I got up early this morning since my body is on daylight savings time and we fell back an hour last night. Turned on CNN and they were doing a story on No Gas and alternative fuels. They were showing Brazil and how they are using sugar as an alternative ethanol based fuel - they showed several pictures of busy highways (USA) and I saw a Nighthawk Black Fit - they talked about the USA and its passion for the larger gas drinking vehicles. How much the USA could save if everyone downsized to more fuel efficent cars - the part I viewd did not talk about the Fit/Jazz but you could see them in pictures taken from around the world where most countries have realized that smaller is better. They said to switch over to sugar ethanol based fuels was the matter of a sensor. Now Brazil is pretty much independent from foreign oil to keep its country running. Thought it was pretty interesting and they did talk about the Toyota Prius.

 

that's pretty cool actually. sugar based eh?

prius' is a dumb car anyways.

 

Yeah, hybrids are stoooopid. I wouldn't want a spacious partial zero emission vehicle with push start, smart key and get 48MPG in the city. That's just plain dumb

Since I think this thread is about spotting the Fit in the media.....so here is a video segment on the new Fit at the Tokyo Car Show by Edmunds and Cars.com giving the current fit a spot on the top 10 best urban vehicles.

YouTube - Honda Fit 2008 edmunds review tokyo auto show
YouTube - Top 10 Urban Cars

[Seinfeld] What is up with people using the word "review" to describe an overview segment/press release on the fit [/Seinfeld]

 

Cool, nice find!

Sugar fuel?? Thats pretty cool!

 

indeed.. since ethanol has an octane rating of around 105 to 110, run tons of boost with turbo or high compression ratio..

lots of folks poo-poo ethanol. they dont know about its potential as a hot rod fuel..

downside is the energy content of ethanol is 75 percent of a gallon of gas. so it takes more fuel to get from a to b and your range on a tank of fuel is decreased..

to run it you need bigger injectors probably and a ecu with flexible mapping to adjust as you move from ethanol to gas and back. such a setup with a turbo with controlled boost would be ideal. you could probably run around 15 to 20 lbs of boost on pure ethanol with a cr of around 10:1 in a small fit type motor.

 

Funny. I was just chatting with a friend in UK and I told her I just got a Honda Jazz and she told me that it was a BIG car!

I'm like, "Not over here it ain't."

 

Ethanol from sugar cane (and other plants) has been around for a LONG time. Biodiesel from plants is newer. Both are feasable to augment oil (the dinosaur kind), but not replace it. There isn't enough land on the planet to grow enough biofuel to replace petrol. We've already seen corn (and other plants, and the animals that we feed on it...chicken,pork and beef) prices skyrocket in the last year.
Hybrids are great... it's just recapturing energy that was created by the engine but would have been lost otherwise. Where I do have a gripe with hybrids is that, increasingly, manufacturers are building very big, very powerfull hybrids that get better mileage than the conventional equivalent, but not nearly what it could have done if they had build something a little more practical. This may be the only time I ever say this, but GM has definately got it right with their electric drive hybrid design that looks like it will most likely go into production, as opposed to the mechanical drive hybrids that everyone else is building.
At the end of the day, the ONLY solution is driving smaller, lighter, less powerfull vehicles, and driving a lot less. Anything else is pie in the sky BS.

 

This sounds great!
I'm going to put some sugar in my gas tank right now!!!