My Dad was an airplane mechanic in the U.S. Navy, and when he retired, switched to automobile mechanics. (Somewhere in between he took a break with theology.) We were talking about cars last week in the middle of me making him a guinea pig in testing different mobile voip applications and instant messenger applications with voice on laptop to laptop. This conversation which I meant to record was on Truphone.

The conversation was about the history of the battle between the environment and automobiles. He's particularly interested in Ford's Ecoboost technology which led me to do some research.

In May 2009, the White House shared a new fuel engine policy in which there would need to be 35.5 miles per gallon fleet averages by year 2016. Carmakers and investors worried about the cost, of course. That's only seven years. Ford's Taurus and Lincoln MKS and MKT already have the Ecoboost engine installed for 2009 and forward. Talk is that an SVO-type Mustang is next.

On the legal side, Ford is filing to patent its Ecoboost invention and technologies.

\"Green\" engines are said to have been used in the most popular vehicles by German carmakers. What is Ecoboost?  It combines turbo-charging with direct fuel-injection to realize up to 20 percent better fuel economy than traditionally experienced with standard engines of the past. Some of Ford's patents for this \"arena\" of applications have been granted.

My Dad says he thinks we waste a bunch of energy trying to become more environmentally-friendly, but he likes how Truphone 3.0 is compatible with Skype, GoogleTalk, Yahoo, AIM Twitter, and MSN IM, and it soon will make you local very inexpensively from many areas of earth. He says, \"This VoIP stuff just may make it where you don't need to get into your car or airplane as often to go anywhere because you'll already be there virtually with something like Truphone.\"

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