Fuel anxiety and the Power Big Meet
Never mind range anxiety, I am suffering from fuel anxiety. There isn’t much profit for the oil cartel boys in selling LPG – they will make a lot more money from selling electricity at garage forecourts as well as pre-divorce roses (any wife presented with guiltladen roses bought from a garage knows she’s in the poo), so LPG in the UK may be on the way out.
My grand plan with the Chevy van was to run it dual-fuel on switchable LPG, which is very available on the Continent but will probably vanish from the UK. It’s mostly about cost. The 7000lb van with its 5.7-litre Chevy V8 gets about 14mpg on a run at 55mph. At £5.40 a gallon, 100 miles will cost me £38.57. Ouch. That’s almost as expensive as going by train. Autogas at £2.92 a gallon means 100 miles would cost £21, or maybe £23 if you take into account the slightly lower energy available from the gas. The financial MPG of the van would then be about 26mpg. And gas also burns far cleaner than petrol. No, I have no idea why the British public does not like cheap, clean LPG.
The conversion requires an additional gas tank, lines and the replacement of the Holley four-barrel carb with a simple single-point fuel injection system, but with the LPG injectors drilled into the intake manifold closer to the cylinders for more efficiency. The nearest current LPG source to home is 25 miles away, and one would also avoid motorway service gas pumps to avoid being gouged, making journeys more interesting but also longer. But as gas use is going to become ever more inconvenient, it might be the smart move to leave the van with my photographer friend Paul in Sweden and just use it for European jaunts.
Still in Sweden, I finally got my long-promised ride on a Ducati. During a winter visit I sat on it, but there was sand and grit on the damp roads from frost gritting, and although the temperature was warm enough, trying out a powerful bike on a skittery surface after a few decades of only driving cars seemed majorly unwise. Come the summer and it was time. I didn’t actually enjoy it as much as I’d hoped, as I didn’t feel in full control. A brief potter on empty roads at 30mph was enough. You can feel the enormous potential of the Ducati, and I will definitely have another go later, but my plan to avoid hospital by starting again at the bottom of biking with a Bantam or the like and a CBT training course before even riding my 650cc Triumph Bonneville remains wise. The imported Bonneville will in any case remain in paperwork limbo for some time to come, as the DVLA clerks are unable to understand that Canadian registration documents are computer printouts rather than paper documents. Correspondence continues, although I’ve referred the issue to my importers to deal with. They are likely to be more patient than me and they can translate clerkspeak.