Today, I made my 27 mile commute on my motorcycle. That in itself is only vaguely remarkable, as I've been doing this more and more often.
However, the freeway was largely a parking lot today, so I did almost the entire ride on the white line, going anywhere from 10 - 25 miles an hour while traffic
was stopped or crawling.
Not that pleasant an experience, at least not for me. I'm out of practice at such games, but I knew it would have to be done sooner or later, and today was the test. I passed (play on words?) but I'm not so certain about my blood pressure.
But that's not why we're here. We're here because it reminded me of a halfbaked idea I had recently, and it's time to get it up on the board.
Sergeant Fletcher was an archer with the Assyrian cavalry in 865 BC who was well known for his ability to reliably put an arrow into a small specific zone in the backside of his opponents horse. While our current military was searching for an appropriate nomenclature for the in flight refueling system developed for aircraft, somebody told the tale of his skill and the name, like the arrow, stuck.
But that's not what this idea is about. This idea is about all those cars sitting on the freeway, burning fuel with no place to go, while road crews worked feverishly to remove a jackknifed semi trailer from lanes.
My bike was low on fuel as well, but I knew I had enough to get to work as long as I kept moving. But if I'd taken my car, I'd be sitting still, possibly behind one of those pre 1971 vehicles that are smog exempt in California, breathing the oil and unburned fuel that that generation of technology spews by design. I passed a few of them and the petrol scent was heavy.
With the Sergeant Fletcher automotive adaptor, the snorkel hose with the elizabethan collar is manually deployed by the driver and appoximately positioned.
The final approach to docking with the blackened tail pipe of the 1969 El Camino, pumping a pint of petrol through the Holly four-barrel every mile, is handled by the automatic positioning sensors, the design of which was cleanly ripped off from a combination of the smog sensor they put up your car's tailpipe when you go to get it certified every other year, and the feedback system from one of those claw toy vending machines crossbred with an electronic typewriter.
Once the docking collar is in place, the waste fuel and oil that the Ford F-250 is dribbling out it's worn out muffler extension feeds into the air intake on your late model partial zero emissions Toyota Serena. Your engine computer reads the now richened mixture and adjusts the fuel injectors to compensate, since it has been hardwired to only provide enough fuel for the moment.
If the contact is lost with the fuel donor vehicle, your car compensates until you can re-establish fuel saving contact with the 1935 Chevy flatbed in front of you, resulting not only in improved fuel economy but double efficiency on the air pollution index, since you are removing the excess petrochemicals that the 1956 Chevy was burping out and then running them through your own catalytic converter before passing them on to the atmosphere.