

2012 VW Passat
2012 Passat TDI will be rated at 31 city, 43 highway








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RE: hybrid?
By zzatz on 6/15/2011 12:59:05 PM , Rating: 4
You'd get an expensive car that got good mileage.

Gasoline engines are cheap to make, but cost more to run. Diesels cost more to make, but cost less to run. Turbocharging adds to the initial cost, but the same power from a smaller, lighter engine reduces operating costs. The same is true for hybrids; more expensive to build, cheaper to operate.

Diesel + direct injection + turbo + hybrid equals an expensive way to make power with a fairly modest improvement in fuel economy. Some of those costs may come down as they are more widely used, but the costs are higher than the benefits today.

We're all tech-heads here, so it's easy to get tunnel-vision and focus only on the technology. But the reason that Diesels are more popular in Europe than in the US isn't technology, it has to do with fuel prices and taxes. The reason that Europe favored small, high revving engines in the past, and the US favored large pushrod engines, is that European countries usually tax cars by displacement, and the US doesn't. Large, slow engines are cheaper and more fuel efficient, but taxes overcome the difference.

We rarely use the best possible technology. We use technology that's good enough but meets the non-technical needs - social, political, economic, whatever. UNIX didn't become the first OS available on hardware from different vendors because it was the best software, it was because it had a better license. And that wasn't a technical choice, it was because AT&T settled anti-trust charges by agreeing to stay out of the computer business, and thus made UNIX available to everyone else. The key point in Microsoft's history isn't that they wrote better code, it isn't that they licensed DOS to IBM, it's that the IBM contract allowed MS to license DOS to others. I'll note that when AT&T was broken up, that allowed them to enter the computer business, and they bombed. They threw away their advantage, the common platform among multiple hardware vendors, by releasing incompatible versions under more restrictive licenses.

RE: hybrid?
Great reply, thank you.





RE: hybrid?
config t
int g5/1
switchpport mode access
switchport mode access vlan 50
switchport voice vlan 60

write mem

RE: hybrid?

