Neil Young's Letter to the Big 3 and the U.S. Government

19 Guests, 0 Users

I was coming home from kindergarten--well they told me it was kindergarten. I found out later I had been working in a factory for ten years. It's good for a kid to know how to make gloves. ~ Ellen DeGeneres

Advanced search

Dilber MulticolorMarley TPSMF Default Theme -

[Francis]

Johnathan Goodwin: patron saint of green cars or a fraud?
by xgz
Tue Oct 30, 2007 at 01:01:41 PM PST
Kos' frontpage diary repeated a great story about an 8th grade educated car mechanic doing what Detroit claimed was impossible - green cars that do 100 mpg and little polution. It sounds too good to be true, that kos "had to do additional research to confirm that it was indeed true."
Well, a little more research shows that it is indeed too good to be true. Details below the fold.
•   xgz's diary :: ::
•   
First of all, Goodwin is the cofounder of an alternative fuel company named "SAE energy." From its website, you can find a link to another company called "hlineconversion.com" which leads you to this glowing article about the new technology that Mr. Goodwin brings us.
Here is the relevant part that started my investigation:
When the green machine covered a quarter mile in about 12 seconds it caught a lot of attention. Rap artist Dr. Dre offered to purchase the vehicle dubbed the "Bio Rocket," and Tobias and Schwarzenegger were in attendance for the race during the final day of the PMR shooting. Both are having their personal vehicles converted by Goodwin this summer. "Governor Schwarzenegger came right up and started talking to me about the conversion, and I introduced myself as the person who had done it," Goodwin says. "The next thing you know we were over there talking about his Jeep Grand Wagoneer and we are now in the middle of negotiations on converting that." Goodwin is putting a Duramax diesel engine into a 2007 Cadillac Escalade EXT for Tobias, and adding his patented ethanol fuel injection technology that will allow the car to get 30 mpg and add 110 percent horsepower to somewhere around 800, conservatively, Goodwin says. The vehicle will have a number of customized changes, including no chrome parts, he says.
Ok, so Mr. Goodwin has a patent on ethanol fuel injection technology. So I went on the official website of the US Patent Office to search this magical patent. First try, using "Johnathan Goodwin" as the inventor, found zero hit. Second try, using "SAE Energy" as the assignee, again zero hit. Third try, using "ethanol fuel injection" for "any field", I got one hit, an invention titled "hybrid electric vehicle," by Hideo Kawamura of Isuzu Ceramics Research Institute Co., Ltd. As a last attempt, I searched "patent applications" in addition to "issued patents," still no luck. There was only one hit under "ethanol fuel injection," an invention titled "Control strategy for engine employing multiple injection types" that came out of (where else) Detroit!
Googling Goodwin yielded only the blog posts about this story, little else. It seems that either Mr. Goodwin does not have a "patented ethanol fuel injection technology," or that technology did not pass the scrutiny of the US patent office.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The claim of 100 mpg is extraodinary. The evidence so far seems not to confirm this claim.
Update. There seems to be some confusion on how I did the search. The searches are done separately, not together as some people have thought. The first search was with "Johnathan Goodwin" as the inventor - no other qualifications. So if anyone named "Johnathan Goodwin" owned any patent, whether on automobile or horseshoe painting, it would produce a hit. Likewise, the second search was with "SAE Energy" as the assignee, again, if SAE Energy ever owned any patent on anything, it should show up. I got zero hits on both searches. In other words, it is safe to conclude that neither Mr. Goodwin nor SAE Energy own any patents, on anything.
Update II. I called SAE Energy as people here suggested. The woman (Mary) replied that there was no patent. It's a pending patent application. When I asked who the inventor was, she replied that it was not Mr. Goodwin, but Larry Urry wo is the cofounder of SAE Energy. When I asked for patent application number she said that she doesn't have it and had to get it from the patent lawyer.
I did a search of pending patent applications using the inventor name "Urry." That landed me 15 hits. But none relates to automobile technology. It is clear that Mr. Urry does not yet have a pending patent with the US patent office.
~ http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/10/30/153528/46

[Daniel]

So your final conclusion is this is a project brewed up by an old washed up whining rock star trying to recapture some of the glory days and some of his reputation that was splattered and a snake oil salesman engineer who has fake patents and taking the credit from the work of others. In the end another bullshit song and dance act to get attention and rake in money.

No comment on the UQM motor and drive train technology I posted?  I don't see Goodwins name anywhere on the UQM website and this is the heart of LincVolts project. 

From the blog you referenced;

...that the person who wrote the article simply messed up and got his/her facts wrong?
In other words, do you have evidence that Goodwin made false claims?
Just curious.

The questionable information you've submitted here has nothing to do with the LincVolt project and Goodwin had literally nothing to do with the development of the UQM electric motor drive train. The LincVolt uses a turbine that burns anything flammable including cow farts. The torque of fuel consumption is totally removed from the drive train and the electric motor and is placed between the turbine and an electric generator.

Now the big 3 has its ass in a sling because their cars are 20 years out dated riding the gas guzzler gravy train and from an economy they helped implode. What comes around, goes around. There hasn't been any paradigm shifting core technology coming from them since WW II (with the exception of the EV1). When GM was crushing and grinding down their EV1 Electric car (in like "this is too good for you, we're taking it back. In fact, we're killing it off") Toyota was developing the Prius.

[Francis]

So your final conclusion is this is a project brewed up by an old washed up whining rock star trying to recapture some of the glory days and some of his reputation that was splattered and a snake oil salesman engineer who has fake patents and taking the credit from the work of others. In the end another bullshit song and dance act to get attention and rake in money.

Nice, I like it. I would add that my final conclusion is not yet formulated. Your summary is a great synopsis of my most current suspicion. I would refer you to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_science article in wikipedia. From cold fusion to the rocket belt, I've been led down the primrose path too many times before. Shall we say 'once bit and twice shy'? or 'closed minded cynic that just spouts negativity'? perhaps some mix of the two? You decide.

Neil's cool, I wish him well. I would also add that I think the Tesla motor's car is a great product, UCM seems like a good technology too. Electric cars are coming soon to the masses. That seems clear to me. Unless there really is some vast petro-conspiracy afoot. We've got this excess capacity for electric energy at night and some great new motors. We need some more cheap, high-efficiency batteries. Things are looking up. But again we'll see. Am I repeating myself ?, sorry about that. I mean no offence Daniel, you seem like a nice guy. 

[Jana]

Supported by the Pierce-Arrow Co. and General Electric in 1931, he took the gasoline engine from a new Pierce-Arrow and replaced it with an 80-horsepower alternating-current electric motor with no external power source. At a local radio shop he bought 12 vacuum tubes, some wires and assorted resistors, and assembled them in a circuit box 24 inches long, 12 inches wide and 6 inches high, with a pair of 3-inch rods sticking out. Getting into the car with the circuit box in the front seat beside him, he pushed the rods in, announced, "We now have power," and proceeded to test drive the car for a week, often at speeds of up to 90 mph. As it was an alternating-current motor and there were no batteries involved, where did the power come from? Popular responses included charges of "black magic," and the sensitive genius didn't like the skeptical comments of the press. He removed his mysterious box, returned to his laboratory in New York - and the secret of his power source died with him.


TESLA’S ELECTRIC CAR
“I could give a few details about this electric car. You see, it does not use a storage battery. It uses the special primary battery and if you know anything about primary batteries you'll know that the only part of a primary battery which fails is the negative plate. Any little dry cells you use for your flashlight, for instance, is the zinc which gives way, and when that gives way the battery goes dead. Well now, Tesla invented a completely new kind of primary battery and in this primary battery, if the negative plate wears out, it can be replaced even by a child in a few seconds. And the battery, when installed in this electric car, will run that car five hundred miles before the battery needs to be attended to. And when the battery does need to be attended to it would take you ten minutes to remedy whatever is going on and the spare parts are all in the trunk. You have enough spare parts to keep that battery running twelve months of the year. You do not have to stop at the service station. You could run five hundred miles for instance at seventy five miles per hour, if you were allowed to do it of course, but you could run this car say fifty or sixty miles an hour right across the country and probably not have to stop more than fifteen minutes to attend to the batteries.”
www.frank.germano.com///blackbox.htm

www.teslatech.info



TESLA AND HENRY MORAY’S ZEROPOINT GENERATORS

It was a Pierce-Arrow car and Thomas Henry Moray was carrying on with the work...the Mark DeMucha documentary covers the electric car that Tesla built.

Tesla made some kind of vacuum valve system that made an electric car run off the zero point energy...in the 1930s...driving around 70+ miles an hour.
In Mark DeMucha’s movie The Tesla Conspiracy he said that in 1931 Tesla produced an electric motor for a Pierce-Arrow car made with vacuum tubes which must have run off zero point…hear Pt.5 of Coast to Coast with Nooney. Also in The Excalibur Briefing by Tom Bearden he says that Dr T. Henry Moray (UT) also produced a zeropoint electric device with valves that cost $500 each to make around the early 1900s. Henry’s son John Moray still carries on his father work, and may live in Salt lake City UT.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzxvhA72vGI&mode=related&search=Tesla%20free%20energy%20conspiracy%20Mark%20DeMucha
1-11 Parts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJBzwN_WKRg&mode=related&search=  —The Tesla Conspiracy: Mark DeMucha Pt.5***
Occult Ether Physics: Tesla's Hidden Space Propulsion System and the Conspiracy to Conceal It (2nd Revised Edition)  by William Lyne (Paperback - Nov 1998
Tesla: Man Out of Time by Margaret Cheney
Tesla: The Modern Sorcerer by Daniel Stewart  www.teslabook.com/
Occult Ether Physics: Tesla's Hidden Space Propulsion System and the Conspiracy to Conceal It by William Lyne  http://www.scribd.com/doc/259156/LyneOccult-ether-physics-Teslas-hidden-space-propulsion-system

[Daniel]

The Tesla is a fantastic car! I would love one.

The entire concept behind the LincVolt is the ability to retro fit presently existing cars (as well as establish new production models), which Tesla motors will not be able to do. Clearly there will be multiple solutions on the road in the next 10-20 years. I do not subscribe to your National Enquirer style put downs and let downs however. It really is beside the point.

I for one will give the project the benefit of the doubt as it presently stands and see what happens, one way or another. What do I have to lose? I'm just a guy in the audience watching the movie eating popcorn. If its a rotten ending I'll write the producer and tell him his movie stinks. So far the previews look great. It looks to me they so far have solid evidence and tests to back up their claims. I don't know what tree you're barking up. Of course thats only based on internet presence. I've never seen the car in action. The car of course needs to be certified by experts. The X race perhaps will separate the men from the boys and the quacks from solid science. 

No offence taken, Francis. You seem like a nice guy. 

The car game piece on the far left is a Prius on the new Here and Now Monopoly...not a GM RAM pickup or a Ford Explorer. Sorry Big 3 

[Francis]

If you don't like put downs then how can you be a fan of Neil Young? His songs are full of negativity of all kinds directed at people including the president and others. So it's just a matter of style? I'm more focused on substance.

What you have to lose is your credibility, by backing a potential quack. It's my view that barking up the tree is sometimes better than humping someone's leg.

The average person cannot typically afford retrofits like the linc volt has. Jon Goodwin can get famous for retrofitting the star's cars but that's not the same as revolutionizing the industry. On the other hand, if one of these retrofits really out-performs currently available mass production models in terms of both cost and fuel efficiency, that's revolutionary.

[Daniel]

Sure Francis. If I lose any credibility, it would be continuing this ridiculous conversation from this point forward. If the LincVolt ends up in someones garage gathering dust under a canopy then whatever. I've got much much more important things to focus my attention on. We need to move forward in our evolution in whatever way that evolution decides to unfold. I have kept an open mind.  Bye 

[Francis]

k, bye.

Turns out, there are some great electric cars already in production besides the Tesla. See

http://alternativefuels.about.com/od/electricvehicles/tp/2008-Electric-Vehicles.htm

[Daniel]

Tesla In Production

http://drs1958.gaia.com/blog/2008/9/tesla_motors_100_electric_sedan_being_built_in_california

EV1 Owners Manual

http://drs1958.gaia.com/blog/2008/7/ev_1_owners_manual

Electric Car Line Up

http://drs1958.gaia.com/blog/2008/7/17_electric_cars_you_must_know_about

[Daniel]

Hawaii Electric Car Charge Stations

http://drs1958.gaia.com/blog/2008/12/hawaii_to_be_1st_state_with_electric_car_stations

[Francis]

Hawaii is in a unique position to produce electric energy from volcanism. I strongly support this type of technology. Geothermal systems are a great source of renewable energy.

http://www.punageothermalventure.com/News/55/hawaiis-geothermal-story