Real rallying or rallycross?Originally Posted by Jeseth Cloak
Your example is flawed. Rotaries have two reasons why they are not good on fuel economy - one, they are two stroke in nature and fire every compression stroke. More firing strokes mean more fuel used. Two, the flame front is slow and inefficent, leading to incomplete combustion. You can not design around either of these two issues, that is flat out the nature of the engine and means that as a petrol motor, it's toast and has been for two decades.I'm not disagreeing that worthless light weight cars are cheap to make, but these cars are usually extremely unsafe (as you stated) and don't get significantly better fuel efficiency than the heavy ones. The technology to design very light cars that are both safe and fuel-efficient exists, although it's not cheap. For example, rotary powered vehicles weigh considerably less than vehicles that come equipped with piston engines. Rotary engines don't get very good gas mileage though, largely due to a lack of commitment by motor companies to invest in research.
The reason why it's kept around is however is exactly those two reasons and why Ford and Mazda are dropping multi tems of millions into a unique motor - the very things that make it bad on economy for a petrol engine are the reasons why it uniquely will run almost any alternate fuel, ranging from natural gas to hydrogen. The fact it can run both petrol AND hydrogen in a production car today is why the RX8 exists. Mazda have known the rotary runs hydrogen for over a decade and are production ready and actually DO sell a twin fuel RX8. If the probelms with hydrogen production and delivery are solved, Mazda has the car ready right now.
If it's not for that fact, the rotary would be gone.
Hybrids are nonsense. Diesels are what you want and Europe has much experience in diesels that give jaw dropping economy for low prices, even against the tanking dollar. The issue is not design or the tanking dollar, the issue is sulpur content in US diesel. Otherwise you might have access to the multitude of fairly cheap and decent European diesels now.As for European cars, yes some of them are good on gas, but since the value of the dollar is collapsing, they're not exactly affordable for middle-class people who live in the United States. Hybrid cars are also normally $3,000 - $6,000 dollars more expensive than a normal vehicle of similar size.
Most of what you describe are in fact either not adding that much weight (Modern power windows are every bit as light as manual winders), power steering makes the modern suspension with it's high castor angles possibleI agree with you though, American's on average could save themselves some money if they cut all of the excess bells and whistles that come with many assembly line cars - it would certainly trim down on the weight of most vehicles. I'll take my car without power steering, ABS, A/C (if I live someplace where that's feasible), soundproofing or power windows and locks, thank you. I normally strip most of these things from the cars that I drive anyway.
, air con weighs about 20 kg, power locks also add to the security of a vehicle.... If you picked things like ICE and big squisy leather I'd have no quibbles. Nor do I quibble about the 100kg of sound deading each car seems to be cursed with.
Most of the problem is California's stupid air standards.
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