Wednesday, September 23, 2009

NBC says No, Jay Leno Says: we'll do it anyways

Several months ago I wrote about how Top Gear USA, scheduled to appear on the NBC network, was doomed to failure. The rampant liberal democrat ideology that backs the majority of televised broadcast media simply can't accept a show like Top Gear. Well, recently, one of NBC's big stars, Jay Leno, showed up on the UK Top Gear. Shortly afterwards it was announced that Jay Leno would be hosting a segment to place Celebrities in a Green Car.

It doesn't take much effort to realize that Jay Leno, once asked to head up the USA themed version of Top Gear, probably had ulterior motives for showing up on Top Gear UK... Such as figuring out how to get the popular Star In a Reasonably Priced Car to work under the green dogma of the Liberal Democrats. Now, realistically, most people know that Green Cars aren't really that environmentally friendly. Once you get over the horrible environmental impact of just the battery production for a Prius, which admittedly does take a lot of effort, there's the fact that they just aren't that fuel efficient.

Case in point for me. A while back a friend and I headed up to Atlanta to go catch an Imax movie showing. We took his Prius, and our daily fuel average was... 14 miles to the gallon. Now, I know your thinking, how is that possible? Toyota says it gets 31mpg+!!! Well, for starters, the Prius, and many other hybrid cars, only really work in stop and go traffic. Many depend on Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems that generate electricity when the car is stopping. Others depend on fancy logic switching to work back and forth between the electric, and the gas engine. If you're laying on the gas through for a 100, 150, 200, or 250 mile stretch? The electric engine never even comes into play... and the gasoline engine in that Prius had just awful fuel economy at highway speeds. Quite simply, if Toyota really wanted to make a fuel efficient hybrid, they should have used a diesel engine.

Jeremy Clarkson once reported he got 73 miles to the gallon from a VW Golf Diesel. Well, one of my former coworkers from Sitel has a Golf diesel and made a trip from Atlanta Georgia, to Columbia South Carolina, to Orlando Florida. His Golf Diesel... managed 68mpg.

You don't see stories about these sorts of diesel fuel mileages on NBC, or ABC, or CBS, or MicrosoftNBC, or CNN, and as much as I dislike saying it, even Fox ignores just how efficient diesel engines can be. Of course, part of the lack of attention is due to car manufacturers. Car companies just don't seem to be interested in talking about how well their diesel engines perform, and the only time the comparison really comes up, is when car companies talk about HCCI.

Of course, some car companies are already looking for ways out of the fossil fuel and synthetic fossil fuel problems. For starters, many car companies know that Bio-Fuels are a dead-end technology from the start. Even back in the 1980's Georgia Power knew that corn supplies would never be enough to sustain the US's fuel consumption, much less sustain both fuel consumption and food consumption. GM, despite being run straight into the ground by Liberal Democrats, then rescued by more Liberal Democrats, had a Hydrogen powered Concept Car, the Hy-Wire. Honda also has an interest in Hydrogen, they actually opened the first filling station in the US. As the most plentiful fuel in the universe, Hydrogen powered cars are a viable alternative, if not the only realistic alternative, to keeping the vehicle system as much of the world knows it... working.

So, while Jay Leno deserves credit for getting Star in a Reasonably Priced Car to the US airwaves... it just serves as a beacon on just how un-interested broadcast media is in actually talking about, or doing something about, fuel efficient cars.

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