Mini Fleet

My Franken-MINI obsession is well documented (part I, II, III, IV, V). It all started when I got the idea, "Hey, what if I got an old MINI Cooper and put a sweet Honda engine in it?" Then after digging around on the internet I found that several other people got this idea long before I did and that there are actually a few companies that specialize in doing just that. They put one of Honda's more potent four-cylinder engines in the diminutive MINI and turn it into a real road-ripping monster. I want one.

But then I got to thinking that the high-performance potent version is just one possible type of FrankenMINI. I found a company that is developing a retro-fit hybrid system; essentially an electric motor that replaces the alternator. This system combined with any of Honda's many powerful, innovative, and efficient four-cylinder engines could theoretically be installed into the diminutive MINI to make for some real clean, green, lean, mean, machines. So in addition to the balls-out fast version, I will also need these other versions:

• Biodiesel Hybrid - Diesel engines are not very popular here in the States because they are seen as noisy, dirty, and stinky. That's too bad because diesel engines are quite a bit more efficient than their gasoline counterparts, producing significantly less CO2 per distance. When fueled with biodiesel, which is produced from crops rather than fossil fuels, the CO2 emissions are virtually erased because the crops grown to produce the fuel re-absorb that CO2 from the atmosphere through osmosis. Pretty much any diesel engine can burn biodiesel, and just as easily switch back to regular diesel. I could even convert it to run on straight waste vegetable oil from restaurant fryers. I thought that the only way I could make a biodiesel MINI would be to use Volkswagen's ubiquitous 2.0 liter turbo-diesel engine found in the Golf and Jetta, but this would have been difficult because the MINIs are designed to take Honda 4-cylinder engines, not VW ones. But then I discovered that Honda actually produces and sells a 4-cylinder diesel Civic in the UK. After reading as much as I could about it, it sounds like quite a marvelous little engine. Although diesel engines are more efficient, they have (until recently) produced a lot more nitrous oxide than gasoline engines. Honda has developed an emissions control system for this engine that reduces Nitrous Oxide emissions down to stringent new European standards. It sounds like it's also a pretty smooth and quiet little machine. In the UK Civic, which weighs almost twice as much as the MINI that I would put it in, it gets about 54 miles-per-gallon. Putting it in the much smaller car and adding the hybrid system, 60 or maybe even 70 mpg don't seem too far out of reach. And with over 250 lb/ft of torque, this little monster would still have plenty of scoot. This car would be difficult to build though because as far as I can tell, this particular engine is only sold in the UK, and has only been on sale for about a year, so finding a used engine (like from a wrecked car) would be difficult. Even if I did find one, this engine has not been approved by the EPA for sale in the USA, so I don't know if it would even be possible to import it here. I read somewhere that rumor has it Honda is planning to sell cars with this engine in the US starting in 2009 though, so maybe in a few years this will be a more feasible option.

• Natural Gas Hybrid - Honda sells a natural gas version of the Civic in California and New York (Civic GX). Natural gas is about as efficient as regular gasoline, but burns cleaner, emitting fewer greenhouse gases. I could also attach the retrofit hybrid system to this. In the civic, this natural gas engine returns the equivalent of about 39 mpg on the highway. This would also be a relatively difficult engine to find just because of its limited sales area and volume. Another challenge would be finding natural gas for it, but I could buy one of these nifty appliances which fills your cars tank using the natural gas supplied to your home. Because of the refueling difficulty, this car wouldn't be able to stray very far from home. This drivetrain doesn't make a lot of power either, but it would be a lot cleaner and more efficient than the balls-out fast one, and in the tiny mini, even the meager power would probably be plenty.

• Gasoline Hybrid - Honda also makes a four-cylinder gasoline hybrid Civic and Insight. At first I didn't even bother looking into this option because I thought it would be way too complex and convoluted to be installed in the MINI. But after doing some more research, it seems that Honda's hybrid system is much simpler than that of the Toyota Prius. So much simpler, in fact, that I think it would actually be entirely possible to just take the engine right out of a hybrid Civic and put it in the MINI. In the Civic, this drivetrain gets about 45 mpg. I would probably try to find a way to convert the engine to run on Ethanol blend fuels like E85. If I already had a biodiesel hybrid, however, that got better fuel economy, had more power, and emitted fewer greenhouse gases, then I would probably never want to drive this gasoline hybrid anyway.

• Plug-in Battery Electric - This one would have no engine at all, just batteries and electric motors. According to Wikipedia (a.k.a. the disinformation dissemination machine) battery electric vehicles are much more efficient and cleaner than gasoline vehicles. Like the natural gas car, though, this one would also have a limited driving range.

So it looks like I would need 5 MINIs then. If I had to settle for just two though, I would have to go with the potent fast one and the biodiesel hybrid. Hydrogen cars have been getting a lot of press and attention lately, but hydrogen is still a pipe-dream with no infrastructure, and it still takes fossil fuels to produce it. So I think that biodiesel is really the best thing we have going for us and it's unfortunate that it doesn't enjoy more widespread support. In fact, it is interesting that the original diesel engine actually ran on biodiesel, not "dino diesel." While the biodiesel is my favorite, these other ones aren't too bad either, and so I want all 5 of them, preferably in 5 different colors.

I can't find any relevant videos, so I'm just putting up another Muse video because they are still awesome. This one is apparently called New Born.

Calling All Units

Tonight, for the first time in my short career as a bus driver, I had to call the cops to take some people off of my bus. I've been lucky to have almost zero passenger-related problems that required police assistance. Really tonight wasn't even that bad. On Wednesday nights I drive the last bus home for a bunch of people who are out in West Vail at the Sandbar for White Trash Wednesdays. It tends to be a pretty rowdy bunch at 2:00 AM, but luckily most of them get off the bus after only a few stops. The rest of them usually ride all the way back to the transportation center where I leave to do the last run of a different route. I don't mind when they are all rowdy and rambunctious for the few stops from the bar to where most of them get off, but tonight the really rowdy ones stayed on. I tried turning the lights back on to quiet them down, but it didn't work. I tried asking them to turn it down a notch because they were really distracting me, but it didn't work. They started getting belligerent and I asked more firmly for them to be quiet. They were very rude and instead got louder. I threatened to kick them off the bus which seemed to help a little. By this time I had already left for the last run and so I figured they weren't much more than a few minutes away from home. I mean I usually have obnoxious drunks on this last run, it's no big deal, just that these guys were ruder than usual. But then from what they started saying to each other, I got the vibe that maybe they were on the wrong bus and would possibly not be getting off the bus at the last stop. Great, here I was faced with the possibility of arriving at my last stop and having three drunk lost jerks. So I decided to call for some police backup. It turned out my hunch was right. When everyone else got off two stops before the end and it was just them left, they asked me about the stop that they were looking for, which wasn't anywhere near where we were or where we were going. At this point one of them knew that I had called the cops and they suddenly became much more quiet. I arrived at the last stop before the cops did and it was pretty uncomfortable just sitting there with these three jerks waiting for the cops to come deal with them. They kept offering to pay me cash to take them to their destination (some 5 miles away in the wrong direction). I was pretty irked and not very polite with them and I told them there was no way that I would do that, especially not after they were such jerks earlier. I also told them that this wasn't a taxi and that it's not my fault they didn't get on the right bus. I had no sympathy for them whatsoever. Heck, it wasn't even very cold out, I told them they could just walk home from there for all I cared.

When the cops came they just took them off the bus, asked what was going on and I told them that the three guys were being rude and that they need to get a cab to where they were going. That was it, and then I was free to drive back to the barn and finish my shift. It wasn't really a huge deal, but I'm really glad the cops were around and got there so quickly to deal with them so I could get back to the barn and finish my shift.

This reminded me of another police/bus incident a few weeks ago. I was not really involved in this incident, but I wish I had been. The dispatch guy comes on the radio addressing all of the bus drivers asking us to keep an eye out for the Sandbar Bus which had allegedly been stolen from the parking lot. Unfortunately I was on the Intown route at the time which is nowhere near the Sandbar, so I knew that my chances of spotting the joyriders was slim. I started thinking about kicking all of my passengers off the bus and leaving the route to go drive around Vail like a vigilante in my bus looking for the stolen Sandbar Bus. I imagined how it must feel to be the lucky bus driver who spots the target and calls in its coordinates to dispatch, saving the day and watching the Vail Police swoop in for the arrest, sirens blazing. In the end I think it was Ed driving the West Vail route who spotted the bus and called it in, but I'm not sure because I was busy answering some dumb tourist question when he came on the radio and I only caught the tail end of it. That darn Ed, he has all the fun. Every week I hope for more drama like that. Hopefully some week I will actually get to play a central role in some unfolding drama.

Sometimes when I see a near-accident or a close-call, I think to myself, "dang, I wish they had actually hit each other so I could call it in to dispatch." I would be like the star witness. Surely the cops would lend more credibility to my version of the events; after all I am practically a professional driver. Anyway, I'll keep hoping that I eventually see some carnage or something. Nothing too bloody, but just a nice little accident that does some decent damage would be nice.

The other day a woman almost got hit by a car after she got off my bus. She was talking on her cell phone and crossed in front of the bus and didn't look to see the car coming from behind on the side of the bus. I don't really want any carnage like THAT.

That's really the extent of the excitement I've had in this job; lots of close-calls, near-misses, missed opportunities, and a few drunk jerks. I think chances are pretty good that I'll get some real excitement before the season is over though. Keep your fingers crossed.

For today's YouTube video, Message In A Bottle by The Police seemed appropriate. This song was released in 1979 according to Wikipedia. That's practically the 1980s, and I generally dislike most things that came out of the 1980s, but I actually really like this song, still.

Centenarity

I saw this little blurb in the Denver Post a few weeks ago about how the first-born children of young mothers are much more likely to live past 100 years old. Being the first-born increased the probability of becoming a centenarian by 1.7 times, while being the child of a young mother (Less than 25) means you are twice as likely to live to 100. I fall into both of those categories, so I guess I should be planning a big birthday bash for 2084 (You are all invited).

Then, last week, I watched a show on the Discovery channel about what life is supposed to be like in 2057. They made it sound like medical advances will make it possible to live much longer by then. The host said something about living to be 200. What if I end up living way past 100? 120? 140? Maybe in 2084 being 100 will be more like being 80 today; certainly old, but there's still the possibility of a squeezing out few more years...

I'm not sure how I feel about this news. Old age doesn't really seem that appealing to me, so I don't know why I should be excited about having more of it. It just sounds like more years of bad knees, weak hips, expensive medicine, senility, and boring old-man cars.

But then I guess that just because I AM old doesn't mean I have to ACT old. Maybe I could still be doing fun and interesting things well into my 100s. I would want to be the kind of guy who still rides his bike on the weekends when he's 88 years old. I want to be the kind of guy who still travels around the world into his 90s. I want to be the 98 year old ripping up the bumps at Vail. I want to be the 100 year old guy who goes to race-driving school for his birthday.

I wonder how many languages I could learn by my 100th birthday. If my goal is to learn 10 by 50, then learning 20 or even 25 by my 100th shouldn't be too much of a reach. The hard part would be picking which languages to study because the first 10 are easy to pick because 10 covers almost all of the world's major languages, so beyond 10 would be smaller, less important languages and dialects like, Romanian, Dutch, Cantonese, Greek, etc.

Yeah, that's the kind of 100-year old I want to be; a biking, skiing, traveling, speeding, 100-year old that can say crazy/offensive things in 20 languages.

According to an article I saw in BBC awhile ago, to reach my full centenarian potential, I need to follow the advice of some of Cuba's many centenarians. The study found that many Cuban centenarians attribute their long life to plenty of coffee, cigars, and sex.

The little blurb also talks about how obesity contributes to global warming, but that's a topic for another day.

Speaking of cool old Cubans, today's video is Chan Chan by the Buena Vista Social Club.