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The Newsletter of the MGs of Baltimore June 1, 2015

OCTAGRAM

Continued on page 4

Officers &

Committee Chairs

President - Richard Liddick (410) 817-6862 rgl2mgbgt@aol.com

1st Vice Pres. & Regalia- Ken Olszewski

(410) 893-1661 kenmgob@comcast.net

2nd Vice Pres. - Mike Lutz (410) 592-8610 mgtlutz@Verizon.net

Treasurer, Tool Meister, Tech. Sessions

Randy Kegg

(410) 592-3733 Randell_kegg@msn.com

Secretary, Rocks Registrar - Tracy Tro-bridge

(410) 489-7444 tracy21794@yahoo.com

MGs On the Rocks - Jack Long

410-420-1385 JackandLizLong@Comcast.net

Librarian - Barb & Larry Heaps

(410)-452-5349 Lheaps4@gmail.com

Newsletter – Roger Marshall

(410) 747-3586 S10blazer@aol.com

Membership - Kathy McHenry

(410) 817-6862 themgbabe@comcast.net

Webmaster - Richard Liddick

(410) 817-6862 rgl2mgbgt@aol.com

MGs of Baltimore Affiliations North American MGB Register North American

MGA Register, American MGB Association , MG Car Club UK , MG Owner’s Club UK

TIDBITS

Thoroughbred & Classic & cars Facts & Feats The Ultimate Guide

The first electric sunroof appeared

on Cadillacs in 1969.

NEW MEMBER/S

LAST MEETING TECH TALK

Randy and Joe gave a presentation on

LED lamps for the dashboard

MEMBERSHIP Submit address changes or membership applications

to: Submit postal or email address changes to:

Kathy McHenry 5237 Glen Arm Rd E

Octagram is published monthly by the MGs of Balti-more Car Club. Opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of the Club, Club officers or the newslet-ter staff. Technical information is believed to be accurate. However, any repairs or mechanical advice is attempted at the reader’s own risk. The Club, officers, or newsletter staff will not be responsible for any misinterpreted or incor-rect technical information. If in doubt, consult with a certi-fied technician. Articles appearing herein may be used by other automo-bile clubs and organizations in their newsletters and for other informational purposes provided appropriate credit and recognition of the source is given.

Classifieds: Items for sale or wanted may be advertised by MGOB members for free.

CLUB TOOLS AVAILABLE FREE

To members of MGOB. See our web site to see what we

have available. www.mgsofbaltimore.net

Tools are available via Randy Kegg and must be returned

TO Randy, not handed off to another member.

The Original British Car Day (OBCD) 38th Annual Meet

Sunday, June 7, 2015

Lilypons Water Gardens - Adamstown, Maryland

The Chesapeake Chapter of the New England MG “T” Register is

proud to invite you to the 38th meet of The Original British Car Day.

This event is held for the enjoyment of all British car and motorcycle

enthusiasts. This year’s Featured Marque will be the MGA, in honor of

its 60th Anniversary!

The event is held annually from 8:00 AM until 4:00 PM at the beautiful

grounds of Lilypons Water Gardens. Come and enjoy this gathering of

all British marques in one setting and the beauty of the water gardens.

Bring your leashed pet and picnic lunch or partake of the food and

drink offered by various food vendors.

Whether you are displaying your car, or just coming to enjoy the event,

the drive is beautiful no matter which direction you come from.

Lilypons Water Gardens is located in Adamstown, Maryland on

Lilypons Road. It can be accessed easily from the North I-70 or I-270

via Route 85, or from the South via Route 28. Please visit their web

site at HYPERLINK "http://www.lilypons.com/" \t "_blank"

www.lilypons.com for directions and more information about their

establishment.

The contact person for OBCD is John M. Tokar, Chairman, who can be

reached at 410-775-0500, or by email at jtokar51@verizon.net

For more information please visit our website at: HYPERLINK

"http://www.chesapeakechaptermgtclub.com"

www.chesapeakechaptermgtclub.com

We look forward to seeing you on Sunday, June 7, 2015!

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From the InterMarque Monthly newsletter.

Test Drive of a Petrol Car By Tibor Blomhäll, Tesla

Club Sweden REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION. http://teslaclubsweden.se/test-drive-of-a-petrol-

car/

Having heard so much good about petrol cars, we decided to test drive one. They are said to combine cheap price with long range and fast charging. A winning formula on paper—but how are they in real life?

We sat us in the loaner car at the car salesman’s office. Automakers do not sell the cars themselves, only through independent car repair shops as middlemen. It may sound like a bad omen to buy the car from a car repair shop that you want to visit as seldom as possible. But you apparently can’t buy the car directly from the manufacturer but must go through such intermediaries. The seller was very “pushy” and tried to convince us to buy the car very forcibly, but the experience is perhaps better elsewhere.

So we sat in the car and pressed the START button. The car’s gasoline engine coughed to life and started to operate. One could hear the engine’s sound and the car’s whole body vibrated as if something was broken, but the seller assured us that everything was as it should. The car actually has an electric motor and a mi-croscopically small battery, but they are only used to start the petrol engine—the electric motor does not drive the wheels. The petrol engine then uses a tank full of gasoline, a fossil liquid, to propel the car by exploding small drops of it. It is apparently the small explosions that you hear and feel when the engine is run-ning.

The petrol engine consists of literally hundreds of moving parts that must have tolerance of hundredths of a millimeter to function. We begun to understand why it is car repair shops that sell the cars—they might hope for something to break in the car that they can mend?

We put in a gear and drove away with a jerk. The jerk came not from any ex-treme acceleration, but gasoline engines apparently cannot be driven as smoothly as electric motors. The acceleration did not occur at all, because we could not get the car to go faster than 40 km/h! By then the petrol engine literally howled and the whole car shook violently. Convinced that something must have broken we stopped the car. The seller then explained that with petrol engines you need to ”change gears” on a regular basis. Between the engine and the wheels are not a fixed ratio gear, but a variable one.

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The petrol engine can produce power only in a limited speed range, and must therefore be geared with different ratios in order to continue to accelerate. There are 5 different gears we can select with increasing speed as result. It is—as we learned quickly—very important that each time select a suitable gear otherwise the engine will either stop or get seriously damaged! You need a lot of training to learn to select the right gear at the right time—though there are also models with automatic transmissions that can do this themselves. In the manual trans-mission car, we needed to constantly guard the engine from damaging it. Very stressful.

We asked if the constant sound of the engine—that frankly disturbed us from being able to listen to the radio—could be turned off. But it couldn’t. Very dis-tracting.

After getting the car up to speed through intricate changing of gears we ap-proached a traffic light. Releasing the accelerator pedal resulted in no significant braking, we had to use the brake pedal very much to slow down the car. We were surprised to hear the brakes are completely mechanical! The only thing they generate is heat—braking gives no regeneration of gasoline back into the tank! Sounds like a huge waste, but it would soon get even worse.

When we came to a stop the engine continued to run and the car vibrate—even though the car was standing still! The engine continued to burn gasoline without moving the car forward. Can it really be true? Yes, the seller explained, it is so with gasoline cars: the engine is always running and burning gasoline—even when the car is stationary. Some models however switches off the engine at a red light, he explained. Well that certainly makes more sense.

After a while we came to a gas station where we could charge the car. The car claimed that it still had half a tank left, but we wanted to try the famous super-fast charging of petrol cars!

So we drove to the gas station and opened the fuel cap. The filling nozzle is very similar to a charging connector, but it is not electrons that come out of it but gas-oline. Gasoline is a highly carcinogenic, smelly and flammable liquid derived from plants and animals extinct since millions of years ago. The gasoline is pumped to a tank in the car, which then drives around with about 50 liters of this hazardous liquid in it.

We put the nozzle to the car, but nothing happened. The seller then explained that we must pay to fuel! Much like those extremely expensive fast chargers

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some electric utility companies have set up. After we put the credit card in the reader we could start fueling. It was extremely fast! In just two minutes we filled the gas tank to the max! But there were two counters on the pump: one that showed the number of liters we have fueled and one that showed how much it would cost us. And that counter was spinning so fast that we could hardly keep up with its pace! Sure we filled the tank full in two minutes, but it did cost us an

unbelievable 30! A full charge would thus cost us double that—a whopping 60! We cursed our luck that we apparently have chosen one of the most expen-sive gas stations, and began to ask the seller what other alternatives are there? How much does it cost to fill up at home, and how many free stations are there?

The seller looked very puzzled at us and explained that it is not possible to refuel gasoline cars at home, and there are no free gas stations. We tried to explain our questions, in case he had misunderstood, but he insisted that you can not.

Apparently you have to several times a month drive to the gas station to recharge your petrol car at extortionate prices —there are no alternatives! We thought it was very strange that no gasoline car manufacturers have launched their own free gas stations?

There are no gas stations either where you can fill up more slowly at a cheaper price. We started calculating price versus consumption and came to the shocking

conclusion that a petrol car costs unimaginable 12 per 100km! Sure, electric cars could also theoretically come up to these amounts if they quick charged at one of the most expensive charging stations in the country—but for petrol cars there are no cheaper alternatives! While electric cars are comfortably charged at

home every night for 2 per 100km petrol cars must make detours several times a month to fill up at these extortionate rates—without exception! Monthly cost for a petrol car can —just for the gasoline alone—easily exceed one hundred Eu-ros! We begun to understand why they are so cheap to purchase—operating them is extremely expensive instead.

We also begun to understand why there must be so many petrol stations every-where, if all petrol cars always have to drive to them to refuel. Imagine if you could charge your electric car only at the power companies’ most expensive fast chargers—and nowhere else!

With this in mind we ended up in a traffic jam and was horrified that the gasoline engine continued to burn these expensive gasoline drops even when the car was standing still or moving very little. With gasoline vehicles it is easy to run into cost anxiety—the feeling that the car literally burns up your money! No cheap home charging and no regeneration of gasoline back to the fuel tank when brak-

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ing sounds like economic madness—especially given that all gasoline must be imported from abroad.

We returned the car to the dealer’s premises, pulled the handbrake and step out of the car. The petrol engine continued to run! Apparently one must man-ually switch off the combustion of the precious liquid. But we wanted to see the petrol engine, so the seller opened the bonnet. The entire front portion of the car was completely cluttered with hoses, fittings, fluid reservoirs, and amid all a huge shaking cast iron block which apparently constituted the mo-tor’s frame. There was no space for luggage in the front of the car! Despite its enormous size, high noise and vibration, the engine barely delivered one hun-dred horsepower. The engine was also extremely hot, we burned ourselves when we touched it. Even though this was on a warm summer day so the en-gine did not need to generate heat to the passenger compartment.

We became also worried about what would happen if we crashed with a pet-rol car? The cast iron block that occupied most of the engine compartment was sitting in the middle of the collision zone! Where would it go if we col-lided—would we get it in our lap? The salesman assured us that the motor in such case somehow gets folded down under the car but we could not escape the impression that the engine block was very much in the way at the front—the safety beams were built around it, which surely impairs their functionali-ty. Avoiding that one hundred kilo iron lump in the front of the car makes it so much easier to build safe cars. In addition, we have seen on the Internet hundreds of pictures and videos of burning gasoline cars. The petrol tank ap-parently often leaks after an accident so the flammable liquid pours out and becomes ignited!

From the engine, under the car runs an exhaust system—a kind of chimney for engine exhausts. When you burn the carcinogenic gasoline a lots of nox-ious gases are produced.

The car cleans away the most dangerous gases, but what remains is released into the open air behind the car. It is still unhealthy to breathe in—and smells very bad! And petrol cars are allowed to emit these harmful gases in the mid-dle of our cities? Do not confuse petrol cars’ exhaust pipes with fuel cell cars’—while hydrogen powered fuel cell vehicles emit only water vapor gas-oline cars spew out noxious gasses, and even fossil carbon dioxide that con-tribute to Earth’s future-catastrophic warming!

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We thanked the seller for the display, shook our heads and gave back the ig-nition key (yes, it’s called that) to him. He realized that there would be no business for him so except for one lame attempt he did not try to sell us the car any more.

On the way home in our electric car we looked with completely different eyes at our poor fellow commuters, who still had to put up with their gasoline cars. But soon it will be their turn to trade up, too!

MGOB Calendar

June

2nd MGOB Meeting

7th Original British Car Day

See flier in this issue

July

7th MGOB Meeting

12th British Invade Gettysburg 9—1

The Outlet Shoppes at Gettysburgh

Remember, many of us meet for dinner at 6:30 at

Pappa’s Restaurant on Taylor Ave.before the meet-

ing which is held upstairs.