Great gas mileage gain!

sounds interesting, where do you get the O2 sensor simulator?

 

A catalytic converter treats the exhaust before it leaves the car and removes a lot of the pollution.

Removing it will significantly increase your emission of pollutants. <_<
howstuffworks.com - catalytic-converter

 

I think that, if this reasoning were correct, catalytic converts wouldn't exist.

 

If you gain 4-7 mpg without the catalytic converter then you are suggesting the catalytic converter is responsible for perhaps a 15% or so mpg reduction. That seems to be excessive. Can someone please confirm if the catalytic converter is actually responsible for a 15% reduction in mileage?

Rick

 

I would rather have a car that is better for the environment.
My Prius already gets great gas mileage.

I don't believe you have shown any evidence that a Prius with its catalytic removed generates less emissions than the vehicles you cited.

Edit: Corrected spelling error.

 

I would NEVER... repeat... NEVER scarify emission for couple MPG increase on my Prius. The Prius is designed for low emission. Great mileage is the side benifit.

 

Any engine running w.o. a catalytic converter will be A LOT dirtier then the biggest SUV. You might gain a little MPG but you are destroying the environment faster then that Navigator you smirk at. To see this look at motorcycles and how much they pollute, they run really small engines but since most of them don't use cats they pollute an awful lot. From what I've read they are worse for the environment then SUVs. That said some motorcycles (BMW and I think Honda) to have cats on their bikes nowadays

 

On the freeway at higher speeds the ICE is working pretty hard. I could see that if you gave a slight increase to the output of the ICE it could give an increase of 4-7mpg on the freeway at the higher speeds when the ICE is working hard. Like around 70-80mph the ICE is working pretty hard. So maybe not a 4-7 increase everywhere, but I could see it incertian situations. Priushappy, do you drive the car on the freeway at higher speeds a lot? I'm interested in this mod...

 

What proof do you have that you aren't?

The way to settle this is hook the Prius up to an analyzer and get a readout.

 

Ok,

I no longer have research material available but this is one of the reasons I decided to drive a Prius instead of a motorcycle (*that said I think a BMW motorcycle would be on par with cars*).

quick search though revelled this: http://motoring.reuters.co.uk/reuters/vocm...lnk=101&id=1498
I also found this from our Canadian neighbour:
http://www.ec.gc.ca/science/sandemay01/article1_e.html [I haven't read it all yet]

I'll find more if you are interested.

Motorcyles, lawn movers etc pollute a lot more then cars, the resons this isn't a big problem is that the number is low. Still they should be improved. Catalytic converters do a great job of cleaning up the exhausts of cars.

So removing the cat is NOT a good option. It's one of the best way to clean up the exhaust of a car.

 

I agree that lawn movers is a bad example and I shouldn't have brought them up. But look at the new post I added (I edited my last post) from that article you can read the following (and most motorcycles nowadays are 4 stroke):

Note how they compare it to light trucks (i.e most SUVs). I'm not saying that the cat does all the cleaning but I know it does a lot. Removing it to help gasmileage shouldn't be an option and is illegal.

So while I respect people who try to maximize the milage I think this is not a good idea.