Gas Millage Hoaxes
In 1935 a Canadian named Charles Nelson Pogue built the first of his 200 miles per gallon carburetors. Well that is what he claimed you could get with his carburetor. By the end of the 1930s, he had built and sold 317 of the carburetor he called the “Winnipeg” carburetor. The carburetor did existed in reality, but the 200-MPG was pure myth. There were two serious problems with the design. The first one is that the claim violated the First Law of Thermodynamics. Second, the best mileage achieved using a Pogo 200-MPG carburetor was 35 MPG when the carburetor was installed on a Ford Mustang. The Mustang suffered a dramatic loss of power in the process and was all but impossible to drive. As far as anyone knows no one has been able to get anywhere near the mileage Pogue claims.
All these super mileage devices are popular urban myths. Supposedly the automakers and Big Oil won’t allow them to come to market because they’d wreck the industry. As if the auto companies really care what happens to the oil companies. The people who tell you this are usually conspiracy mavens who offer it as an example of how the masses are duped by the Illuminati or some other big bad entity. you do have to be skeptical. Right now oil companies are regarded very lowly by the general public with BP screwing up the Gulf and all. With that the conspiracy theorist has a perfect boogie man to use to sell their scams to a gullible public. It’s far easier to blame a faceless daemon than really study the issue with a critical eye. And lets face it, it is a complex technological issue that to understand requires an understanding of things like Thermodynamics and energy conservation. If you do not understand the technical issues than you can be sold the idea that some extraordinary device can take a car that gets 30MPG and by installing it make the same car get 200MPG. AND here is the most ridiculous part…. the conspiracy theorist sell the idea that auto companies would not use this technology simply because the oil companies or the government said not to. Fact is the auto companies are hurting right now and you bet your life GM would use it, if not they know Ford would, and if not Ford, Toyota or Honda. Something like a 200MPG device could never be suppressed, the value would be far to great. Government could not stop it, what are they going to do, take an auto maker to court for making something a majority of the public wants? The reason you do not see such devices is the simple fact ‘They do NOT work”, no one has been able to make it work or demonstrate it is even feasible.
The internal combustion engine does a good job of burning the fuel you put into it, and there is little you can do to the fuel to make that better. It’s just the thermal efficiency of an internal combustion engine is not very good, much of the energy produced is not used to propel the car, it’s lost as heat energy. Just feel the hood of your car or the radiator, all that heat is just being pumped into the air. Things like turbo chargers can take some of that heat and use it to compress the fuel air mixture for more power and improved mileage but it’s small.
Real high mileage is never the result of a single miraculous component, such as a carburetor. Carburetors in general are an obsolete technology now being replaced by computer controlled electronic fuel injection, which offers superior emission control and better gas mileage. Truth is carbs are the equivalent of the buggy whip. Getting high mileage is sum of numerous small improvements. Among these are lightweight materials, small light car require less energy to move, low-friction tires, improved aerodynamics, flywheels to store and reuse energy now lost during braking, and “ultra-lean-burn” engines for more efficient city driving. The theoretical (and unobtainable) maximum efficiency for a small car like a Honda Civic is around 200 mpg for your big beaters it’s much lower. And that won’t come from “blue-collar ingenuity”, some backyard mechanic with a magical carburetor. Claims to the contrary are fraudulent. Want to get 200MPG, you will need a very small car, maybe only two seater, very light with maybe a small turbo charged diesel engine, and, no Carburetor. The reason you don’t see these cars is not because of a giant conspiracy but because the American public won’t buy these cars, they still want SUVs and pick-up trucks.
