My wife needs to drive 50 miles on a rural interstate to a university class this morning. We are having a winter blizzard right now. If the road report looks reasonable she will go. She will have a sleeping bag, winter oudoor clothing, snow boots, etc, with her. She is an ex-Nordic Ski Patroller, trained in winter outdoor survival. She has spent long days in the winter wilderness on her skis when the temperatures were below zero. If she gets stuck she will not leave her vehicle; it is a much better shelter than a snow cave that she would have to dig. That's on an interstate. When you go into the winter wilderness you are on your own. We have taken part in many simulated and a few actual rescues. The rescuers are putting themselves at risk in any rescue attempt. When you have no idea where those who need rescuing are it makes it very difficult. Every year we lose snowmobilers and backcountry skiers who break down or get lost. Many of them are inadequately prepared to spend a night or more in the wilderness.

The Kims made a series of fatal errors. If you are not trained and prepared to be in the winter wilderness, don't go there. It is not the responsiblility of society to save you from your own foolishness. Luckily there are many volunteers, like we were, who are willing to go to great effort to save the foolish. They are not paid to do it, even though they are willing to go to tremendous effort in a very unforgiving environment to do just that.

Many of the letter writers seem to be totally oblivious to the extreme difficulty of performing search and rescue in the winter wilderness. I think it is time for them to volunteer to spend a lot of time and effort to learn how to become part of rescue efforts. Courses in winter survival and rescue are readily available. They might consider getting off their latte-sipping butts and do something useful for a change.

I meant the cost of the engine, not the price of the car. As engines get more complicated we will need long warranties. The best way to get complex and efficient engines is to get the price of gas up. Consumers are not dumb, they weigh the cost of more efficeint cars against the cost of operation. Europes high cost fuel is a strong incentive to efficiency. I feel sorry for Detroit, they got used to making $20,000 profit on big SUV's and pickups. Those profits don't exist in the sedan category.

Well, you are right, there are tremendous heat losses in an internal combustion engine. Installing heat recovery steam engines (turbines) will recover a lot of that heat. Internal combustion engines utilize the heat at high temperature, and the steam engine recovers some more energy at low temperature. However, steam engines require condensers to recover the water. The old steam locomotives did not recover the water, but they could fill up on water every so often. There are interesting corrosion problems in water recovery systems, as the makers of high efficiency home heating systems discovered years ago. Ordinary stainless steel doesn't work too well, as it is subject to stress corrosion cracking. By your description it sounds like the BMW engineers will be using the steam turbines to drive an electric generator. This is a useful technology, but the devil is (as usual) in the details. Automobile technology is quite mature and it is inexpensive to build a car, despite its complication. For example a '70's vintage V8 engine cost about $25 to build. As soon as lead-free gas was mandated the cost increased markedly, because the valve seats in as-cast cylinder heads would not work with lead-free gas. Each technological improvement requires extensive work to get the cost down to where people can afford to buy the cars. An area that I am familiar with is the replacement of steel valves with titanium valves. Titanium valves would reduce engine friction significantly and yield a large increase in fuel efficiency. All racing cars use titanium valves because they permit higher RPM. You can have high RPM or increased gas mileage with titanium valves. They cost $100 a piece, however, as opposed to much less than a dollar for steel valves. I suspect that the addition of a steam heat recovery system to a car engine will more than double its cost.

I have been to and discussed advanced technology with the Big Three. I know engineers who work for them. They are as capable and competent as engineers anywhere. The Big Three have never been able to shake their concentration on getting through the warranty period, and after that it is the owners lookout. After the engineers have done their job on designs and specs the car is turned over to the cost-cutting bean counters. They are rewarded for cutting costs, not improving long-term reliability. The easiest way for Detroit to regain consumer confidence and sales would be to emulate the Koreans: go to a ten-year 100,000 mile warranty, or better. That would force the bean-counters to have a longer term outlook, if management explained it to them correctly. I own a Honda and a Toyota. I will look at Detroit products when they show me that they believe in their products enough to warranty them for a long time. Lutz is right about gas mileage, there is not much more that can be done, except to reduce size and weight. Detroit sedans get as good a gas mileage as any other brands of similar class. Thermodynamics is thermodynamics, except for the scientifically ignorant who carefully avoided knowing anything about the important (and difficult) stuff.