Yesterday we looked at the technologies that are most likely to be adopted in the near term to improve fuel efficiency.

Here is how much various technologies can improve fuel economy.

Diesel Engine  25% - 30%

Gasoline Direct Injection plus Turbocharging up to 12%

Dual-clutch transmission up to 10%

Cylinder deactivation 7%

Continuously variable valve timing 5%

Stop-start system 5%

5 speed automatic transmissions 3% - 4%

- Automotive News, November 3, 2008

Now, let’s look at the cost of these technologies as projected by the National Highway Transportation Administration (NHTSA).

Here is how much these technologies will add to the price of a car.

Diesel Engine $1,000 - $3,000

Gasoline Direct Injection plus Turbocharging  $122 - $810

Dual-clutch transmission (continuously variable transmission) $100 - $139

Cylinder deactivation $203 - $229

Continuously variable valve timing Cost not available

Stop-start system $1800 - $2,000

5 speed automatic transmissions $76 - $167

Based on the cost versus the fuel mileage gain, it appears that Gasoline Direct Injection plus Turbocharging has the best profile.

Ford Motor Company is introducing a system called EcoBoost that combines gasoline direct injection and turbocharging.  Here is a video (kind of dry) about the system:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVncFb7GMOs

Here are some videos about what to look for when you are shopping for a new car:

http://endependence.info/research/videos-c-1-v-20.html

http://endependence.info/research/videos-c-1-v-8.html

The technology is out there.  If the government (meaning the taxpayers) is going to help the Big 3 (Detroit 3) automakers, we should insist that they bring these and other energy saving technologies to market in the short term.

Have you noticed that when you see pizza ads on T.V., the bigger the pizza, the lower the price?  You can get a lot of bad pizza for $9.95, but can you survive on lots of bad pizza?

What if you fed the family cheap bad pizza every night for dinner?  It might be good for the budget, but soon the health effects of a lousy diet would start to show.  It wouldn’t be long until everyone decided that the cheap bad pizza diet wasn’t working.

When society was choosing energy sources during the industrial revolution, cheap was good.  Oil and coal were less expensive than whale oil and wood.  But like with pizza, cost is not the best way to judge the value of an energy source.

With energy, we have lots of cheap bad fuel choices. We have coal, oil, oil shale and natural gas.  This stuff is cheap because there is so much of it (especially coal), and the energy yield of fossil fuels is very high.

Here is a good outline of how fossil fuels formed:

http://www.energyquest.ca.gov/story/chapter08.html

There are a couple of problems with the cheap bad fuel choices.  First of all is the fact that they are non renewable, so eventually we will run out of them (all of the pizza places will close, and there won’t be any frozen pizzas either).  Second is the fact that as with eating pizza for dinner every night, burning fossil fuels has unhealthy side effects.  They release greenhouse gases which are a cause of global warming and they release other toxins into the air.

A scientist friend of mine explained it to me this way - “it took the earth millions of years to trap the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and we are in the process of putting it all back into the atmosphere in a couple of hundred years”.

Here is a video about the different types of fuels we are using currently:

http://endependence.info/research/videos-c-1-v-6.html

What we need is a more balanced energy diet.  We can use fossil fuels sparingly.  But we need to add lots more renewable energy to our plates (think of renewable energy as fruits and vegetables).

Renewable energy sources may not be as cheap as fossil fuels, but in the long run we will be much healthier when we change our cheap bad fuel choice diet.