Cars are not more efficient

By Alan Linda | The Daily Journal

Published Tuesday, April 1, 2008

When I think about cars and mileage and stuff, I think about a 1949 Chevy that used to get over 20 miles per gallon and an uncle who had a 1963 Chevy with a 283-cubic-inch engine which, on a trip with me driving him down to see a VA doc, got 28 mpg. This kind of mystifies me.

Looking back on all the cars that have gotten good mileage over the years and looking now at all the cars that people are driving that get bad mileage would seem to indicate that, in 50 years, we haven’t gotten any engineers who have learned a single thing about making cars more efficient.

That 1963 Chevy of my uncle’s remains the center point of my confusion. It had an engine approaching five point zero liters, it had an automatic transmission that had never heard of overdrive, much less a locked-up torque converter (for those of you who haven’t heard of any of this either, these are things that have supposedly increased mileage), it had a gear ratio that spun the engine at rpm’s nearly double what car engines now spin, it had, thus, nothing modern whatsoever.

“Oh, you should buy one of these new I-----‘s,” a car salesman said to me not too long ago. “It’ll get 30 mpg on the highway.”

Really! I didn’t say it, but I wanted to say: “Look, buddy. The year is 2008. Back in 1963, we all thought we’d be flying rocket ships by now. Instead, you’re trying to sell me a car that costs five times as much as did a car back in 1963; yet, basically gets the same gas mileage.”

One might add to the end of that sentence: “What! Do you take me for an idiot?”

Lock-up torque converters. Stratified fuel injection and combustion. Computerized engine ignition and fuel management. Four cylinder engines with eight spark plugs and 16 valve overhead cams, 50,000-volt individual-coiled lifetime plugs. All this stuff sounds like it belongs on the rockets we all back then thought we’d be flying to work in now, and what do we get?

We get an industry that thinks 30 mpg is some kind of miraculous achievement.

It’s a miracle all right, and some people think the miracle is a cover up for a huge conspiracy between Big Oil and Big Iron, the car manufacturers themselves.

Next time you’re bored, which is probably about now, because as soon as someone begins hollering “conspiracy,” we all think we’re dealing with a kook, which would be me, here. Google these words: auto, hydrogen, and water, and take a look at what’s going on out there in the world.

Or go buy yourself a couple of magnets that’ll clamp onto your car’s gasoline line and are guaranteed to get you 10 percent better gas mileage.

No, don’t do that. They’re worthless.

Out there in the world are a lot of people working like crazy to find a better way to split water into the two components that make it up: oxygen and hydrogen. By the meaning of build a better way, it turns out that water is actually relatively easy to split up into its component parts, as easy as dangling a stainless steel wire in the water and applying a voltage to it.

Doing that will produce plenty of what isn’t quite hydrogen, at least not the hydrogen that we know from hydrogen bombs or what the sun is made of, but a hydrogen nonetheless that is H-2, and will burn like crazy.

In your car engine.

There are hundreds of folks out there tinkering like crazy with this stuff, and the problem isn’t making the H-2, it’s more one of making it more efficiently. There are some folks out there who have indeed made gadgetry that does make it efficiently, and have patented it.

Here’s the real problem: the patents have been sold. And no one is talking about who purchased them, or for how much. Matter of fact, a great deal of the actual basis for believing this is all a big conspiracy exists because a guy who actually was driving his car on water back in the nineties was found poisoned to death in the parking lot of a restaurant, and all his equipment mysteriously disappeared.

I don’t know. Could just be nothing. But let’s say you’re Big Oil, or Big Arabia, or Big Anybody who sells oil, and some gadget exists that might cut down your ability to take the West’s dollars and fund terrorism — and other stuff more in the personal greed bracket--, wouldn’t you be interested in stopping that gadget?

Really? You wouldn’t?

Then all this would be impossible, wouldn’t it.

Alan Linda writes from his home in New York Mills.