On Wed, 24 Mar 2021 19:56:01 -0500, BryanGSimmons
> wrote:

>I used to have a 1992 Metro. It was supposed to get 51MPG highway.
>It got better than that. It was powered by a 998cc 3-cyl engine.
>We blew out one of the the piston rings on one of the cylinders
>going 85+MPH on the Turner Turnpike in Oklahoma, so then it was down
>to two cylinders. A mechanic told us that those engines are sealed,
>and could only be replaced, not repaired, but that the control module
>had sensed that the defective cylinder was ****ed up, and had disabled
>the fuel injector to it, so now we were down to two cylinders, and the
>displacement? Do the math. I hath understanding enough to count. The
>number of cubic centimeters of displacement of that little beast was
>"Six hundred threescore and six."
>
>Yes. And you would have thought that it would have been the end times
>for that little Geo (Geo does relate to Earth), and that there would be
>horsemen, rather than horsepower in its future, but that little car ran
>for 2 more years like that, and when we replaced it because it wouldn't
>pass emissions testing in that condition, I sold it to a junkyard for
>$50, where they intended to use it as an onsite vehicle for ferrying
>parts around. When we got rid of it, it was still getting spectacular
>mileage, and ran well. It merited an afterlife. All true.
>
>In retrospect, I should have realized that the Geo Metro was a *city
>car*, and we shouldn't have pushed it to turnpike speeds. We also
>shouldn't have driven it out to the Missouri Ozarks, and driven it down
> a poorly maintained county gravel road, because it had inadequate
>ground clearance, and try as I did to keep one side of the vehicle on
>the crown of the road, I punctured the oil pan, and it took several
>quarts of added oil to make it back to St. Louis, where we got the oil
>pan replaced, yet the beast of an engine made it another year until its
>repurposing as a junkyard ferry.
>
>These days, subcompacts sold in the USA are, TTBOMK, invariably powered
>by 1.4 liter engines, and no non-hybrid gets anywhere near the MPG that
>the 3-cyl Metros and Suzuki Swifts got in the early 1990s. Fiat even
>manufactured a turbo 2-cyl that was available in Europe, but not here.
>
>EVs like the Nissan Leaf have their place as city cars, but only as city
>cars. Hybrids are great, and plug in hybrids make the most sense for
>compact/subcompact cars, but they didn't sell well because of the price.
>The prices were high because they were outfitted with too much battery
>storage, instead of being sold with minimal batteries, and empty slots
>for adding additional battery modules as needed/preferred by the
>consumer. That would have made the transition to EVs far more
>practical.
>
>Standardized battery modules make sense, and we have a model for that,
>the USB 5 volt that has become ubiquitous. Proprietary, oddball
>batteries and charging systems need to go away, as do the extant
>variations of USB plugs--one standard for 5V, and one standard for 20V
>connectors would save a lot of time and trouble.
>
>For those of you who have read this far, I probably won't be posting
>here much for a while.

To be honest, I skipped this far. Car talk... meh.

>I have a lot of other things toward which I need to devote my time and attention.

You have to renovate your son's new house.

>I got my first Covid shot yesterday, and it's time to refocus.

That's a side effect I hadn't heard of. Does a covid shot make you
lose your focus?

--
The real Bruce posts with uni-berlin.de - individual.net