When the oil dries up
Posted on June 26, 2009 by Jesse O'Brien in News and Events
People often talk about what will happen to the Earth when we use up all the fossil fuels, and where we’ll all be in 10 years. I’m more concerned with my project cars. Project cars aren’t about to switch over to electric power or hydrogen, all our engineering has gone into one particular gasoline engine or another. What then, is your plan for increased regulations or unavailability of gasoline?
Courtesy of Freefoto
Personally, I seek other projects. A bicycle is just as much fun to work on, and normally less expensive (there are exceptions to this rule), but not as fast. It also doesn’t allow me to be quite as lazy. What are your thoughts on future transportation? Will you continue the hobby after you can’t afford fuel?
Im very lucky because were i live we do a heck of alot of car pooling. i mean i know thats still using up gas but why have 18 people drive to one place when u can crame into the back of a pick up truck..? Course then again i live in a small farming town, so we always hitch rides from each other. Anotehr big factor for the downtown area about 50 miles from my house is that they have an inygo bus systme that is currentually running on some sort of alternate fuel source ( not sure what it is) but that also provides alot of good car pulling and their not even using actual gas…
until gas hit $4 which is only .03 cents away im sure we can keep our sanity…
=D
I’m right in the San Francisco Bay Area, so cramming people into a car is the name of the game. Our public transport is huge here, as well. I’ve just been using my own car to drive me (and my roommate) to the bus stop, so we can get around from there. I’m about to move to an even more public-transport-accessible area, so I’ll be driving less and less as time goes by. Of course, there’s always my bicycle as well, and that goes a long way toward getting me around, especially since I can take it on buses and trains around here.
Of course, my daily driver gets roughly 14mpg and is only a 2-seater, so I try to keep my required driving times to a minimum. Going out for cruises in my free time is an entirely separate matter. I could drive around all day on the weekends (and probably would be today, if my engine hadn’t just died on me).
I fully plan on converting it to run on rubbish and plutonium. Maybe a 1000v electric engine. Or a big old turbo diesel. Or the tears of emo kids. Maybe just rage. I seem to have a never ending supply of the latter.
Good ol’ alcohol has been around for, o I dunno, couple thousand years at least. We’ve been running cars off of it for nearly a century now, and now we’re trying to call it “green” by giving it a new (well deserved) name of ethanol. When “the oil drys up” I’ll be more than happy to bump my compression up to 18:1 and run “green” on ethanol. Hopefully by then most will be running either completely electric or hydrogen, leaving the dirtier alcohol based cars to fend for what little can practically be made.
It’s sure hard to beat the convenience of the automobile, and I don’t see it leaving any time soon. So it’s just going to take some ingenuity from hobbyists to learn to adapt to the age.