Fast and Green?
Lets talk nickel – your oil company can expect £10bn in profit and they can gold-pressed latinum
parachute an American VP from an oil giant to the
tune of £37bn if you believe the papers. Wishing to
stay that way causes all kinds of anomalies, I am
convinced that they are interested in the environment
and they are committed to ruling the planet
even beyond petroleum, which is why the Lotus
270E Tri-fuel is so interesting. Lotus’ plan, and its
impressive, has been to equip the Lotus Exige 270E
Tri-Fuel with non-corrosive fuel pipes and an
alcohol sensor, not in the cabin but deep inside the
engine, the combustibility of any mixture of
methanol, ethanol, petrol and other biofuels can be
instantly fed to the engine’s computer processor
and combustion controlled from there. This is
impressive to someone like me who spends most
of his time wondering what the new fuel E85 is
constituted of - only to find its 15% petroleum,
hmm. Left to fend for myself against the cruel
world of acronyms with only 3 degrees in
engineering I find this approach by Lotus practicable
and therefore likely to succeed. I mean,
when was the last time you popped to the supermarket
for a specific mixture of fuels? Makes sense
to support a range of them doesn’t it? So, Lotus are
well poised to obtain green credentials for their
performance cars in the future, especially given
the minimal costs involved in converting to any
Tri-fuel combination. Lotus’ crowning achievement
in this field is the proposition of recovering
methanol from the atmosphere from renewable
fuel powered |
