Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Things they should invent: cars with variable engine power/efficiency

Someone I know owns a big horse, so she needs a big SUV to pull her horse-trailer. However, she isn't pulling her horse trailer at all times - I'm sure she doesn't need to be using all that gasoline to drive to work or the grocery store - a smaller car would do just fine for these jobs. But owning two cars - a big one for the horse trailer and a small one for the everyday - is too costly or inconvenient for households with only one driver.

So what they should invent is a way to make cars switch between a more fuel-efficient but less powerful mode, and a less fuel-efficient but more powerful mode.

I'm really terribly shamefully ignorant about how cars work (I've never owned one), so I don't know how exactly this could be done. Some ideas, with the caveat that they may all be completely incompatible with the basic elements of car construction:

1. Part of the engine could be blocked off when the car is in Efficient mode, and the car can access that part when you switch to Powerful mode. (Like you know how there are V6 and V8 engines? Just turn off two of the V's)
2. Put two engines into the car, but only use one at a time (or use one in Efficient mode and both in Powerful mode)
3. If the efficiency/power of the car is more a function of its size (I know that bigger SUVs and trucks tend to be more powerful, but I don't know what the cause and effect elements of this phenomenon is), make it something that can be physically added on to the vehicle. Picture the ship Obi-Wan uses to go to Kamino in Attack of the Clones - he has a little ship with this big hyperspace engine thing, and when the time came to land on the planet he detached the ship from the big engine and went down to the planet using what the Star Trek universe calls impulse power. (Is this metaphor mixed up enough yet? Or should I add another fandom?) There could be something that hooks up to car in a relatively simple way and provides it with more power, and the user could remove it for their daily commute. Maybe, if you didn't need full engine power very often, you could even rent a power booster thing for when you take your boat up to the cottage once a year or whatever.

Anyway, the point is, even though some people need SUVs for some things they don't necessarily need them all the time, and it would be convenient if you could switch the extra engine power on and off, and save some gas in the process.

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