4/5/16 car talk

[fluffy]

That sounds like a really neat project! I hadn't heard of Mercedes' turbo diesel thing, but I imagine it's under extra-hard scrutiny after the VW TDI debacle. Also before that went down I thought that a return to diesel would be generally good (because it was supposedly fine for the environment and because diesel can be synthesized from sources other than fossil fuels) but now I worry that clean diesel can never be that clean and I also have to wonder how things work out with the possibility for biodiesel on the large scale.

Of course ethanol production is still a losing proposition (cellulose-derived ethanol shows promise but it's still just in the lab and nowhere close to production) and even then, ethanol's just a booster to regular fossil-fuel gasoline, so that only adds a minimal safety net to a giant problem.

Personally I'd like to see better pushes for better mass transit. And I justify owning a car based on it only being for pleasure, not for commuting or whatever, so I'm still only using around 5-10 gallons per month, personally.

And of course mass transit can't handle the sorts of specialty things like what your wife's doing, but I'd love to see a world where most street traffic is for that sort of thing and less-so people just taking up a lot of space on their commute. (Better telecommuting options for a lot of folks would also be nice.)