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You have to look at the total volume of oil available for recycling my comment on McD and BK was the sort of light-hearted throwaway line that I'm told is the norm on here.

The Armed Forces are commissioning portable waste veg oil recycling plants so that they can use field kitchen waste as fuel.

The forces sensibly went 100% diesel - even Despatch Rider's M/bikes! - recently so that everything they use from Aircraft and tanks to motorcycles and  generators can all use the same fuel.
Diesel/AVTUR is also MUCH safer to store in bulk under combat conditions than any other fuel.

You may have a point about automotive hybrids but the Prius/Insight appear to have done little to advance the cause by failing miserably to live up to the hype and delivering pathetic fuel economy in real world use compared to equivalent diesels. Furthermore the little matter of the environmental problems created in making and disposing of the battery packs has yet to be addressed.

If the last diesel you drove was a Tipo then I will accept your experience is way out of date. I used to own it's Big Brother a Tempra Estate and now own it's descendant a Marea Estate and there is no comparison. The later Mareas/Punto with the common rail JTD engine are yet another vast improvement. I doubt if you would notice any difference whatsoever between comparable petrol and diesel models of the same car these days.

A good example is http://www.alfa147collezione.co.uk/ [nofollow]both version have 120 bhp but the diesel is a second faster from 0-62mph and has a top speed of 120mph (as opposed to 121mph for the petrol version) and approx 30% better fuel economy.

The Alfa is in effect the modern Tipo, same size and uses the modern version of the same diesel engine and trounces it's petrol sibling on all counts bar 1 highly illegal mph.
Shame that the diesel costs about £1000 more, but it does retain that price premium throughout it's life, whist recovering it through fuel savings and reduced company car tax for business users, in a couple of years.

I have the solution to the electric car range and refuelling problem (once the battery making, carrying and disposal problems have been solved) run them on diesel. In fact almost any form of diesel. Fit them with a small generator pack - it only has to supply enough current to meet mean consumption as the peaks can be recharged when the car is running below peak (a lot of the time in traffic). That pack could be powered by a small Gas Turbine such as those used in large model planes, target drones etc. The GT could then happily hum away at it's optimum speed and the waste heat can be utilised to solve the other problem of electric cars - no heater.

[albert]

To suppliment the mcD and BK fuel supply I made a proposal on another site that liposuction clinics should donate their erm... byproducts (which are likely to be have been sourced from mcD and BK) so that the couch potatoes of the future can do their bit for humanity...

Then some boffin replied - raining on my parade...

"Let us not assume free energy, but rather let us assume the entire planet is filled with obese couch potatoes. If 100 pounds of fat could be harvested from each of 6 billion people each year, that is 600 billion pounds or 300 million short tons of fat each year. If we assume human fat has the same energy content as crude oil, and since 1
ton of oil equals about 8 barrels, this is 2.4 billion barrels of oil equivalent (BOE). Since the world currently consumes about 30 billion barrels of crude oil per year, this method will not go far toward eliminating our dependence upon oil."

Ah well - out of the madness a good idea might just turn up!

Albert

[paul.fr]

To suppliment the mcD and BK fuel supply I made a proposal on another site that liposuction clinics should donate their erm... byproducts (which are likely to be have been sourced from mcD and BK) so that the couch potatoes of the future can do their bit for humanity...

The same such idea was in a storyline on Boston Legal last week! are you a script writer on the side?

Paul

[another_someone]

I think there really are two questions that we have to consider, to some extent separately, here.

Firstly, what is the ideal motor for a motor car, and although there is still some way to go for that technology to be fully mature, I think it is valid to say that it is the electric motor.

The separate question is what is the best energy storage system for a motor car.  Is it better to generate electricity away from the vehicle itself, and store the electricity as capacitive or chemical electrical charge onboard the vehicle; or is it better to store a liquid fuel (e.g. petrol or diesel) on board the vehicle, and convert it to electricity in situ.

At present, the latter option seems to be the more energy efficient, although politically, generating pollution in some far remote location, and then shipping the relatively pollution free electricity to the congested cities is more tolerable, even if it is less energy efficient.

Ofcourse, that is true as long as we have relatively cheap and available supplies of oil to use as a liquid fuel.  Once we start having to synthesise liquid fuels because we have run out of mineral sources, then the equation might change (but, despite the doom and gloom merchants, it seems unlikely that we will run out within the 50 to 100 years).

In any event, given the 50 to 100 year leeway we still have, it does give us ways to think of other ways of transporting energy (it is the convenient transportation of energy that is the major problem for vehicle transportation, rather than the availability of energy as such - although the latter is a wider issue but not one particular to motor vehicles).