[gonrod]

En français, le mot pour le "Lemon" est le "Citron".

Citroën – named after André-Gustave Citroën (1878-1935), a French entrepreneur of Dutch descent. He was the fifth and last child of the Dutch Jewish diamond merchant Levie Citroen and Mazra Kleinmann (of Warsaw, Poland). The Citroen family moved to Paris from Amsterdam in 1873 where the name changed to Citroën.


As for why I drive a Citroen?

Well, unlike many drivers who buy first and rationalise an excuse later, I sat down and spent a couple of weeks researching exactly what car would best suit my purposes. I live in Brightin, where parking is a nightmare, and regulary have to attend auctions, and the cars are usually wedged in three or four deep, with no room for manuever. Citroën AX is a good foot narrower than most cars, and is built like a mini-estate too. (It's amazing how much stuff you can get in the back with the seat down!)

When the engine is nice and clean, and has been (properly run in which mine has!) you get 50Mpg urban, and more on long-haul journeys. (Over 250 miles per stint) Ok at 60Mph, but as I said in my earlierr post, I have found that the difference between a steady 55Mph, and 85Mph in terms of journey time is minimal on UK motorways. A few minutes at most. Also the engines start first time, always, (Provided you have an injected model!) and with the all alloy engines are lightweight, and very nippy in towns and great for country roads too.

Not to forget they are corrosion proofed at the factory, and if mine is typical this is very well done, not showing any significant corrosion at all, despite spending 90% of it's 16 years at the seaside!

Downsides.

OK the trim is basic, and a bit flimsy but to be honest, that's not high on my list of priorities. The bodywork is also a bit on the lightweight side, and bumpers are prone to fall off under impact. (But cable ties will hold a loose bumper very reliably!) A plus on the weight side is that if yiu get "sideswiped" the car tends to get out of the way rather than crumple. Someone did this to me not so long back, and despite ruining a perfectly good rim, (and knocking both bumpers off!) the car survived virtually unmarked. (And the bloke drove off, without giving details. The police tell me that the owner claims his mate was driving, of course his mate deny's this. Not that it will matter to the insurance companies!)

Engine wise, mine's got the 1125cc wet-liner single point injector. These have a tendency to leaky head gaskets, especially if you try and run the thing on cheap supermarket petrol and let it get badly coked. On the other hand, you get lots of warning, and you don't end-up with a sump-full of mayonnaise, which does the engine bearings no good whatever. So an extra 1p a liter is worth the extra just to avoid the hassle.

(If you need to get the cylinder head gasket replaced it's easy enough to do yourself, and better. The garage will set you back about £400 and will not do anything other than just replace the gasket. (and probably skim the head.) Doing it yourself, will cost about £150, including most of the tools you will need, a full top-end gasket kit (including new valve-stem seals), the price of a "dressing skim" (About a thou, just to remove any pitting due to corrosion cause by exhaust getting into to coolant. £25 cash at your local motor engineers), and you can give it a good de-coke so that the engine will perform better, and reduce the risk of a repeat performance in the next three or four years. Tip...Make sure the gasket has separate fire rings. The cylinder liners are not always exactly the same hieght, and liners with a continuous fire-ring don't have as much "give" in them and so tend not to seat as well.)

Other than that, its cheap to run, just make sure you use the right coolants, change the oil regularly (I use a fully synthetic. More expensive but the car loves it!), and lay of the cheap liqour and you should be fine. If you develop a bad pink, expect gasket failure in the next year or so. Mine does not pink at all since de-coking!

And, it cost £350 to buy, with a new MOT, and road tax almost two years ago. After selling the totally excessive in car sound system, I reckon that I actually paid about £110 for it.

On the subject of running a car on Hydrogen.

I didn't say you couldn't. Hydrogen makes an excellent fuel, but...

First, you have fuel storage prolems. Hydrogen needs to be under considerable pressure in order to get enough into a reasonably small tank. So a heavy tank is required, and you would not want it to rupture in an accident!

Second, we have no idea what the result of hydrogen 'spillage' will do to the atmosphere, and if every car in the world were running on it, the amount of inevitable spillage would be considerable. Don't forget we thought CFC's were completely inert, and therefore totally safe until the ozone layer developed a big hole. We know that hydrogen is not inert. We should be cautious before jumping on the hydrogen waggon.

(Ok, it produces no carbon dioxide at the tailpipe, which is the green bogeyman gas. But if we burn fossil-fuels to make the hydrogen then all we ar doing is moving the carbon dioxide release to a different place. More efficient turbines can burn less fossil fuel for the sme power output, but then as I said before, we cripple this by then using it to produce a hydrogen, which is then inefficiently burned in a car engine. So we introduce an extra loss at the hydrogen plant, and use more energy for the same number of miles travelled!)


Third, it is not cheaper than pertol. Certianly you can build a hydrogen electrolysis plant at home, but that won't get you cheap motoring.

Lets do a quick calculation.

If we assume your hydrogen generator will use all of it's input energy into separating the oxygen and hydrogen. (It will not but let's just assume it does.) Then each Kwh will produce enough hydrogen to provide one Killowatt of power for one hour. Your average small car running in it's most efficient mode (55Mph continuous speed.) will run at around 45Kw. So after 55 miles you will have used 45Kwh of energy.


We can equate that to energy cost by looking at our electricity bill. My last bill shows I paid 11.78p (cheap rate) for each Kwh. So that equates to 11.78 x 45 = 530p or £5.30 . Petrol is costing me £1.11 per liter, and so I get 4.78 litres for that amount of money. A UK gallon is 4.454 liters so that's 1.07 gallons.

Now in my car, that get's me something close to 75 miles under the same driving conditions. So I get 75-55= 20 miles more out of my petrol, than by electrolysing water to get the hysdrogen. And that's if I'm running with a 100% conversion factor from electricity to hydrogen.

Ok, so I get a more Mpg out of my car than most. But that does not mean a thing. If you have a car which gets fewer Mpg, then you will burn more hydrogen per mile too. I just used my car as an example.

Of course, if the price of electricity came down to arounf 8p pew Kwh you could argue that there was a break even point, but again I stress, that this calculation assumes 100% conversion efficiency. In reality the best you can expect is 50%. Even the latest experimental conversion equiment can only achieve about 80% at ver low yields, and not practical for generating the amount required for runing a car on a daily basis.

Also, the hydrogen has to be comressed, or liquified before you can cram enough into the tank for any practical use. Compression requires power, and so does cooling.

Ok, if you live somewhere cold, the waste heat produced by these processes could be used to heat your home, or provide hot water, but I'm willing to bet few people are going to go that far, and of course not many people live in places cold enough for that to be practical all year round!

So allowing for a real practical converson efficiency, that £5.30 is more like £10.60and you are only getting 55 miles from that, and that's in my car runing under ideal conditions. If a large SUV gets say, 25Mpg under the same condiditons, then you can multilpy that by a factor of three.

The fact is that fossil fuels are really dirt cheap, and have historically seemed plentiful. Governments worldwide all realise that in reality the available reserves of oli and gas are limited (whatever they say) and realise that one day pretty soon they are going to run out. When I say run out I mean literally run out. No amount of technology is going to be able to extract oil that is not there.

Before that however, what oil remains is going to cost more and more to get out of the ground, and relying on simple free market economics to take care of the problem will not work. That's because free markets do not generate investment until after the prices have increased naturally. That's not fast enough, and has the obvious problem that before anything happens, we won't be able to afford it in any case. (So a strong risk of total energy market collapse, etc.) So not good.

So getting people to think now about the cost of energy before we end up in a lose-lose situation, I think is a sensible approach. Artificially increasing the cost of petrol to a point where unit for unit the various forms of energy delivery cost roughly the same, is one way of ensuring that what people concentrate effort on is improvements in efficiency, or 'free' energy tecnologies. (Such as solar or wind generation.) This is dome by taxation.

Don't let yourself be fooled by the notion of the greedy tax-man either. Governments well know that you can only extract so much tax, and realise the importance of transport in any economy. So you should rather think about why the tax on petrol is so high in terms of what they are trying to convince us to do, rather than in terms of lining the chancellors pocket.

(And no I don't like paying taxes either, or necesarily agree with all the ways it is spend. I don't expect other people to agree with some of the things I think tax money should be spent on either. It's called civilised society!)

It is interesting to note that many of the people who really seriously try and say there is plenty of oil to last the human race, are christian fundamentalists who also beleive that the apocalypse is just around the corner. By their calculations there is just enough oil to last until judjement day, probably calculated as sometime around 3Pm next Wednesday!