" is... Who do you think was behind the lobbying effort to implement this Ethanol requirement?

The grain growers!

Deslock

My experience with hybrids has shown that at least some of them are the real deal. Obviously your mileage will vary with driving style and which car you get, but this anti-hybrid backlash seems mostly unwarranted.

I personally know 5 owners of hybrids: 1 Civic, 3 Prius, and 1 Insight. All of them report getting within 1 or 2 MPG of their ratings (or sometimes exceeding them). I've witnessed this with 4 of the 5 cars and I've driven all their cars except for the Insight (which never impressed me much... too small, too slow).

Coincidentally, I drove a 2006 Prius yesterday. It's very comfortable and has decent pickup for a daily driver. It's also roomier and more solid than the cheaper, really low-end ~1.5L econoboxes (Honda Fit, Kia Rio, Toyota Yaris, Scion xA, etc) that you'd have to go with to get 40+ MPG in a non-diesel, non-hybrid car.

It has a read-out showing MPG on the fly. If you constantly drive aggressively, you're probably looking at only high 20s/low 30s, but it had no problem averaging over 50 MPG for the hour of city driving we did, even with me flogging it quite a bit (tripling my RX8's MPG for the same type of driving). The owner told me that she's read in the Prius forums that if you alter your driving style slightly (coasting more, braking less), you'll also see a significant jump in fuel economy.

The warranty is excellent. Toyota takes care of recycling the battery, which is covered for 100k miles.

The car was also surprisingly well-equipped. Had leather seats, power-everything, touch screen interface, traction control, rear-facing backup camera (very useful), bluetooth (with a sweet hands-free phone system), and remote entry (this was also cool... you just walk up, sit in the car, and start it by pressing the power button while holding the brake).

I was told that the car cost $24k, but with the $3k tax credit was $21k. I don't expect a comparably sized, powered, and equipped non-hybrid cost much less. I've heard people claim that it'd take 10 or even 18 years to make back the extra money spent on a Prius. From what I've seen, that's an exaggeration (with the Prius, assuming I could find a comparable 35 MPG car that cost $2k less, it'd take 48k miles to break even vs 50 MPG at $3/gallon).

Of course maybe the extra cost of Civic and Camry hybrids vs their non-hybrid counterparts is more. And if you do a lot of highway driving, hybrid advantages diminish. But the Prius seems to be a good deal for those doing a lot of city driving (at least until diesels eventually make a comeback over here in the USA).

Paul_in_DC

An RX-8 hybrid makes as much sense as a Ferrari with training wheels.

kartweb

It's always amusing to see that anytime someone brings up the subject of global warming, someone else is quick to mention Clinton and Bush, in defense of Bush. Subliminal guilt.

Yes it is true that a large and sustained discharge from volcanos can emit a generaous amount of CO2. The problem is we haven't had a large and generous sustained output of volcanic activity for over 100 years.

Whether one wants to live in denial over the problems that our lifestyle of speed and petroleum are damaging the environment is one of personal choice. I choose speed.

A rotory is the wrong choice for a hybrid, at least the wankel version. Hydrogen is at least 10-15 years away from being practical. In the mean time we'll be adapting to ethanol especially after about 2008. My guess is the next administration will probably divest the oil companies, bring the prices way back down, but use the savings to pay for technical advances in energy. Obviously the industry that provided the largest share of Bush's political funding is enjoying the spoils of their investments. Whether or not the oil industry was raping us we would still be using lots of oil. In some respects that the GOP has encouraged Exxxon etal, to rape us has provided an overdue awakening, so maybe it's a good thing.

I have to admit, it's nice to drive through Plano Texas and not have Mario MOMdretti pitching across lanes in her Suburban anymore.

daisuke

the wankel is the only production rotary engine out there, there are others in the works but all suffer from lack of interest, the rand-cam is the only one that looks practical but it still has many more moving parts than the wankel. I don't see them being any better in the torque department either.

New Yorker

And if you read what I said carefully, you'll see that I didn't say he said global warming doesn't exist. I said that the effect of humans on global warming is no longer debatable; global warming (the part caused by factories, engines, etc.) is now accepted—by most scientists—as fact. (Admittedly not by everyone—there are people who believe the World Trade Center was brought down not by airliners, but by "controlled demolition". And there are people who believe fluoridation of our water was not to help fight tooth decay but, in fact, a Communist plot to adversely affect the health of our American children. So, yes—I guess the effect of humans on global warming is, technically, debateable.)

Winfree

(Quote [It's always amusing to see that anytime someone brings up the subject of global warming, someone else is quick to mention Clinton and Bush, in defense of Bush. Subliminal guilt.]

Guilt? I think not!!!
I learned about global warming and science the hard way...
Way back in the 'good ol days' under Clinton and Gore, I was working with some biologists up at Oak Ridge TN. We had just figured out that a lead/mercury contamination in Tennessee water was coming in from Kentucky, so we were politically correct, and I had begun to develop a system for tracking calcium, that could be applied to pine trees.
Dr. Sandy McLaughlin was working on acid rain - he noticed tree deaths - but only on one side the mountain - the other side was lush. He figured that since they were both getting the same amount of acid - then something else was at play and he suspected calcium - he thought that trees on low calcium, granite soils were dying because the acid released and washed the calcium away, the tree on high calcium limestone soils were doing well because the acid was liberating the calcium and making it more available. He thought the tree deaths were because low calcium caused more frost nipping, and also reduced the motility of the swimming sperm (yes pine trees have sperm) that travels down the pollen tubes, so there was fewer pine seeds, causing squirrels to chew bark and open it up to pine insects. I agreed to measure the difference in the calcium between trees from different locations; he was also going to add dolamite to some areas to try and save the trees! He submitted a grant. The grant was thrown back with the annotation that it could not be funded unless it mentioned gobal warming.
We were not getting warming problems, we were getting frost nipping! So the grant was not politically correct enough. We found if you wanted money and were working on global change than you had to say those magic words. But Sandy was too honest! He refused to sell his soul - He did get a grant for a dolamite study from a lumber company,(which worked), and I went to work on detectors for pesticides and some other nasties.
But I got interested in why all this warming stuff! turned out there was money in it.. Sort of a Harvard Business way to look at things - If people keep insisting on controlling pollution - tell them Ozone is good, not enough of it, there is a hole in the sky! Green house gases, produced by complete combustion (better gas effeciency and better power, for you combustion freaks) was to be considered bad - makes you too warm - and because we were in the warming part of the cycle (1972-1992) it would sell, ENRON was to sell permits for green house gas pollution. You lower your CO2 production and you could sell credit to a company that made more of it - ERON would act as broker, just as they did for real pollution credits - these allow polluting companies to sell credits permitting pollution on the days they have low production - thus, polluters help each other meet EPA requirements while dumping the stuff into your lungs..Cute! ENRON was doing big things under Clinton - and spending money on both parties - But ENRON got in trouble when Bush came in - they were playing games with California and foreign electricity in India, and they got caught and had to come up with some money to pay damages. Bush refused to give them government loans. So they start playing games with electricty - and California. A $85 electric bill goes up overnight to $400! This upset little old ladies like 'Grandmaw Milly" who writes letters to ENRON. PG&E, Nevada Power, Barbara Boxer, and every person she can think of - Grandmaw Milly (whom ERON said was factitious) was, in fact, Mildred Winfree, former Executive Secretary, Field Rep and aide to Congressman Chet Hollifield, D-Calif,, ret. She made so much trouble that one of ERONs lovely little scam artists and trade reps suggested they cram the electrical costs up her skirts - But Milly had her ears back and she helped uncover how Democratic Governor, Gray Davis, of Califronia and a number of others, were getting big bucks from ENRON to run for President. He is said to accumulated the biggest campaign chest in the Democratic Party - and it was enough that the State of California saw through Davis, "the next future Democratic contender", and Califronian's tossed him out of office and put in the Governator instead. And who was Grandmaw Milly? Probably the oldest living Rotarhead! Under Bush, ENRON execs got to face trial Judges, and we hope they put them away for a long long time - but the scam isn't over yet, as the new propoganda movie proves.... So, saying "well it's all just guilt", when global warming is mentioned is not the truth. Nope, it is personal, rightous indignation! And if you think the ENRON scam ended - then talk to someone who is a Democrat, and an honest one, who is fighting to get rid of some of ENRONs rip off deals with Washington state - try Inyo (sp?) Democratic Congressman from the Seattle area, or check it out with Barbara Boxer, D-Senator, Calif. This issue is beyond party or politics ! You only get rid of criminals when both parties work together!