Wasn't it Frank Scrooby who wrote:
>A colleague of mine has bought an amazing hydrogen-making device that is
>supposed to improve the fuel economy of his vehicle's petrol burning
engine.
One significant insight into systems like this is that the guys that
design petrol engines have to make a compromise between several design
objectives, such as torque, power, fuel efficiency, low emissions and
manufacturing cost. It's not too difficult to design add on devices or
modifications which will improve one or two of these objectives at the
expense of the others.
If you can't manage to buy a car which has been designed with the
compromise that you want, it can make sense to bolt on extra widgetry
to, say, improve fuel efficiency at the cost of reducing the performance
of the car. The guys that originally designed the engine reckoned that
the car wouldn't sell so well with the lower speed and acceleration
figures that would be obtained from a more fuel efficient design.
Similarly, you can buy things like high performance engine control chips
which make the car go faster but make it less fuel efficient. What you
almost certainly can't do is beat the engine designers in all directions
at once.
--
Mike Williams
Gentleman of Leisure
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