...test drive of a petrol car
Having heard so much good about petrol cars, we decided to test drive one. They are said to combine cheap price with long range and fast charging. A winning formula on paper – but how are they in real life?
Automakers do not sell the cars themselves, only through independent car repair shops as middlemen…
So we sat in the car and pressed the START button. The car’s gasoline engine coughed to life and started to operate. One could hear the engine’s sound and the car’s whole body vibrated …
The petrol engine consists of literally hundreds of moving parts that must have tolerance of hundredths of a millimeter to function…
We put in a gear and drove away with a jerk. The jerk came not from any extreme acceleration, but gasoline engines apparently cannot be driven as smoothly as electric motors… as we learned quickly- very important that each time select a suitable gear otherwise the engine will either stop or get seriously damaged!
We asked if the constant sound of the engine … could be turned off. But it couldn’t.
We approached a traffic light. Releasing the accelerator pedal resulted in no significant braking, we had to use the brake pedal very much to slow down the car. We were surprised to hear the brakes are completely mechanical! The only thing they generate is heat – braking gives no regeneration of gasoline back into the tank! Sounds like a huge waste…
When we came to a stop the engine continued to run and the car vibrate – even though the car was standing still! The engine continued to burn gasoline without moving the car forward. Can it really be true?
The car claimed that it still had half a tank left, but we wanted to try the famous super-fast charging of petrol cars!
The filling nozzle is very similar to a charging connector, but it is not electrons that come out of it but gasoline. Gasoline is a highly carcinogenic, smelly and flammable liquid derived from plants and animals extinct since millions of years ago.
We put the nozzle to the car, but nothing happened. The seller then explained that we must pay to fuel!
Sure we filled the tank full in two minutes, but it did cost us an unbelievable €30! A full charge would thus cost us double that – a whopping €60! …it is not possible to refuel gasoline cars at home, and there are no free gas stations.
With this in mind we ended up in a traffic jam and was horrified that the gasoline engine continued to burn these expensive gasoline drops even when the car was standing still or moving very little. With gasoline vehicles it is easy to run into cost anxiety – the feeling that the car literally burns up your money!