Near the end

I'm coming to a close in my blog shortly, today's the last day of class and I feel I haven't gotten much closer to a decision. Next semester I will be taking Environmental Issues as a class at the University of Mary. Hopefully this class will contribute to my on-going thoughts on vehicle power supplies.

As I think about another possible discussion for my blog I turn to msn.com to check and see what's going on in the world. I notice an add for a vehicle that obviously wants us to not the EPA est. 33 mpg. Are we seriously so deceived as a society that we believe 33 mpg to be a great increse or standard for mpg. I remember in the mid '90s when that was just a typical rating for any Honda you could buy or even earlier than then.

As a consumer I'm not really suprised to hear about the possible closing or government bailout proposed by the 3 major US auto companies. We've known for years about the lack of quality in their products and many of us knew about the ridiculous amount of money being payed to individuals for doing very minimal work backed by unions. I wasn't one of the latter. Recently I found out about the amount of money that union workers get payed to simply put a tire on a vehicle in the assembly line. In my opinion, if this is what these major auto companies allow their workers unions to enforce them to pay, they should be going out of business.

The power of the go-kart

I decided to do some research this time around and found an article about the show MythBusters where they test electric and gas powered go-karts against each other. You can view this article at: http://www.popularmechanics.com/home_journal/workshop/4264026.html?page=1

In the article they prove how close the 2 can be compared to each other with a semi-scientific approach, lap times, driven by one of the MythBuster guys. The results of the test showed that the electric is faster from a stand still but has a lower top speed. While the gas powered kart has a higher top speed, which is usually unused on a kart track, "one kart can spew as many pollutants as 100 cars" due to the 2-stroke engines.

I would have to say at this point in my research that's one win for electric powered vehicles, though, this doesn't directly translate to our daily driving machines.

declining economy and gas prices

With the economy the way it has been for the past month or more, it has begun in the past 3 weeks to effect the price of gasoline, or petrol if you wanna be all British about it. With this reduction in gas prices is it really affecting us to think about giving up our gasoline powered automobiles. I remember (this is completely aging myself now) when gas was under $1 per gallon. I understand that with inflation and all that's happened in the past 13 years (you can guess my age now) $2-$3 may not be so unacceptable. But with all that's being said about the effect we're having on the environment (I'll leave my opinion about that out for now), and the harm our vehicle usage is triggering, wouldn't it be about time for us to stop depending on oil to power our transportation?

Gas vs. Electric

Gas vs. Electric

I'm starting a new blog to decide whether I would rather support the use of electric cars or to continue using only gas powered vehicles. I'm planning on taking responses to this blog into account and also doing my own research on the subject. I will be posting occasionally with new thoughts and arguments to support my own research and discuss others thoughts upon the subject matter. Hopefully after all said and done I can make an informed decision about either supporting the use of electric or gasoline powered vehicles or possibly both.