That thing is absolutely screaming for an engine swap from an RC51.

"For the last time, I'm not gay. Look, Spade took the last manual one and the automatic was all they had left. I'm Not Gay."

The chevy small block is the corn syrup of the automotive world: Cheap, powerful, and they put that shit in everything.

Take this half-assed solution and shove it. I want full ultrasonic 6th-sense daredevil-style brain implants for blind people, and I'm going to keep stabbing out peoples' eyes till our lazy-ass scientists are ready to play ball.

@ein242: More efficient than an automatic with a torque converter since a clutch slips less, more efficient than a 6-speed manual because you have an extra seventh cog that lets you put a taller gear in the top slot and/or have closer gear ratios in the other slots, which keeps the engine in a more efficient rpm range…

@brownie: True, true. And the RS4 is a priapism on four wheels. But I do love the (finally) move towards smaller and lighter.

That clip is completely out of context, the full clip has him waxing poetically about the sting of methanol fumes, the taste of dirt and Budweiser, and the red-blooded joy of admiring another man's mullet in a non-ironic way.

Let's hope they get the formula of this one right. The original S4 with the Twin Turbo 2.7L V6 was a great car. The current S4 with the 4.2L is not nearly as interesting. Hopefully a return to forced induction will be accompanied by a sportier chassis setup as well to give the car some of it's character back.

@brandegee: Sorry, right, the Azera.

Yeah, but he really did a lot for Hyundai, it would be like ousting Steve Jobs from Apple if he was convicted of the stock options backdating. I mean, sure what he did was illegal, but as a shareholder, how can you argue with the results?

@AndyDuncan: And eventually you'll be able to run those tractors on biodiesel or e85, and the equipment will run on solar energy. It's a bootstrapping process at first, but as long as it's significantly energy-positive, that's ok.

@Shadowfire: Well, that's where the energy calculations come in. With corn/grain ethanol you're at 1:1 to 1:1.3, where you're using an equivalent amount of petroleum energy to produce bio-fuel energy. For things like switchgrass you're (theoretically) using one unit of petroleum energy to produce 3-6 units of bio-fuel…

@marsneedsrabbits: Yeah, again it's highly vehicle-dependent, and a for a flex-fuel vehicle to be optimized for gas AND ethanol efficiency would require something like a variable-compression ratio system.

@Shadowfire: At least with biodiesel, the byproducts tend to be cleaner than petro-diesel. Ethanol, theoretically, should be much cleaner burning than gasoline, even at atmospheric pressure it burns remarkably clean. They aren't truly clean though, you still have particulate matter and NOX problems with biodiesel.…

@Mad_Science: Actually the main reason detroit has been willing to produce flex-fuel vehicles is that the current CAFE math is screwy for flex-fuel vehicles, from Car and Driver:

@Shadowfire: Which counts? I made a bunch. Cellulosic ethanol can be made from waste material but it doesn't have to be - you can grow crops (like switchgrass) that are very energy-positive (on the order of 300-600% depending on the study you believe, versus about 100-130% for corn). The sustainability of cellulosic…

@AndyDuncan: Better: [en.wikipedia.org]

Here's a table comparing large cup-sizes across brands/countries:

@tgpt: we absolutely do need an improved power transmission infrastructure, but more to enable the use of unreliable renewables like wind and solar. Plug-ins, since they would typically be charged at night when demand is low and capacity is in excess, wouldn't put much of a strain on the grid at all. There was a study…

If we had ethanol-only motors we could run them at a higher compression ratio which would increase efficiency and mitigate the reduced energy density issue. But E-85 needs to become much more widely available for that to be feasible.