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 Road Rocket Fuel - from McDonalds and Corn. 
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Post Road Rocket Fuel - from McDonalds and Corn.
Double the MPG, tripple the horsepower, and keep 90% of your parts stock.

Cool: Efficient Hummers that get better gas milage than most compact cars.
Awesome: Converting old muscle cars into 800hp monsters that can destroy Lamborghinis on the track. With canola oil.

With all the different engine modifications, bio-fuel, corn and vegitable oil running fuel systems, and revolutionary new designs coming from small companies these days, it's still shocking to me that we haven't had a consumer vehicle revolution.

List your favorite / most promising new car/truck engine ideas, and any benefits/infastructure issues that would have to be addressed.

I really need a garage to tinker around with my next car...or just get a Mr. Fusion.

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Wed Oct 31, 2007 10:56 am
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Chibi-Czar
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Man.. I should have no problem getting up to 88MPH in my delorian now :p

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Thu Nov 01, 2007 12:56 pm
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Chibi-Czar
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Location: The Frozen North of the Upper Peninnsula of Michigan
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Why haven't you seen the Biofuel revolution? Same reason we haven't had a hydrogen revolution, or an electric revolution. There's no infrastructure to cater to the insane number of cars on the road. Yeah, when there's just a garage industry putting together biodeisel rigs you can just pull up to a fast-food restraunt and fill the tank, and they'll thank you for it. But when you convert that into not even every car on the road, but just every tenth car, you hit a little problem. Efficient or not, there's no way to provide that much biofuel on the scale that would be needed to supply everyone. It's like the ethanol problem: there's not enough farmable land in the US to grow the corn to supply the nation's fuel needs for a year, and that's if we turned every operating farm, every cattle ranch, and every other scrap of usable flat space into a corn farm exclusively for ethanol. We'd starve to death, and still not be able to drive. The problem we have to solve first is where to OBTAIN biofuels with the same output levels as petrol products.

The engineers in Detroit aren't stupid. They've seen it can be done, they know it can be done, but they're told not to do it, because it's still a niche market and there's no profit in it. Hybrids use the existing infrastructure, so there's no major shift and the consumer doesn't have to learn anything new about how to keep their car running. And the newer the tech, the more expensive it is, meaning that the poor saps on the bottom who could really use a cheaper fuel source won't be able to get the system for a long time. On top of that, what about all the old cars still running on gas? Mandatory trade-ins wouldn't work, because some of the clunkers people scrape along in aren't even worth scrapping, so they'd be out of luck. Incentives could work, but the poor would need the most help and would be least likely to qualify.

It's a great idea, it really is. And a great garage project too. But don't expect a mass change anytime soon. Sheeple don't like change, and until the idea catches on with the mainstream, the major automakers won't be pushing stuff like this.

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Fri Nov 02, 2007 11:18 pm
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