A century of hair samples proves leaded gas ban worked | Hacker News Reader

A century of hair samples proves leaded gas ban worked

arstechnica.com

115 pointsjnord24 comments

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46865275

I can’t wait until some bored rich dude funds a trad-gas influencer campaign.

“With universal income, most people simply don’t need surplus IQ. But we waste billions on repair of engines suffering with substandard gas”

We already have trad-gas.

It's called ethanol-free and people gladly pay a premium for it.

It's far better for your engine, it's what the car manufacturers use to determine the gas mileage, and Californians can only dream of having it.

Ethanol free fuel in an engine designed for ethanol blend can result in incomplete combustion, leaving deposits in fuel injectors and valves. The car companies don’t care about this for the purposes of determining gas mileage.

Californians I think still remember the smog of the 90s in LA that kicked us to make our air pollution standards the highest in the nation. Going away from that I think sounds more like a nightmare than a dream for most Californians.

Sorry but this is complete horseshit. Ethanol is corrosive to engine and fuel system components. It is also hygroscopic and will suck water in which is bad news for your fuel system. The less the better. There is a reason modern cars will tolerate up to 15%. With modern DI engines you are getting buildup no matter what and it is completely unrelated to the presence of ethanol in the fuel. Ask any BMW owner and the fuckin' spa treatments they need to take their engines to.

Flex-fuel vehicles run on E85 are required to run a tank of regular gas every few months per the manufacturer. Which is literally the opposite of what you are suggesting.

I grew up in Brazil, where we had a very successful program for cars running on ethanol fuel with a little gasoline added. It was common to have certain models of car be offered as gasoline or ethanol (back then engines needed to be tuned for one) powered.

At least one car magazine would buy retail cars and fully disassemble them for analysis a year later. The difference between a gas and an ethanol engine was quite shocking - the ethanol engine was always clean and displayed less wear than the gas version of the same engine. Part measurement indicated no significant difference in wear between the engines. There were models only offered with ethanol engines because they offered a little more power because of higher compression rate.

Most of the ethanol stuff about cars isn’t really true anymore.

The place where ethanol sucks is yard equipment where gas sits and pulls in water.

>Ethanol is corrosive to engine and fuel system components.

Caca del toro.

Who needs imaginary horseshit when you can be spreading bull?

The Ethanol on my home planet consists of Ethyl Alcohol. In the chemical, beverage, and fuel world, pure Ethanol is a non-corrosive flammable solvent. More caution is always recommended to those who are least familiar with its properties.

>It is also hygroscopic and will suck water in which is bad news for your fuel system.

Sorry to deliver even worse news, Ethanol is not nearly as hygroscopic as you have been hoping for. A hygroscopic chemicals go, it hardly even qualifies. I can assure you that the water causing your fuel system such anguish did not come out of thin air because of fuel grade alcohol. Not any faster than it would if your fuel were plain conventional hydrocarbons under the same weathering conditions.

That’s different. My newish snowblower has to meet California standards to avoid smog in Los Angeles. It’s super sensitive to any gas issues and basically needs a carb cleaning annually.

My previous machine ran for about twenty years with normal ethanol mix.

Putting it in almost any car made this century is just wasting money.

As someone who remembers the smog that we used to have here in Southern California, I don't mind leaving the trad-gas in my dreams if I can keep the massively improved air quality in my reality.

This is a myth. While tailpipe emissions are lower, evaporative emissions are higher. At best it's a draw.

You're seeing less smog because people are driving modern cars with modern emission systems because we live in the future, smog-producing vehicles have been taken out of service, and drawing conclusions based on mere correlation of the two. It has nothing to do with ethanol.

Sounds like someone who’s been fed a line and has believed it.

A) why do you think car companies started to need to develop more modern emission systems to begin with? That’s right - California, a huge car market, started creating and enforcing standards through the introduction of CARB. Prior to this car companies had no incentives and weren’t doing this

B) there’s more to smog than just cars. CARB tackled emissions across multiple industries.

C) average cars last too long. The reason cars modernized was because CARB made owning and operating older vehicles impractical/impossible.

D) population and vehicle miles driven kept growing so per unit emissions need to shrink faster than that growth and it did. Thanks to CARB.

Is ethanol the primary reason we don’t have smog now? No, but the problem was so bad that CARB took a comprehensive approach at tackling the problem on many angles. And importantly they succeeded. It’s quite a silly position to take that “this problem would have solved itself”. It’s the twin to the fatalism position of “this problem is too big and complicated to solve”

>evaporative emissions are higher.

Well, if you put the gasoline in an open bucket there are some blends that have a fraction which would evaporate faster because of the alcohol content.

This was some of the low-hanging fruit that was addressed when ventilated fuel tanks were deprecated, even while leaded gas had not been replaced. You should have seen the amounts of liquid butane that used to be blended before evaporative emissions were regulated.

The problem was, tailpipe emissions only come out when the engine is running, but evaporative emissions from vented fuel tanks were constant 24/7.

With the arrival of non-ventilated fuel systems decades ago, it's actually a draw between plain hydrocarbons and alcohol-enhanced gasoline when it comes to evaporative emissions of the vehicle itself.

>because people are driving modern cars with modern emission systems

Exactly why Ethanol is not the problem that people think when they let rumors or superstition prevail. It's mainly during the time your gas cap is off, when your fuel system is not "sealed" and you are fueling up where the slight differential in evaporative losses would show up if there was careful measurement. You can sometimes even notice more vapors escaping while you are in the process.

Put your gas cap on properly and the remainder of 24/7 there will be no difference in evaporative emissions (VOCs) between conventional hydrocarbons and alcohol-enhanced, until you open the gas cap again to refuel. It does add up but the overall difference is so small when you do the math that's why it would be almost a complete draw.

>because we live in the future

After all, it's all we've got left :)

One thing that can help make the future more futuristic is when physical reality can be better recognized over myths and misconceptions.

It’s probably a bit late for that. BEV will have taken the market four new cars before such a campaign could take root.

We should be using leaded solder though! Campaign away ...

We can charge those batteries while we drive, with generators powered by Freedom Fuel.

Dumb Question: Why do you do what you do and or are you a bot? If the latter, why doesn’t HN just automate this?

HN does dedupe on a timer. If it has been a little while reposts are allowed to get a chance of reaching new eyeballs.

In this case it's not a direct duplicate of the link, but another post on the same topic. I find there is value in reading through the previous discussion that I may not have otherwise seen.

I've seen this account dupe-post twice on a story that was flagged, then later vouched.

Which is a telling bug for a bot to have.

LOL! I also found that our dear friend ChrisArchitect, sees them (maybe s/he uses a tool), and I just refer to them to see duplicates I might have missed/submitted. I see no harm, and it is a thankless job. We also know that sometimes duplicates are the only way to resurface interesting and curious articles.

It’s a common HN practice. I’ve done it once or twice. Mods will do it often, especially with highly active topics. I imagine it started as a method to avoid duplicate posting thereby consolidating conversation and, also, so that karma attribution goes to whoever the original poster was.

I imagine automation would be difficult because the same topics come from different sources and occasionally there is additional/novel information in similarly titled postings.

Also important to note there is a time eventually that something is no longer a dupe, and people will still add previous discussions about it (often dang himself), because the previous conversations about the topic may be of interest. But unless some earth shattering research just came out in the last three days showing that lead is good for us, actually, it hasn’t been long enough for that to apply here.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46867700 and marked it off topic.

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