How about inviting some guests to the forum
 

Would you all consider having a 'guest speaker " of sorts on this forum for a short Q&A on certain topics that we usually discuss ?

Engineers of any sort.
I know one of our members here is a tire engineer, and I find his information very helpful.

So engineers of any sort.

Even if these people just give 30 minutes of their time to talk with us and answer questions, it would certainly be welcome.

And I don't want to see someone brought unto the forum simply to settle arguments either - they wouldn't wan't to ever come back again !

Perhaps some of you moderators could invite some experts to the forum.

Does anyone else here think this would be a good idea ?

A thirty minute window on an asynchronous board? It would need to be on a Wednesday.

With advance notice I could be on the forum. (He says with a seven-minute delta. :))

I was thinking we could be prepared with some prewritten questions.

This would also allow the speaker to tackle the main ones they want to elaborate on.

Just checking at random, there are four Users would could participate at this time. It's usually four to six, lately. There may be times of day or days of week that are more popular. I mention Wednesday for aerohead's sake.

I didn't mean to suggest a live Q&A session.
We would post questions beforehand.

One answer always brings up another question, so rather than having this as a live Q&A session, we would limit it to just a few important questions.

I would really like to see some advice from people that work in the industry.

I'll even get this started.
I plan to write an old fashioned paper letter to one of the guys that worked at GM on the EV-1 aerodynamics.

I think paper letters are more personal than an email.

I spoke with the guys' son, who also works in aerodynamics, and found him to be a real likeable guy.
He spoke with me over the phone for 20 minutes, and I'm a nobody.

This would be interesting, if there are engineers who would be gracious enough to take the time to respond to some questions. That sounds like a good lead, Cd; other than that, JulianEdgar seems to be the most well-connected person here. It will be up to him if he wants to reach out to any of his contacts in the industry.

Seems like a solid idea to me. Maybe make a youtube channel and embed the videos in the Q&A thread. Maybe stick to a single topic so the questions can go a bit more in depth than general/generic questions.

Since I just got a Diesel truck, looking around for performance mods (generally better MPG too) and I see talk about doing X Y and Z, but not much mention of the theory behind the concepts, what happens if you go too far, not far enough, etc. Like propane injection, I know too much is bad, but there's no mention of too little, if tuning the system to work at max levels at idle would give any benefit at speed, etc. A static regulator is easy to setup, variable is a fair bit more complex and expensive.

Areo seems to be the #1 thing to go for on most vehicles so that would be the most common topic I'd think for the forum. Diesel isn't super common, but people with the VW diesels and such could benefit from some deeper knowledge on those engines. Electric hybrids I suspect would be another big subject.

If you did do live meetings, it could be good too, since you could get instant questions/replies, clearly would want a basic set of questions to get things rolling. I'd assume there wouldn't be many viewers live, but could give a ton of solid info. That's the kind of random video's I tend to watch, ones that go in depth on a subject I find interesting.