Fuel Efficient Engine Builders?

[Davo53209]

Originally Posted by northboundtrain

Hello.

Great site. I've gotten into rebuilding engines recently, and the thought of openning up a fuel efficient rebuild shop has crossed my mind more than once. I'd love to do it, but I'm not sure the market is there. Engine rebuilders focus on speed and power because that is where the money is. Driving fast cars is something a lot of people devote a huge portion of their lives (and disposable income) to.

Most people want fuel efficient cars to save money. Sure there's plenty of other reasons, but in the end, the mods would would have to pay for themselves (or come pretty close) for most people to want to throw down the necessary thousands of dollars. In addition, the only cars you would be modifying are older out of warrenty vehicles. Given that the mods would take years to pay for themselves, Someone would have to be really into their car and plan on keeping it for many more years to make that kind of investment.

Where the market might exist is in taking older CRXs, Sprints, Metros, diesels, etc that you get for a song and then modifying and fixing them up. If you could get them into the 60+ mpg range and resell them for 8-10k then you might be able to pay yourself an okay wage if you could do it out of your garage with negligable overhead expenses.

I dunno, I'm being a little skeptical and playing devil's advocate to some extent because I'd like to hear someone respond convincingly to these arguments. It would be a really fun business if it could work.

Well here's my rational. I'm tired of having the auto industry tell me that "Statistically", as an American car driver, all I want is a bulky, inefficient SUV, which has horsepower over Fuel Efficiency.

Secondly, there a cars in Europe like the VW Lupo, or the Audi A2 which get 78 MPG U.S. that will never be allowed into this country.

Finally, to add insult to injury, they've been trying to pass off some ugly looking hybrid costing over $20,000, which only averages 50 to 60MPG.
50to 60MPG! For God sake, Geo Metros and the Honda Civic CRX HF were doing that over 16 years ago, while costing significantly less than $20,000. Not to mention the added expense of replacing the lithium batteries within 8 to 10 years. Furthermore, a fuel efficient car does not have to cost that much or look like some obscure, flamboyet, quasi-futuristic rollerskate.

Bearing all that in mind, including the increasing cost of a gallon of gas, I think that there would be a market...All it would take are a few dedicated engine builders who have the "Know How", that are willing to step foward, make Fuel Efficient mods that work and be able to quantify there results.

As far as "throwing down the necessary thousands of dollars", I feel think that by taking an already fuel efficient Geo Metro, CRX HF or Honda Vx, and tweaking it to be more fuel efficient, it would be far cheaper than buying some hybid for over 20K. Not to mention, you'll have a better running car that can also be tweaked to be more reliable...again, being far cheaper then the auto industry.

Bottom line, we need to turn speculation into fact, by separating what might work to what will work. The point is that like the early hotrodder, we need to take our FE Mods that we've learned in the backyard and turn them into a professional service.