By Popular Mechanics •
October 1, 2009
This is an excerpt of a guest column Nick Chambers, editor of Gas 2.0, wrote for Popular Mechanics. You can read the whole column on the Popular Mechanics website.
The road trip—driving cross-country for days on end, crammed into a vehicle with your family—is virtually a required rite of passage for most Americans. The lure of the open road is as ingrained in our psyche and culture as the hamburger, football or fishing. So it’s no surprise that proposals for new types of taxes on these seemingly free highways—traditionally paid for by gas taxes and tolls—are causing an uproar.
Back in July of this year, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon) proposed a bill that allocates funds to research the effectiveness of taxing highway usage by the mile. On the surface, the bill seems to be laying the groundwork for big government to track our driving habits while simultaneously discouraging the driving of more fuel-efficient vehicles. It doesn’t have to be this way.
While domestic manufacturers have in recent years returned to the “retro” look, reigniting the nation’s passion for the muscle cars of yesteryear, the rest of the world has been giddy on egg-shaped hybrids and fuel efficiency vs horsepower.
There is an understandably large gap between the fuel-conscious and horsepower heavy crowds, but Popular Mechanics has undertaken a project to bridge that with their Eco+Muscle hybrid Dodge Challenger.
This post comes to you from Popular Mechanics. Written By Seth Porges.
Across the country, a handful of car makers continue their quest to bring a market-ready mega-mileage machine to market. The prize: $7.5 million from the X Prize Foundation. Unfortunately for X Prize followers, the New York Auto Show is not shaping up to be much of a battlefield. There is one exception: On Thursday, EV Innovations will unveil the Wave, a curvacious plug-in electric two-seater that the company claims will have a range of up to 200 miles, a top speed of around 80 mph, and start just north of $30,000 when it becomes available to consumers in 2010.
By Popular Mechanics •
February 27, 2009
Editor’s Note: Our friends at Popular Mechanics have written an in-depth piece about an essential piece of fuel-saving technology: the turbocharger. Read the rest of this story at PM.
In the 1980s, it was difficult to escape the turbocharger. The twin energy crises of the 1970s forced automakers to produce cars that delivered better fuel economy. And that meant downsizing engines. By the 1980s, turbo technology was evolving and automakers installed them to boost the power of these smaller engines. But turbos promised more than just power—they promised fuel economy benefits too.
Popular Mechanics just tested seven common energy-efficient, compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) for brightness, color, and power use. Can they compete with the traditional incandescent light bulbs that most of us use?
They sure can. Although the old-fashioned incandescent bulb measured slightly brighter than the equivalent CFLs, the test subjects in the Popular Mechanics study couldn’t see any significant difference. In fact, when it came to the overall quality of light, every
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