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There isn’t much that people can do unless car drivers realize how polluting their cars are. Any rule will be seen as some obstacle to freedom and lobbied into

by bertil 4y ago

There isn’t much that people can do unless car drivers realize how polluting their cars are. Any rule will be seen as some obstacle to freedom and lobbied into irrelevance—unless people wake up and look at their exhaust pipe differently. I don’t know how to do it. It’s such a violent dissonance that bridging it will be hard: people know that if they are in a room with their car while it runs, they will die within minutes. This is a trope used without explanation in popular movies and TV series. Having someone stand near the same exhaust affects their health because they breathe a comparable dose. If you tell the same driver, they will curse you loudly. They will openly prefer their convenience over something they know intuitively is deadly. That dissonance kills more people than anything else—besides eating fatty food and not exercising when you have a heart problem. It kills more young people than anything else. It kills more people than other car-related dissonances (1. most drivers think they are far better than others and drive dangerously, or 2. parents think having a tall hood that hides the children standing in front of your car is somehow protective of your children). I’m not sure why psychologists don’t investigate those three problems more. The yearly deaths alone are staggering. Unless car lobbyists suddenly lose their complete control of the media and car advertisers stop lying about how cars are used, no progress will happen in that domain. VW is trading after lying about killing millions of people with their diesel cheating device… The company is actually doing fine. What other group, what army could kill so many people and be welcome in polite society!? I suggested to a local group fighting pollution in a small, time-limited area (a school pick-up) that drivers buy plastic bags to capture their exhaust gases. In that plan, organisers would also offer to treat the bag's contents for a fee. That was to give people a sense of the scale of the pollution, not even the toxicity. How massive is the cloud of exhaust? It’s straightforward to compute the amount: RPM * engine volume. That was a conversation with people who were openly complaining that kids were sick because parents didn’t cut their engine while waiting. I couldn’t imagine a softer, more on-board target. They refused. No problem in human psychology is so deadly, and yet so frustrating to address…

steve76 4y ago
[dead]
WalterBright 4y ago
> people know that if they are in a room with their car while it runs, they will die within minutes. We'll also all die within minutes if we rebreathe only our own exhalations. More to the point, without energy production, the billions of people on the planet will die. It's all tradeoffs, not absolutes.
- bertil 4y ago
  That’s nowhere true at reasonable scale. People spend days (months even, in the last few years) in the same room without dying. You can’t do that with a car, even if the room is ventilated normally. You will die in 3 to 5 mins. Sure, if you stand in an airtight coffin… but no one here is arguing for that. I really think that you presenting a straw man instead of my actual and then pretending you are a moderate by claiming its “all tradeoff” is the perfect illustration of how car lobbyist make sure their master can kill millions of people every year and think they look like the good guys. It’s a scandal bigger than the holocaust by two orders of magnitude and you are there defending it like it’s a good thing…
  - bawolff 4y ago
    It seems about the same amount of reasonableness/strawmanness as capturing the exhaust in a plastic bag and breathing that.
  - haswell 4y ago
    I think you’re missing the point here. The way I took the comment, specifically about tradeoffs, is that for many people the alternative to driving is dying. If a household can’t acquire food at a minimum, death will result. For many people, a car is a prerequisite to food. This is why IMO, only legislative action that includes new solutions to replace the need for cars will make a dent here, and trying to convince individuals will continue to be problematic.
    - Dalewyn 4y ago
      Cars being a life line isn't strictly an American thing either. Any rural area will very likely have insufficient public transport, necessitating cars just to accomplish daily needs. Japan, for example, faces a problem of elderly drivers in the countryside who can't (or won't) retire from driving simply because they need to drive to get to their farm, go shop groceries, and visit the hospital.
userbinator 4y ago
No problem in human psychology is so deadly, and yet so frustrating to address I'm sure everyone could probably live much longer and "healthier" if the government controlled every aspect of their life, but that's exactly the authoritarian dystopia that much of the population fortunately rejects. It's only a problem to those who want society to become that sort of sterile un-life. We realise there are risks to everything, and that's just a natural part of life. You could even say that's what makes life worth living.
- bertil 4y ago
  Not poisoning millions of people to death isn’t an authoritarian dystopia.
  - userbinator 4y ago
    They might as well ban smoking then, but we know that's not going to happen (and I hope it doesn't, despite the fact that I don't smoke myself.)
- ABCLAW 4y ago
  >I'm sure everyone could probably live much longer and "healthier" if the government controlled every aspect of their life, but that's exactly the authoritarian dystopia that much of the population fortunately rejects. It's only a problem to those who want society to become that sort of sterile un-life. Well, there's clearly a spectrum between 'the government controls everything' and 'it's legal to release chlorine gas into the vents of buildings'. The bigger question should be whether or not it's a good idea for government to intervene in this issue with some specific policy rather than litigating whether or not government should be able to exercise any power at all. Is the concept of air quality regulation inherently dystopic?
  - calvinmorrison 4y ago
    More like - is the government even capable of the outcomes it wants? COVID hit. Millions of americans, primarily obese, with multiple comorbidities, died. The government closed gyms and kept mcdonalds open. If the government instead forced everyone to go to the gym once a week instead of wearing masks, we'd solve the health crises of our lifetimes and had fewer deaths.
idiotsecant 4y ago
No, theres plenty that can be done without tilting at windmills. Air quality standards can be improved over time without hang wringing about massive impossible changes and one day things are just better.
- bertil 4y ago
  Please do it.
  - idopmstuff 4y ago
    That's what the whole post is about - they're doing it. They're changing standards and making things better. Honestly, I think that of all sources of pollution, cars are the ones that are seeing the clearest and most visible work. We can see it in the market - electric cars are increasingly taking market share. We can see it in government - California just banned gas cars completely as of 2035. Yes, ICE cars are big polluters, but all the evidence seems to pretty clearly show that we're in agreement on that as a society and are taking active steps to get rid of them.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    It’s already being done. Electric vehicles and solar are taking over because they’re cheaper and will continue to be more so for quite a while. Longwinded emotional appeals that misrepresent truth aren’t necessary, just some patience. You want to help, invest in solar development projects after installing a few on your own residence. Whatever outcome is going to happen is more or less already certainly happening, there aren’t many levers or much that can be changed. Fossil fuels being mostly replaced is inevitable, climate effects good and bad from all the carbon added are likewise inevitable.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      > Whatever outcome is going to happen is more or less already certainly happening, there aren’t many levers or much that can be changed. Fossil fuels being mostly replaced is inevitable, climate effects good and bad from all the carbon added are likewise inevitable. This is basically climate illiterate.c Ebikes have saved more carbon emissions that all EV vehicles combined. All you need is to. make cities suitable for cycling, and habd out free ebikes, and you would save about a degree of planet-wide heating. Thats the difference between having a global famine and avoiding one.
bawolff 4y ago
This is kind of conflating different types of pollution. If you breathed just the exhaust, you probably wouldn't notice the PM2.5 particulate as you would be too busy suffocating from CO2 exposure.
- bertil 4y ago
  That’s not making the argument any less terrifying. You see that, right?
  - bawolff 4y ago
    I mean it does make the argument less terrifying because it makes you seem less believable. When you are sloppy in your reasoning, you become less convincing since people will start to doubt the veracity of your other conclusions, even the ones unaffected by the slopiness, since if you are willing to be misleading on one point, why would you stop there? The scariness of your argument depends entirely on how accurate it is. If you start playing fast and loose with accuracy it might be scary the way a horror movie is, but you lose the actual scariness. [Which to be clear, is not to say the reality of the situation is not scary. Car pollution (in all its forms) is scary. I'm just saying the only reason i find it scary is due to things from outside this thread. This argument by itself is not scary]
Sevii 4y ago
You mention a lot of the negatives of cars and express frustration that people won't budge on the issue but the reason you run into so much opposition is because cars are the most empowering invention for the average person ever. For most people the trade offs are worth it 100 times over.
- calvinmorrison 4y ago
  My wife cannot drive due to her disability. Whenever somebody tells me you don't need a car I just laugh. Since almost everyone can do it, you don't really think how much you depend on it. Outside of maybe NYC, really good transit isn't a reality. Sure her life would be great if we had all this transit, but that's the way it is.
  - namuol 4y ago
    The first step is admitting that this is a problem.
  - culi 4y ago
    right, but we don't have good transit precisely because of our car-centric society. You and your wife would likely live easier lives in much of Europe In the US, the car industry has and continues to actively undermine efforts to fix our public transportation system
    - calvinmorrison 4y ago
      Right, and because we live in an area that is about as good as you get for the united states (east coast, between NY and DC) for public transit, she is able to get around somewhat. Mostly it's just me ferrying her around though, like a concierge! Think about how much of a non starter that is for someone in Oklahoma? I know many hackernews readers are on either coast, well, statically most americans are, but for large parts of the country - driving is an absolute requirement. If we lived in Oklahoma, she probably would have found a doctor willing to overlook Epilepsy as a risk because, without a license she would have been destitute
- 4y ago
rootusrootus 4y ago
> if they are in a room with their car while it runs, they will die within minutes FWIW, that's not true with a modern car and a functioning catalytic converter. It's gotten considerably more difficult in recent years to kill yourself even by piping the exhaust from your car directly back into the passenger compartment. Also, an increasing number of us have no exhaust pipes, which weakens this aspect of the anti-car crusade.
- calvinmorrison 4y ago
  I recently got an old (56 years, no cat, carb'd) car running after years of sitting. within about 10 seconds my nose rankled up, and after about 30 seconds my CO2 meter, which I had totally forgot I placed in the shop because it never went off years ago - I did this because I had propane heaters - went of like nuts for an hour! So I was glad to know that it worked, and clearly the car was running far too rich!
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    Once in a while I'll be driving behind a classic car and all I can think of is "how the heck did we survive when every car made that kind of stink?" I grew up in the 80s, when catalytic converters were a thing but cars were generally still carb'd, and it was bad enough then. > 56 years That makes me feel old, BTW. My brother and I have a project car we share and it is almost exactly that old (Chevy Nova). It definitely isn't doing any favors for the climate, but it doesn't get driven much.
- bertil 4y ago
  I’m happy to run the experiment with you as a subject.
FatActor 4y ago
All of your examples have one thing in common: a very long feedback loop. Human brains weren't designed to comprehend feedback loops that aren't a few days (hunter/gatherer), weeks (exertion), or a few years at most (gestation, agriculture). Feedback loops with half a lifetime or more are just impossible unless you practice thinking that way. American's can't even figure out interest rates or long term saving (it is an entirely different argument as to WHY our culture forces people to save for retirement, but I digress). I think most people are too busy or lack the capability to think in terms of long feedback loops. Or it is the horror of knowing the consequences that cause some people to just shut down and go lalalalalafakenews
- bertil 4y ago
  That’s very true, but when running your car idle at the school run, you are poisoning a kid two meters away. You can hear them coughing, even with the insane sound insulation that cars have these days. I don’t get how that loop is broken.
  - FatActor 4y ago
    Good point. I guess in that instance--if had to argue--people think by just stepping away from the path of the diesel exhaust solves the problem and don't have to think about it anymore except in the context of "boy that one car sure was polluting." But I see what you are saying it's like a sort of a collective "shrug" and what's worse some cynics well say something I find absolutely idiotic: "Well, everything causes cancer," or, "We're all gonna die anyway." smh.
jimbob45 4y ago
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss... Transportation is something like 15% of total emissions. It’s bikeshedding to suggest that limiting car use is going to meaningfully solve anything relative to how difficult implementing such an approach would be.
- acdha 4y ago
  It’s twice that in the US: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis... There isn’t going to be “one weird trick” to solve this problem. Instead it’s going to be like optimizing a mature program: 5% here, 7% there, etc. Making better choices about transportation or beef consumption isn’t going to halt climate change but it’s something anyone can do right now and the more they do the more time it buys us for the harder problems.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
chiefalchemist 4y ago
> That dissonance kills more people than anything... I agree with the majority of what you said. That said, I'd proposes that a fair number of these deaths aren't accidents. They're suicides. One of the things that you don't hear often - because it doesn't fit the media and societal narrative - is that 50-60% of gun deaths are suicide. The point being, when it comes to such things convenience matters. Combustion engine exhaust is easy to access, and it's also less painful / violent than fire arms. Certainly, it's not all. But it's certainly some and like guns more than we care to admit.
compumike 4y ago
> RPM * engine volume To be horribly pedantic, but hopefully educational, this formula misses a few factors: (1) In a four-stroke internal combustion engine, which all car engines are, there is only one exhaust for every TWO engine revolutions. Thus the formula would be: (RPM/2) * engine_volume (2) You’re also assuming the engine is being run at wide-open throttle (gas pedal fully depressed), where the intake pre-compression chamber pressure is equal to atmospheric pressure. In reality, car engines spend very little of their time at wide-open throttle (I hope!), so the average chamber pressure is much lower than atmospheric. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_flow_sensor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_flow_sensor (3) Also missing a small ideal gas law “N” factor: there will probably be slightly more molecules in the exhaust combustion products than there were in the input fuel+air. If I had to guess, your RPM * engine_volume estimate is probably higher than reality by one order of magnitude, but not two. Not bad :)

by bertil 4y ago

steve76 4y ago

[dead]

WalterBright 4y ago

> people know that if they are in a room with their car while it runs, they will die within minutes. We'll also all die within minutes if we rebreathe only our own exhalations. More to the point, without energy production, the billions of people on the planet will die. It's all tradeoffs, not absolutes.

bertil 4y ago
That’s nowhere true at reasonable scale. People spend days (months even, in the last few years) in the same room without dying. You can’t do that with a car, even if the room is ventilated normally. You will die in 3 to 5 mins. Sure, if you stand in an airtight coffin… but no one here is arguing for that. I really think that you presenting a straw man instead of my actual and then pretending you are a moderate by claiming its “all tradeoff” is the perfect illustration of how car lobbyist make sure their master can kill millions of people every year and think they look like the good guys. It’s a scandal bigger than the holocaust by two orders of magnitude and you are there defending it like it’s a good thing…
- bawolff 4y ago
  It seems about the same amount of reasonableness/strawmanness as capturing the exhaust in a plastic bag and breathing that.
- haswell 4y ago
  I think you’re missing the point here. The way I took the comment, specifically about tradeoffs, is that for many people the alternative to driving is dying. If a household can’t acquire food at a minimum, death will result. For many people, a car is a prerequisite to food. This is why IMO, only legislative action that includes new solutions to replace the need for cars will make a dent here, and trying to convince individuals will continue to be problematic.
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    Cars being a life line isn't strictly an American thing either. Any rural area will very likely have insufficient public transport, necessitating cars just to accomplish daily needs. Japan, for example, faces a problem of elderly drivers in the countryside who can't (or won't) retire from driving simply because they need to drive to get to their farm, go shop groceries, and visit the hospital.

userbinator 4y ago

No problem in human psychology is so deadly, and yet so frustrating to address I'm sure everyone could probably live much longer and "healthier" if the government controlled every aspect of their life, but that's exactly the authoritarian dystopia that much of the population fortunately rejects. It's only a problem to those who want society to become that sort of sterile un-life. We realise there are risks to everything, and that's just a natural part of life. You could even say that's what makes life worth living.

bertil 4y ago
Not poisoning millions of people to death isn’t an authoritarian dystopia.
- userbinator 4y ago
  They might as well ban smoking then, but we know that's not going to happen (and I hope it doesn't, despite the fact that I don't smoke myself.)
ABCLAW 4y ago
>I'm sure everyone could probably live much longer and "healthier" if the government controlled every aspect of their life, but that's exactly the authoritarian dystopia that much of the population fortunately rejects. It's only a problem to those who want society to become that sort of sterile un-life. Well, there's clearly a spectrum between 'the government controls everything' and 'it's legal to release chlorine gas into the vents of buildings'. The bigger question should be whether or not it's a good idea for government to intervene in this issue with some specific policy rather than litigating whether or not government should be able to exercise any power at all. Is the concept of air quality regulation inherently dystopic?
- calvinmorrison 4y ago
  More like - is the government even capable of the outcomes it wants? COVID hit. Millions of americans, primarily obese, with multiple comorbidities, died. The government closed gyms and kept mcdonalds open. If the government instead forced everyone to go to the gym once a week instead of wearing masks, we'd solve the health crises of our lifetimes and had fewer deaths.

idiotsecant 4y ago

No, theres plenty that can be done without tilting at windmills. Air quality standards can be improved over time without hang wringing about massive impossible changes and one day things are just better.

bertil 4y ago
Please do it.
- idopmstuff 4y ago
  That's what the whole post is about - they're doing it. They're changing standards and making things better. Honestly, I think that of all sources of pollution, cars are the ones that are seeing the clearest and most visible work. We can see it in the market - electric cars are increasingly taking market share. We can see it in government - California just banned gas cars completely as of 2035. Yes, ICE cars are big polluters, but all the evidence seems to pretty clearly show that we're in agreement on that as a society and are taking active steps to get rid of them.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  It’s already being done. Electric vehicles and solar are taking over because they’re cheaper and will continue to be more so for quite a while. Longwinded emotional appeals that misrepresent truth aren’t necessary, just some patience. You want to help, invest in solar development projects after installing a few on your own residence. Whatever outcome is going to happen is more or less already certainly happening, there aren’t many levers or much that can be changed. Fossil fuels being mostly replaced is inevitable, climate effects good and bad from all the carbon added are likewise inevitable.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    > Whatever outcome is going to happen is more or less already certainly happening, there aren’t many levers or much that can be changed. Fossil fuels being mostly replaced is inevitable, climate effects good and bad from all the carbon added are likewise inevitable. This is basically climate illiterate.c Ebikes have saved more carbon emissions that all EV vehicles combined. All you need is to. make cities suitable for cycling, and habd out free ebikes, and you would save about a degree of planet-wide heating. Thats the difference between having a global famine and avoiding one.

bawolff 4y ago

This is kind of conflating different types of pollution. If you breathed just the exhaust, you probably wouldn't notice the PM2.5 particulate as you would be too busy suffocating from CO2 exposure.

bertil 4y ago
That’s not making the argument any less terrifying. You see that, right?
- bawolff 4y ago
  I mean it does make the argument less terrifying because it makes you seem less believable. When you are sloppy in your reasoning, you become less convincing since people will start to doubt the veracity of your other conclusions, even the ones unaffected by the slopiness, since if you are willing to be misleading on one point, why would you stop there? The scariness of your argument depends entirely on how accurate it is. If you start playing fast and loose with accuracy it might be scary the way a horror movie is, but you lose the actual scariness. [Which to be clear, is not to say the reality of the situation is not scary. Car pollution (in all its forms) is scary. I'm just saying the only reason i find it scary is due to things from outside this thread. This argument by itself is not scary]

Sevii 4y ago

You mention a lot of the negatives of cars and express frustration that people won't budge on the issue but the reason you run into so much opposition is because cars are the most empowering invention for the average person ever. For most people the trade offs are worth it 100 times over.

calvinmorrison 4y ago
My wife cannot drive due to her disability. Whenever somebody tells me you don't need a car I just laugh. Since almost everyone can do it, you don't really think how much you depend on it. Outside of maybe NYC, really good transit isn't a reality. Sure her life would be great if we had all this transit, but that's the way it is.
- namuol 4y ago
  The first step is admitting that this is a problem.
- culi 4y ago
  right, but we don't have good transit precisely because of our car-centric society. You and your wife would likely live easier lives in much of Europe In the US, the car industry has and continues to actively undermine efforts to fix our public transportation system
  - calvinmorrison 4y ago
    Right, and because we live in an area that is about as good as you get for the united states (east coast, between NY and DC) for public transit, she is able to get around somewhat. Mostly it's just me ferrying her around though, like a concierge! Think about how much of a non starter that is for someone in Oklahoma? I know many hackernews readers are on either coast, well, statically most americans are, but for large parts of the country - driving is an absolute requirement. If we lived in Oklahoma, she probably would have found a doctor willing to overlook Epilepsy as a risk because, without a license she would have been destitute
4y ago

rootusrootus 4y ago

> if they are in a room with their car while it runs, they will die within minutes FWIW, that's not true with a modern car and a functioning catalytic converter. It's gotten considerably more difficult in recent years to kill yourself even by piping the exhaust from your car directly back into the passenger compartment. Also, an increasing number of us have no exhaust pipes, which weakens this aspect of the anti-car crusade.

calvinmorrison 4y ago
I recently got an old (56 years, no cat, carb'd) car running after years of sitting. within about 10 seconds my nose rankled up, and after about 30 seconds my CO2 meter, which I had totally forgot I placed in the shop because it never went off years ago - I did this because I had propane heaters - went of like nuts for an hour! So I was glad to know that it worked, and clearly the car was running far too rich!
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  Once in a while I'll be driving behind a classic car and all I can think of is "how the heck did we survive when every car made that kind of stink?" I grew up in the 80s, when catalytic converters were a thing but cars were generally still carb'd, and it was bad enough then. > 56 years That makes me feel old, BTW. My brother and I have a project car we share and it is almost exactly that old (Chevy Nova). It definitely isn't doing any favors for the climate, but it doesn't get driven much.
bertil 4y ago
I’m happy to run the experiment with you as a subject.

FatActor 4y ago

All of your examples have one thing in common: a very long feedback loop. Human brains weren't designed to comprehend feedback loops that aren't a few days (hunter/gatherer), weeks (exertion), or a few years at most (gestation, agriculture). Feedback loops with half a lifetime or more are just impossible unless you practice thinking that way. American's can't even figure out interest rates or long term saving (it is an entirely different argument as to WHY our culture forces people to save for retirement, but I digress). I think most people are too busy or lack the capability to think in terms of long feedback loops. Or it is the horror of knowing the consequences that cause some people to just shut down and go lalalalalafakenews

bertil 4y ago
That’s very true, but when running your car idle at the school run, you are poisoning a kid two meters away. You can hear them coughing, even with the insane sound insulation that cars have these days. I don’t get how that loop is broken.
- FatActor 4y ago
  Good point. I guess in that instance--if had to argue--people think by just stepping away from the path of the diesel exhaust solves the problem and don't have to think about it anymore except in the context of "boy that one car sure was polluting." But I see what you are saying it's like a sort of a collective "shrug" and what's worse some cynics well say something I find absolutely idiotic: "Well, everything causes cancer," or, "We're all gonna die anyway." smh.

jimbob45 4y ago

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss... Transportation is something like 15% of total emissions. It’s bikeshedding to suggest that limiting car use is going to meaningfully solve anything relative to how difficult implementing such an approach would be.

acdha 4y ago
It’s twice that in the US: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis... There isn’t going to be “one weird trick” to solve this problem. Instead it’s going to be like optimizing a mature program: 5% here, 7% there, etc. Making better choices about transportation or beef consumption isn’t going to halt climate change but it’s something anyone can do right now and the more they do the more time it buys us for the harder problems.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

chiefalchemist 4y ago

> That dissonance kills more people than anything... I agree with the majority of what you said. That said, I'd proposes that a fair number of these deaths aren't accidents. They're suicides. One of the things that you don't hear often - because it doesn't fit the media and societal narrative - is that 50-60% of gun deaths are suicide. The point being, when it comes to such things convenience matters. Combustion engine exhaust is easy to access, and it's also less painful / violent than fire arms. Certainly, it's not all. But it's certainly some and like guns more than we care to admit.

compumike 4y ago

> RPM * engine volume To be horribly pedantic, but hopefully educational, this formula misses a few factors: (1) In a four-stroke internal combustion engine, which all car engines are, there is only one exhaust for every TWO engine revolutions. Thus the formula would be: (RPM/2) * engine_volume (2) You’re also assuming the engine is being run at wide-open throttle (gas pedal fully depressed), where the intake pre-compression chamber pressure is equal to atmospheric pressure. In reality, car engines spend very little of their time at wide-open throttle (I hope!), so the average chamber pressure is much lower than atmospheric. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_flow_sensor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_flow_sensor (3) Also missing a small ideal gas law “N” factor: there will probably be slightly more molecules in the exhaust combustion products than there were in the input fuel+air. If I had to guess, your RPM * engine_volume estimate is probably higher than reality by one order of magnitude, but not two. Not bad :)