Can you believe Oil @ $115 a barrel?

[Apteratude]

I'm kind of a financial nut and watch CNBC endlessly. Oil closed at 114.93 today =(. Unleaded gas traded up 15 cents higer that it did last friday to $2.94 a gallon (wholesale prices). That increase has yet to show up at the pump as there is a delay in the time the whosale price contracts are made, and the price increase at the pump. But rest assured that prices will be up an additional 16-17cents in the next week or so. =(

Wishing I bought 2 Aptera's.

[KarenRei]

Now, it'd only be $70-80 a barrel or so when you cancel out the US's weak dollar, but yes, it's still pretty high. The market is tight right now, so supply disruptions can really spike you. There's no shortage of energy they can tap to make fuel, but it's increasingly dirty. Oil companies prefer to things like the recent find of Carioca/Sugar Loaf (although they'd rather it not be beneath miles of water...). Either way, it takes half a decade, a decade, or even more between when you decide you want to tap some oil resource and when it actually comes online. And OPEC seems to have decided that these sorts of prices should now be considered normal, and they don't want to put more crude on the market (something I'm sure Venezuela is thrilled about, with their ultra-heavy crude).

Basically, to sum up: They're high and they're going to stay high. It'll fluctuate up and down, probably more down over the course of next year than up, but don't expect much to change between now and when you get your Aptera.

[basjoos]

These high gas prices make me glad I got 75mpg on my last fill up and got 83mpg on the way home today, all of this interstate driving at 60-70mph. Not bad for a 16 year old car with close to 500,000 miles on the odometer. Just love driving low Cd vehicles.

[GCustom]

I just wish I knew where to start on improving my car's drag ('04 Prius) Those numbers sound delicious, my best "tank" was ~72MPG for 300+ miles


How would I setup a hand throttle like yours basjoos?

[basjoos]

The hand throttle is real low tech and allows me to more precisely control the throttle position from zero up to less than half throttle (down to tenths of an injector msec accuracy on the SuperMID display) without having to resort to "sock driving" like some hypermilers do to improve their throttle position sensitivity. I built it out of scrap materials around the farm. Its just a small steel plate bolted to the accelerator pedal, another plate with a metal bar (the throttle handle) bolted to it with a handle nut to adjust the tension, all bolted to the central tunnel near the gearshift, and then a metal pushrod running from the throttle handle to the pedal plate. There's a picture of it on my Photobucket site. It works just like the accelerator pedal/hand throttle setup on a tractor, the hand throttle sets a minimum throttle position that can be increased by the pedal. Its basically a "driving with load" cruise control. Since I have been using that setup so long on the tractor, its second nature for me to automatically pull the handle back to idle when I need to stop. Even at the "full power" hand throttle position, its easy enough to override that small amount of power with the brakes in the event of an E-stop without pulling back on the hand throttle if for some reason I did forget to pull back on the hand throttle. I've found it very useful for highway driving.

[butter]

That sounded slightly dirty, basjoos.

By the way, I'm telling you this rather belatedly, but I am highly impressed by the car you altered to lower its drag and thus raise its mpg (I saw the pictures you put up of it in another thread several weeks ago).

Some people talk (i.e., me), and others DO (i.e., YOU).

Have fun hand-throttling your nut and driving with your load...

[GCustom]

cool thanks