Oct
25
The Muscle Car Alternative Fuel Man
October 25, 2007 | 6 Comments
He’s Johnathan Goodwin of Wichita Kansas, famous for building the ’65 Chevy Impala running on biodiesel that creamed the Lamborghini in a drag race for the MTV show “Pimp My Ride.”
He just shows what a talented man with a passion can accomplish in America. Starting out he fixed up cars to help his mother with the bills. Now some 24 years later he owns SAE Energy in Wichita, Kansas.
The booster in this is that Goodwin has caught the co-fueling bug and has adopted much of Uli Kruger’s work in co-fueling with hydrogen, LPG, propane etc. Co-fueling is a technique where an engine is fueled by two fuels, singly or together. Mr. Kruger and Mr. Goodwin have both taken the idea to better developed levels.
Mr. Kruger is a principal officer at Alternative Engine Technologies, managing director for Clean Future, and associates with Diesel on Gas International in Australia. These companies are operating in Australia with products for sale.
Here in the US Mr. Goodwin has came into the market from the hot rod and modified car part of the market. His innovations are said to be based on the research of Mr. Kruger who has entering into the diesel modification business for fuel economy and emission reduction. Interesting to note is that one product of Mr. Kruger’s includes a device to power down the engine back to the standard output when the co-fuel is operating.
Mr. Goodwin’s background and experience create products and services that answers customers looking for more power and in some cases greener operations and better fuel economy. The November edition of Fast Company has put Mr. Goodwin on the cover and the article is here:
Fast Company – Johnathan Goodwin.
This article is professionally written, offers lots of entertaining information and leaves lots of the science out.
Which leaves us with the question, is co-fueling offering anything to provide or save fuel and energy? The answer is yes. Co-fueling has been around for decades in various forms and has been used in farm tractors to military equipment. We use it daily all across America when we use ethanol-laced gasoline for two reasons, to substitute imported oil and to use the oxygen attribute of ethanol to reduce emissions and greenhouse gases. Mr. Goodwin is showing us that current offerings in automotive products can be modified with his skills to vastly increase power, fuel economy and decrease emissions. Its not a huge discovery, rather its an incredible show of intelligence and imagination on using the things we have today to get us further for a given unit of fuel.
The Fast Company Article offers some of Mr. Goodwin’s insights and in many important ways he is one of those who “get it.” The lessons he shows are making an impact for the US automotive industry and we can hope they quickly adopt what he’s learned and so graciously offers us all. It should be possible to greatly reduce the size, weight and fuel consumption of current engines with these technologies. Perhaps the day will come that another form of hybrid is available, one that has plug in charged batteries to electrolysis water for the freed hydrogen and oxygen to supplant an engine. The possibilities here to reduce the importation of petroleum are quite substantial. We wish Mr. Goodwin and Mr. Kruger visions of brilliance and a great deal of media attention.
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[…] it worthwhile to revisit what is going on in the custom, do-it-yourself class of EVs and hybrids. We looked at Johnathan Goodwin some weeks back and see the conversion business is looking good at the top end. In the middle market where most of […]
It’s good to hear BP & GM talk about alternative fuels, but 50 years to implement is too long.
http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/05/news/companies/bigoil_hydrogen/index.htm
Perhaps this link will spark more attention:
http://www.chevrolet.com/electriccar/
It is GM’s electric concept car the Chevy Volt. If more people begin to demand alternative fuel cars, we should be able to speed the rate at which the technology is developed.
We have started an Investor Forum where Investors can meet and discuss topics like this:
http://investor-forum.thesubway.com/
SOG knives…
Interesting ideas… I wonder how the Hollywood media would portray this?…
Thank for the great post.
thank you agian
When I see a great post I do one of three thing: 1.Share it with the relevant friends. 2.save it in all my favorite bookmarking websites. 3.Make sure to come back to the same site where I read the article. After reading this post I am really considering going ahead and doing all of the above.
Thanks for an idea, you sparked at thought from a angle I hadn’t given thoguht to yet. Now lets see if I can do something with it.