The Car Allowance Rebate System is a US federal program that helps US citizens to purchase a new, more fuel efficient vehicle when trading in a less fuel efficient vehicle.

Thousands of Americans are rushing out and trading in their old cars to receive a $3500 or $4500 discount towards the purchase of select new cars. This may sound great at first but there are many hidden facts the majority of the population may not be aware of.

• The program is designed to get old cars up to 25 years old with under 18 MPG off the road and replace them with brand new cars that have a higher MPG rating.
• Depending on the age of the vehicle you will ether qualify for $3500 or $4500 off of the purchase price of the new car.
• The old car must have been owned, registered, and insured for the past year.
• The dealer is required to disable the old cars engine by draining the oil and replacing with a water and silica solution, permanently destroying the engine.
• The old car must the crushed and the engine and drivetrain cannot be sold for parts, this prevents the sale of the car in the United States and elsewhere as a vehicle.

Many of the cars being turned in as “Clunkers” to this program are still perfectly fine and are being turned in just so the owner can get a new car, but because the car is required to be destroyed hundreds maybe even thousands of cars are being destroyed. But is this really the best way to get people to buy new cars? Why go to the effort to destroy perfectly fine cars that may only be 4-5 years old.

Let’s say all the cars that went to the program that were newer then say 1998 were taken into a low income car program, helping get the “real clunkers” off the road.

It could work as follows:

• The total household income is less then a certain level.
• Each household would qualify for only one vehicle trade.
• The traded vehicle must need more then $500 in repairs to qualify.
• The car must be less then 35 years old, but mileage does not matter.
• The car must be owned for the last year but is not required to be registered or smogged.

This would help get the “real clunkers” and unsafe cars off the road and help clean up the roads. But why was this not the way the Cash for Clunkers program was designed? We can only guess that it has to do with the fact that the Government has recently bailed out both GM and Chrysler. By requiring people to purchase a new vehicle they are protecting there investments.

Another theory about why they don’t want to have a low income program is “Keep Them Stupid and Poor” consperacy that has been floating around the internet. I think the government has been brainwashing the population, there is so many stupid laws and programs right now and the majority of the population appears to be going along with it.

I see this first hand as I am an unemployed, student. Like many others I have been in search of a job for many months, but because of the current economy there has been very little interest. Another major issue is the cut to education budgets, just this summer I had a class I was attending get canceled after the first week was over because they were two people short of the twenty person quota. I feel that as an American I am not getting what I should, if I pay my taxes I should be able to use that money, and I feel it unfair to allow this program to only benefit the people capable of making monthly car payments. What about the rest of the population?

The US consumes about 140 billion gallons of gasoline each year. A team of researchers led by John Heywood has completed a five-year assessment of what can be done to slash that and save fuel for the nation.

They looked at how gas and diesel engines, as well as hybrid electric cars and plug-in cars, are likely to evolve between now and 2035. They also assessed what can reasonably be expected from new fuels such as hydrogen and biofuels.

“Improvements” in cars in recent years have largely focused on increasing performance, driven by the demand for ever-larger and more powerful cars. As a result, no significant fuel consumption gains have been realised over the past 25 years, says the team.

They call for car manufacturers to focus efforts on improving fuel savings over performance.

Lighten the load

A seemingly simple way of reducing the amount of fuel used by cars without a big change in consumer preferences would be to produce lighter cars. Heywood’s team estimate that the average US car 25 years from now could feasibly weigh between 20% and 35% less without compromising on security and convenience. This alone would cut fuel consumption by between 12% and 20%.

I’m always amazed to see that one of the obstacles constantly cited by developers of smaller, alternative, and more fuel-efficient cars is that they “don’t pass safety tests”.  Um, how about we reevaluate the safety tests?  Right now it seems to be a demolition derby mentality out there; in other words, who can own and drive the car (read SUV) that can smash into you and sustain little damage.  A kind of “my car can smash up your car” way of thinking when we go out to buy something new. 

So, how about we change the rules.  If everyone were driving lighter cars with less “protection”, then a hit from another car would be relatively OK.  “Relative” is the key word here.  A large heavy car (again, read “SUV”), running into a small car, say a Prius, could be very damaging to the Prius and it’s owner.  However, if most people were driving light, and hence more fuel-efficient cars, then a Prius hitting say a Mini Cooper would be relatively (their’s that word again), OK and undamaging.  So, why don’t we redo the safety rules, giving light weight cars a whole catagory of their own.  This would greatly lessen the bureaucracy that the innovators in transportation have to wade through, thus leading to more fuel efficient cars SOONER.  Make sense?

True, for awhile, until all the SUV’s in the world are retired, it will be a little hairy out there.  But, hey, this state of affairs will be temporary, and the carnage can’t be any worse than Iraq, can it?  And the long range benefits to the death and destruction would be FAR more tangible!

“As the highly competitive fuels marketing business in the U.S. continues to evolve, we believe this transition is the best way for ExxonMobil to compete and grow in the future,” said Ben Soraci, U.S. director of retail sales for ExxonMobil.

Sorry Ben, I don’t buy it. Big Oil has been making record profits, have have more money floating around than they know what to do with. I realize that the retail end is different from the “manufacturing” component, but gas stations as a loosing proposition? I doubt it.

To me, this is good news. I think the big oil boys see something coming they don’t like, and want to get rid of their stations before a “certain something” is mandated by the Feds, or virtually “demanded” by market forces. I hope this “certain something” is something like: compressed air refill stations, hydrogen refill stations, and or biofuel pumps. Wouldn’t that be fantastic?

the United States by late 2009 or early 2010, and better yet, it is expected to be for sale for less than $18k. One of the planned Air Car models, reaches 68 mph, and goes for a range of 125 miles. It will take only a few minutes to refuel at gas stations equipped with custom air compressor units, and it should cost only around $2 to fill the car up with 340 liters of air!

Hmmmm. You know the saying, “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”. I can’t help but wonder what energy expenditure is required to compress the air. Electricity, I suppose, so that opens up that can of worms. But, hey, any candle is a bright light in total darkness. Lets keep our fingers crossed that this is real, and the developers of this technology don’t get run over (literally) by big oil. Rock on folks, and be sure to check under your hood before starting your car in the morning. Watch the video on the next page…

The Compressed Air Car developed by Motor Development International (MDI) Founder Guy Negre might be the best thing to have happened to the motor engine in years.

The $12,700 CityCAT, one of the planned Air Car models, can hit 68 mph and has a range of 125 miles. It will take only a few minutes for the CityCAT to refuel at gas stations equipped with custom air compressor units. MDI says it should cost only around $2 to fill the car up with 340 liters of air!

The Air Car will be starting production this year, thanks to India ’s TATA Motors.

Once again the “infrastructure” becomes the stumbling block. I can’t help but wonder where all those extraordinary profits are going within big oil. It seems, if our government so chose, that they could mandate that at least a percentage of windfall profit be reinvested in infrastructure. My guess is that it wouldn’t take long to have an air compressor installed in every gas station in the US. Meanwhile we take it in the ear by paying $4 or more per gallon.

I stood there for about a minute trying to figure out why it was trying to charge me $4.30 when the sign said $3.72, until I discovered there are two different prices for how you pay.

This Valero gas station in West Covina, CA thinks they can charge an additional $0.58 per gallon on top of the normal gas price, and still charge a Debit card fee. I thought this was crazy and drove across the street where it was only $0.04 more per gallon with no fee to use credit card.

But this brings up a interesting point, do you think you should have to pay more for merchandise when you use a credit card VS cash?

I think that a merchant needs to plan on the cost of credit card fees into their business plan and not pass it on to the consumer just because they use a credit card.

With the gas prices getting so high I’m starting to wonder who really is cashing in on the high prices; we all know that Exxon Mobile earned $40.61 billion in 2007 setting a new U.S. record for profits.

Using a credit card costs merchants (Gas Stations) on average of 1 – 3% of the total transaction plus a $0.30 fee. So you can see that it costs the gas stations a little of there profit to accept credit cards, but is it right to jack up the price $0.58 a gallon just for using a credit card? An average customer, pumping say 20 gallons, would pay an exorbitant $10.00 just because he/she wishes to use a credit card.

Do you think merchants should be allowed to charge a premium for the convenience of swiping a piece of plastic?

Here is a video about it:

But, Stan died shortly after that journey: he was poisoned to death. A rather persistent and nasty rumor blames a hit-man from the middle east with obvious interest in seeing such an invention disappear. Another related rumor says Stan was offered $1 billion dollars to dump the engine and retire – but he refused, and suffered the unfortunate consequences.

So, is it real? Well, in a way. BMW has a prototype car they call the Hydrogen 7 (pictured). They state that: “Our long-term EfficientDynamics strategy can be summed up with one vehicle: the BMW Hydrogen 7. As the world’s first luxury performance sedan with hydrogen drive, it runs on the most plentiful element in the world and emits virtually nothing but water vapor”. However, it runs on especially processed hydrogen (ahh, the big business “hook”?), that must be dispensed at stations much like, or as an addition to, current gas stations. In their words, the Hydrogen 7 is not yet available “because the infrastructure for refueling a hydrogen internal combustion engine is not yet complete”.

Well, at least they are working on it, and to my knowledge nobody has been “wacked” by oil interests as of yet. Keep tuned, we may be emerging on a breakthrough that will free us from the oil dependence nightmare.

Are you wondering why your grocery dollars aren’t stretching quite as far? In Mexico City, a barely publicized riot, called “The Tortilla Riots”, break out in protest of escalating corn prices (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6319093.stm) and sharply rising flour prices destabilize Pakistan. In Sudan, a grocer that supplies the countries needy is chocked that the price of white beans has increased by a factor of 5 in two years. Humans just might be embarking on one of the worst ideas yet: using the earth’s food croplands to grow crops that will be converted to Biofuel. According to a recent article in Times Magazine and the Los Angeles Times, food prices are increasing rapidly. LA Times sites two reasons for this: the devaluation of the dollar, and the use of crops for biofuels. Global hunger is now expected to increase instead of decrease, from early estimates of 625 million (a decrease from today’s 800 million) to 1.2 billion starving-humans by 2025. Many scientists and economists now blame this on increased food prices caused by increased demand (and hence profit) for biofuel crops.

So, it’s finally come to this. Our dependence on oil and energy competes head-to-head with our food. Not only is this obvious madness, but many scientists now also believe that this new turn to biofuel is increasing, not decreasing the factors that effect global warming. Ethanol, says Times Magazine, “increases global warming, destroys forests, and inflates food prices”.

The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year.We like our SUV’s, so kiss the Amazon goodbye. And guess what, we, you and me as tax payers, subsidize this madness. Last year, our country produced 7 billion gallons of biofuel, which cost taxpayers at least $8 billion in subsidies. Worse yet, our backwards-and-out-of-touch-as-always Bush Administration signed in an energy bill will mandate production of 36 billion gallons of biofuel by 2022, up from 7 billion today. “Fuel of the future”, he says. Now there’s a built in profit-making insurance policy for the biofuel industry if I ever saw one, directly guaranteed by the President of the United States.

What can you do? Well, I think we are still a democracy, so write your Congressperson and demand a halt to the biofuel madness. If you are thinking of buying an SUV, don’t! If you are thinking of buying a new car at all in the near future, wait for the hydrogen technology to mature. We will be reporting on this technology soon.