So why don't they engineer the damned things properly?
Banner Notes - Yeah, she's really going green now.
A hydrogen-burning car would be really nice . . . if it weren't made out of pasteboard and paper-clips. Somehow the damned Greens never seem to understand that their "solutions" to environmental problems have to work in the real world -- you know, the one where physics, chemistry, and biology determine how things work. As a result, a woman died in a car wreck that would have properly dinged an SUV, but certainly wouldn't have caused an SUV to implode the way this one did, and just might have left her alive, if shaken up, afterwards.
My comments to Banner's original post, linked above, point out avenues of approach to engineering solutions for small, lightweight cars which otherwise tend to be way too fragile. So why the hell haven't the Greens come up with such simple, easy-to-implement engineering solutions to the problem?
I freely give away my own contribution to anyone who wants to make some big bucks on engineering such cars such that they are both hydrogen-burning and non-frgile/non-collapsible/non-lethal:
I seriously think that many of those who come up with designs like that of the G-Wiz are extrenely neurologically challenged. Like, no brains. There are ways to build light-weight machines of any kind that don't make them extremely fragile -- by analogy, compare the Chambered Nautilus to the Ammonite, and, before the last of the Ammonites, which died out at the end of the Cretaceous, compare them to the ancient straight-shelled Ammonites, which died out at the during the Early Silurian Period of the Paleozoic. The most ancient Ammonites, also called Orthocones, were large creatures, among the largest cephalopods who ever lived, and had long, heavy, straight shells. They thrive as long as their prey were smaller than they were, but at the end of the Ordovician Period, there was a mass extinction that might have been caused by a nearby, 10-second long gamma-ray burst aimed at the Earth. As a result, numerous creatures were mutated all out of true, and many became very ill or died at once. The Ammonites survived it -- for a while. But their prey populations were nearly wiped out, and they began to starve, and between genetic damage and selection for Ammonites that weren't very big and so needed less food, they got smaller. In the meantime, one of the animals they preyed on, Eurypterids (who, as far as I'm concerned, are -- or, anyway, were living proof that H. P. Lovecraft was right), which theretofore was too small to take down Ammonites and so got et a lot, suddenly was in the right ballpark to tackle and feed on Ammonites, which they did. The big, straight-shelled Ammonites, whose shells were too fragile to survive eurypterid attacks, died out. Smaller Ammonites with strong, curled-up shells, however, were a much harder nut -- er, shell to crack for the eurypterids, and survived.
Comes the Mesozoic Era.
The Mesozoic Ammonites, all coiled shells, shared the seas with the Chambered Nautilus. But the Ammonites were shallow-water creatures, while the Nautiluses were deep-water creatures. The acid rains of the end of the Mesozoic/Cretaceous killed everything that couldn't dive deep and stay down there, which meant the Ammonites, but not the Nautiluses. The reason the Nautiluses could stand far out to sea and go deep, whereas the Ammonites could not, was that the Nautilus shell, also coiled, had a somewhat different, hence stronger architecture, than the Ammonite shell. The Nautiluses are with us today; the last of the Ammonites perished 65 milion years ago.
The point being that these light-weight little cars don't have to be fragile. There are ways to engineer them that build great strength into them, enough to see them through a bad accident in more or less one piece. Yet the damned Greens never, ever seem to get a clue as to how to build them for safety and still keep them lightweight. Ergo, Greens aren't rational and aren't intelligent and are obscenely ignorant. Feh.
A good independent reference on Nautiluses and their cousins, extinct and otherwise, is Dr. Peter D. Ward. His book Out of Thin Air: Dinosaurs, Birds, and Earth's Ancient Atmosphere, goes into great detail on the evolution of such marine animals.
Another way to make normally fragile materials strong is to foam them, make them relatively foamy, like the bones of birds, which are far stronger than their proportions and the materials in them would suggest. Bird bones are filled with air sacs, which make their respiration much more efficient -- flight is very expensive, and anything that lightens the load without compromising strength is very helpful. I imagine that there are many other ways, as well.
Go for it.
(You know what? You could put a hydrogen-burner into an SUV body and not generate any csrbon footprint -- a carbon footprint is irrelevant at that point. If the horsepower is too low for that sturdy example of American automotive engineering ingenuity, why, add more hydrogen-burners or otherwise beef the system up. How stupid does someone have to be to not realize that? Because that's how stupid the designers of this little automotive death-trap are.)
A hydrogen-burning car would be really nice . . . if it weren't made out of pasteboard and paper-clips. Somehow the damned Greens never seem to understand that their "solutions" to environmental problems have to work in the real world -- you know, the one where physics, chemistry, and biology determine how things work. As a result, a woman died in a car wreck that would have properly dinged an SUV, but certainly wouldn't have caused an SUV to implode the way this one did, and just might have left her alive, if shaken up, afterwards.
My comments to Banner's original post, linked above, point out avenues of approach to engineering solutions for small, lightweight cars which otherwise tend to be way too fragile. So why the hell haven't the Greens come up with such simple, easy-to-implement engineering solutions to the problem?
I freely give away my own contribution to anyone who wants to make some big bucks on engineering such cars such that they are both hydrogen-burning and non-frgile/non-collapsible/non-lethal:
I seriously think that many of those who come up with designs like that of the G-Wiz are extrenely neurologically challenged. Like, no brains. There are ways to build light-weight machines of any kind that don't make them extremely fragile -- by analogy, compare the Chambered Nautilus to the Ammonite, and, before the last of the Ammonites, which died out at the end of the Cretaceous, compare them to the ancient straight-shelled Ammonites, which died out at the during the Early Silurian Period of the Paleozoic. The most ancient Ammonites, also called Orthocones, were large creatures, among the largest cephalopods who ever lived, and had long, heavy, straight shells. They thrive as long as their prey were smaller than they were, but at the end of the Ordovician Period, there was a mass extinction that might have been caused by a nearby, 10-second long gamma-ray burst aimed at the Earth. As a result, numerous creatures were mutated all out of true, and many became very ill or died at once. The Ammonites survived it -- for a while. But their prey populations were nearly wiped out, and they began to starve, and between genetic damage and selection for Ammonites that weren't very big and so needed less food, they got smaller. In the meantime, one of the animals they preyed on, Eurypterids (who, as far as I'm concerned, are -- or, anyway, were living proof that H. P. Lovecraft was right), which theretofore was too small to take down Ammonites and so got et a lot, suddenly was in the right ballpark to tackle and feed on Ammonites, which they did. The big, straight-shelled Ammonites, whose shells were too fragile to survive eurypterid attacks, died out. Smaller Ammonites with strong, curled-up shells, however, were a much harder nut -- er, shell to crack for the eurypterids, and survived.
Comes the Mesozoic Era.
The Mesozoic Ammonites, all coiled shells, shared the seas with the Chambered Nautilus. But the Ammonites were shallow-water creatures, while the Nautiluses were deep-water creatures. The acid rains of the end of the Mesozoic/Cretaceous killed everything that couldn't dive deep and stay down there, which meant the Ammonites, but not the Nautiluses. The reason the Nautiluses could stand far out to sea and go deep, whereas the Ammonites could not, was that the Nautilus shell, also coiled, had a somewhat different, hence stronger architecture, than the Ammonite shell. The Nautiluses are with us today; the last of the Ammonites perished 65 milion years ago.
The point being that these light-weight little cars don't have to be fragile. There are ways to engineer them that build great strength into them, enough to see them through a bad accident in more or less one piece. Yet the damned Greens never, ever seem to get a clue as to how to build them for safety and still keep them lightweight. Ergo, Greens aren't rational and aren't intelligent and are obscenely ignorant. Feh.
A good independent reference on Nautiluses and their cousins, extinct and otherwise, is Dr. Peter D. Ward. His book Out of Thin Air: Dinosaurs, Birds, and Earth's Ancient Atmosphere, goes into great detail on the evolution of such marine animals.
Another way to make normally fragile materials strong is to foam them, make them relatively foamy, like the bones of birds, which are far stronger than their proportions and the materials in them would suggest. Bird bones are filled with air sacs, which make their respiration much more efficient -- flight is very expensive, and anything that lightens the load without compromising strength is very helpful. I imagine that there are many other ways, as well.
Go for it.
(You know what? You could put a hydrogen-burner into an SUV body and not generate any csrbon footprint -- a carbon footprint is irrelevant at that point. If the horsepower is too low for that sturdy example of American automotive engineering ingenuity, why, add more hydrogen-burners or otherwise beef the system up. How stupid does someone have to be to not realize that? Because that's how stupid the designers of this little automotive death-trap are.)