| Monday, February 13, 2006 |
14:47 - Still in the game
http://www.newtechspy.com/articles06/hydraulichybrid.html
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It's easy to be cynical about the American auto industry these days. GM is flirting with bankruptcy. Chrysler threw in its chips with the Germans and has gained some cred with the 300C, but now it seems to be getting a little full of itself. Both GM and Chrysler have slapped together their me-too retro-musclecars (the Camaro and the Challenger) in response to Ford, whose cars aside from the Mustang have all been far from inspirational (even the GT has suffered from embarrassing recall problems). Cars from Europe and Japan and even Korea seem to be light-years ahead of domestics when it comes to technology, reliability, and performance all put together into an attractively designed and high-quality package. When Ford keeps putting out ads congratulating itself for its "innovation", it's hard not to be cynical.
Well, here's some evidence that it might not all be smoke. A 60mpg F-150? Hydraulic cylinder power storage? 300% more efficient than the Prius? Egad.
We'll have to see if it's for real; it would have to imply that the losses even in the Prius are so immensely high as to make this kind of gain feasible, because they both have to run on the same gasoline input energy. But it does my heart good to think that there's real competition in the cards...
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Brian Tiemann
