The price of gas
Posted: Fri Sep 16, 2005 12:10 pm
For those who have absolutely nothing to occupy their fine minds except
dither about $3/gallon gas in the U.S., consider the following, courtesy of
the website, How Stuff Works, explaining the new Bugatti Veyron engine:
How much gas is that?
Here's a quick calculation, which you can ignore if you hate math:
a.. 1,000 horsepower is equivalent to roughly 2.6 billion joules per hour.
A gallon (3.8 liters) of gasoline contains 132 million joules, so a 1,000-hp
engine has to be able to burn just over 20 gallons of gasoline per hour.
b.. However, car engines are only about one-quarter efficient -- three
quarters of the gasoline's energy escapes as heat rather than as power to
the wheels. So the engine actually has to be able to burn at least 80
gallons per hour, or 1.33 gallons (5 liters) per minute.
Hmmm. Let's see, the TC was rated at 46 HP which translates to 119,600,000
Joules, producing a consumption of 0.9 gallons per hour at 100% efficiency,
or 3.6 gallons per hour at 20%. Now did I do my math right? If so, the
Veyron will run at $240 an hour versus the TC at $10.80 per hour.
Look at it another way, it would take 22 XPAG's to put out the horsepower of
one Veyron. They are estimating a price of about $1.1 million for the
Veyron. If I recall correctly, the original list price of a TC was around
$1,300, which means that you could have the equivalent (i.e. 22 brand new
TC's, gad!) for a grand total of $28,600, or just 2.6% of the purchase price
of a Veyron! Do they want me to believe I could have more fun with one of
those compared to owning 22 new TCs?
See this link for details:
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/bugatti1.htm
_Peter
dither about $3/gallon gas in the U.S., consider the following, courtesy of
the website, How Stuff Works, explaining the new Bugatti Veyron engine:
How much gas is that?
Here's a quick calculation, which you can ignore if you hate math:
a.. 1,000 horsepower is equivalent to roughly 2.6 billion joules per hour.
A gallon (3.8 liters) of gasoline contains 132 million joules, so a 1,000-hp
engine has to be able to burn just over 20 gallons of gasoline per hour.
b.. However, car engines are only about one-quarter efficient -- three
quarters of the gasoline's energy escapes as heat rather than as power to
the wheels. So the engine actually has to be able to burn at least 80
gallons per hour, or 1.33 gallons (5 liters) per minute.
Hmmm. Let's see, the TC was rated at 46 HP which translates to 119,600,000
Joules, producing a consumption of 0.9 gallons per hour at 100% efficiency,
or 3.6 gallons per hour at 20%. Now did I do my math right? If so, the
Veyron will run at $240 an hour versus the TC at $10.80 per hour.
Look at it another way, it would take 22 XPAG's to put out the horsepower of
one Veyron. They are estimating a price of about $1.1 million for the
Veyron. If I recall correctly, the original list price of a TC was around
$1,300, which means that you could have the equivalent (i.e. 22 brand new
TC's, gad!) for a grand total of $28,600, or just 2.6% of the purchase price
of a Veyron! Do they want me to believe I could have more fun with one of
those compared to owning 22 new TCs?
See this link for details:
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/bugatti1.htm
_Peter