Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

Recent digs here in Mexico have unearthed a new species of pterosaur flying dinosaur called the Quetzalcoatlus which has a wingspan of at least sixty feet. It is believed that this dinosaur was capable not only of gliding, but also full powered flight… Below I've made a diagram showing it in comparison with a Cessna 152 airplane. It's seriously big!

The Cessna burns about six gallons of fuel per hour to fly. It's a lot faster than the pterosaur of course, but the pterosaur managed to stay aloft on a diet of fish and dead animals. How? Incredibly efficient design. They were light and low powered.

Below is the 118 Wallypower yacht which I've talked about here before, powered by a trio of 5,600 HP gas turbines. At sixty knots cruise (not quite full throttle) it consumes 15 gallons of fuel per mile, whereas if you're willing to amble along at nine knots, that same 15 gallons of fuel would carry you four miles.

What I am I rambling on about? Why am I pointing out that energy use is affected greatly by weight, design, and excesses of power? The world is in a fuel crisis right now. Gas prices are beginning to spike, and it's quite likely they'll go far higher than they are right now. SUV sales have slowed only a tiny bit, and even for smaller cars efficiency is far from ideal with little effort being made to improve.

To maintain a car at highway speed takes about nine horsepower. Unfortunately much more power is needed to get today's bloated vehicles rolling in the first place. A modern car weighs thousands of pounds when it could easily weigh under a thousand using modern materials — after all, that Cessna 152 airplane weighs only 1,150 pounds empty and it's far larger than a car.

If we used modern materials, modern aerodynamic design, and downsized engines, we could easily build cars that had performance comparable to a current modest consumer car, but achieved 150 miles per gallon or better — college level supermileage design challenges are currently operating in the 2,000 miles per gallon range, but those are far more radical designs such as the one below.

Obviously that's not something that's going to interest the average person, at least not unless gas gets a whole lot more expensive than even I expect it to. That said, even back thirty years ago or more there have been companies building cars capable of between a hundred and two hundred miles per gallon. The rather dated-looking car below (1981) achieves 128 miles per gallon, and it's a pretty primitive design that could easily get more with a bit of design work.

Sadly I think most people have an attitude of “if I just keep my eyes closed for long enough, things will get better by the time I open them”… I just don't see that as a wining strategy. It's not hard for humans to change the way we consume, we just have to be willing to try something different.