Hybrid Cars Don't Live Up to Mileage Claims 1528
Omega1045 writes "Wired News is running a great little article about how hybrid cars (specifically Honda and Toyota models) do not come anywhere close to living up to their fuel efficiency claims. The article highlights that the EPA tests are more to blame than the car manufactures. Consumer reports has shown that the mileage for these cars can be as low as 60% of the claims. The article also links to a blog authored by hybrid enthusiast Pete Blackshaw detailing his failures getting any real answers on why his Honda Civic Hybrid isn't getting better fuel mileage. It looks like these cars are more hype than help in the battle against pollution and foreign fuel reliance."
Better than nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I'm interested in hybrids but not for fuel efficiency reasons. I'd like to see auto makers combine the output from different energy sources into all-wheel acceleration of a normal car. I remember seeing something on the news a few years ago about Ford experimenting with that on an Explorer, trying to jazz up the acceleration of a bigger vehicle. I don't know what became of that testing, if anything. But it would be extremely cool to see that technology in a small, sporty car.
Neither do regular cars (Score:3, Insightful)
What About Emissions? (Score:3, Insightful)
What I'd be more interested in is the air and environment impact of charging batteries vs. providing high torgue. Not to mention what one does with batteries that can no longer hold a charge. Land fills?
Let's not look at just the MPG's on this. Let's look at the over-all impact of the vehicle throughout it's lifespan. Even if it doesn't immediately effect your bottom-line... it could effect your quality of life in 25 years.
cheers,
Levendis47
Good (Score:3, Insightful)
Hybrids are only delaying the inevitable, and (according to this article) not by as much as we thought.
ummm (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Better than nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
Volkswagen Golf TDI (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Better than nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
But the key line in the article is that federal law prohibits using anything other than the EPA estmates for advertising fuel efficiancy. So while it may stink, the 'guberment' is more to blame than Honda.
NOTE: IANACG (i am not a car guy)
The article suggests that the tests are not necisarily accurate b/c they use emisions to estimate the amount of fuel used. And that the tests were designed to be simple to replicate.
Why wouldn't it be simpler to just fill the tank, run the car, and then see how much fuel it takes to refill the tank?!? Is there some reason this wouldn't be a reliable test?
Re:...so are non-hybrid cars also overrated? (Score:1, Insightful)
Don't lie. You didn't read the article. Most of it is about that very fact. You couldn't have gotten past the first two paragraphs.
Re:Better than nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
D
Re:Duh (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Biodiesel baby (Score:3, Insightful)
We can make it here
You can drink the exhaust (h20)
You can tell OPEC to rotate.
Not better than Diesel (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no batteries to worry about, and you get a fullsize (well... not subcompact like most hybrids anyway, hehe) car with a full trunk to use.
-Jesse
Efficency isn't their main purpose (Score:4, Insightful)
Diesel cars with similar fuel effiecncy, but definitely not the cleaniness, have been around for ages.
Re:Duh (Score:2, Insightful)
You're wrong in many ways.
You CAN create more energy from less fuel, of course you usually talk about USABLE energy... so, improving efficiency leads to more usable energy.
A lot of cinetic energy (which is a form of ordered, high quality energy) is wasted in the brakes, here's where you can improve efficency.
The act of moving doesn't theoretically need energy (except for the pure cinetic energy you reach during the travel) so, there's a lot of space for improvements.
The principle behind hybrid cars does make sense, it tries to recover some energy that otherwise would be wasted (engine at idle, brakes, etc...)
Adult undergarments- it Depends (Score:2, Insightful)
If your hypothetical bloated SUV had one of those nice little LCD consumption displays like my '04 Prius, I bet you'd find that it needed several decimal places to display anything other than 0 when dragging its lard ass up a hill. I suspect that all such mileage ratings are for "ideal conditions," and even those nice little plain-gasoline economy cars get 5-10 mpg less than the 30-40 on the sticker.
As a data point, my Prius averages 45 mpg (well, 45.4 on the current tank, around mile 400). I tend to float between 50-70 on I-495 around DC, depending on traffic conditions, and have five minutes or so of 25 mpg deadweight in the suburban areas at the endpoints of my commute.
Interresting notes (Score:3, Insightful)
At first I thought it felt remarkably close to the standard civic in performance, then I went back to the standard civic
But according to the car (its readout not my calculations) I got about 39-40 MPG durring the week, where as I calculate any where from 28-35 MPG on my civic.
Not a big increase, but It seemed like they could have done more to make little improvements, like according to the car the electric motor never assists unless your really heavily accelerating or going up an incline. also it turns the gas motro of at a stop light, but if you move again it wont turn it off unless you exceed 5 MPH, so if your in real bumper-to-bumper traffic the motro stays on, now I realize the design of the engine(s) probably makes it so the car can't move without the electric but it seems to me it would be morte asthetically pleasing to keep the gas off until you actually start moving faster than say 5MPH. (there would have been stretches of 20-30 minutes in traffic without the engine even running if that were the case for me.
all in all I would definatly consider a hybrid when I purchase my next car, but my milage expectations have been brought to earth.
Re:Better than nothing (Score:1, Insightful)
But this is the "Big Lie" of Hybrids. Yes, they get better mileage, but it's not because they're hybrids. It's because they have extremely low CD's (co-efficients of drag), unusually hard and narrow tires, low-friction bearings, lightweight alloys and construction, thinner-than-usual safety glass, and a host of other ounce-pinching compromises. However, the fact that they still have to haul around a couple hundred pounds of lead batteries negates a lot of that efficiency.
Here's the thing they don't want you to know. If you took all that efficiency - the ultra-streamlined body, lightweight alloys and glass, low-friction tires and bearings, and everything else - and put it in a regular car with a small engine (a diesel Golf, a Civic, whatever), the regular car would get better mileage. But it wouldn't qualify technically as "low-emission", because it is always generating (an extremely small amount of) pollutants, while the hybrid has periods of zero-emissions.
Why don't people see this? If you put all that tech into a regular car, they'd get better mileage than hybrids. It's crystal clear.
Is this just more anti-hybrid FUD? (Score:2, Insightful)
Overall, I've gotten an average of just over 50 miles per gallon over the last 16,000 miles. In the summertime, I get about 53-55 mpg, and in the winter it's just under 50.
I definitely changed how I drove to maximize my fuel efficiency. If you don't leave the car in gear as you're braking to stop at a light or stop sign, the engine won't charge and you're mileage goes way down. If you accelerate like a bat outta hell after stopping, you lose mileage big time - instead you have to just accept that you're gonna accelerate slower than other cars.
Others have asked the question, and I'd be curious to know the answer: do non-hybrid cars live up to the EPA mileage reports? One would imagine that the EPA would have some consistency in their testing, so it'd be okay to compare numbers.
Interestingly, on my Civic hybrid, the dashboard display of the average mileage for this trip seems to exaggerate the mileage consistently by about 4-5 miles per gallon. I reset one of the trip odometers each time I fill up the tank, and use the odometer reading (number of miles travelled) along with the number of gallons I put in to make my own calculation of mileage. It's always at least 3 or 4 miles per gallon lower than what the display reports. My Honda dealer is clueless about the hybrid, and couldn't even understand the question when I asked them about this difference.
Re:Better than nothing (Score:1, Insightful)
Uh, I hate to point out the obvious, but just where do you think the precious electricity comes from that drives your hybrid vehicle? Bzzzzt! Time's up! It comes from fossil fuels, that's where it comes from!
Or were you trying to make a joke here by pointing out the obvious two-faced, no-logic tactics so frequently used by environmentalists?
Re:Better than nothing (Score:3, Insightful)
Lead-acid batteries are almost completely recyclable. Anyone "discarding" them needs adjustment via clue-stick.
Re:Better than nothing (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Why aren't we promoting Diesel / Biodiesel? (Score:3, Insightful)
Err, gas in the US is gettin there (and in Hawaii it's already there)...
Considering we should be slapping a Gulf War tax on every gallon of gasoline sold, perhaps homegrown fuel would be less of a 'sacrifice'..
(frankly we should put a war tax on gasoline and subsidize biofuels, removing agricultural subsidies that are alleviated by increased pricing due to legitimate demand and giving 3rd world agribiz better access to our markets... but that's another rant..)
Re:Better than nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why I Didn't Buy a Hybrid Car (Score:3, Insightful)
I love my Golf TDI. It averages 40-45mpg (seasonal) for commuting and 45-50mpg on interstate trips, actual verified mileage as opposed to the useless EPA estimates that this article talks about. But please don't kid yourself about pollution. TDIs still make more soot than gas engines, and it'll be years before low sulfur diesel is standard in the US.
I bought it for the mileage. My goal is to always have higher MPG than my age. IMO, suburban SUV owners (not park rangers, USGS, etc) are supporters of terrorism [google.com].Re:Why aren't we promoting Diesel / Biodiesel? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Better than nothing (Score:0, Insightful)
No, because MPG in a hybrid car is in addition to whatever electricity is consumed (which also must be generated somehow). So, I would argue that it's a good deal worse, for this and other reasons (e.g., disposal of toxic batteries, etc.).
No, actually, the hybrids are well optimized... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you think about it, city driving involves less aerodynamic drag, so it should require less energy to accomplish. Motorcycles (driven sanely) regularly do better in town than on the highway, largely because their aerodynamics are crap. Hybrids are typically designed with lots of efficient features (as you point out) and hence do OK on the highway -- but where they really shine is in city conditions, where they use less fuel per mile [and a regular car would use more fuel per mile].
My Experience with a Honda Insight (Score:4, Insightful)
One thing this car has taught me, however, is that I don't think any car will get the mileage as advertised if you do not drive it "correctly." Because the Insight gives me constant feedback about what sort of MPGs I am getting at any given time, I have learned and adopted different driving patterns to maximize MPGs. For example, when coming up to a red light, I tend to coast and slow down gradually, rather than accelerating right up to it, and braking more quickly. Anyone in the passenger seat does not notice the behavior as weird, and at this point I just do it naturally and without thinking. However, when I am in a friend's car with them driving, I do notice that they tend to accelerate right up until the light, and then break fairly quickly. Little behaviors like that affect what sort of MPGs you get, and unless you drive a car that gives you that sort of feedback, many people do not tend to think about such things as having a real effect on their mileage.
I have a friend that just bought a new car, and it is advertised as allegedly getting around 30mpgs... However, as he accelerates quickly on highways, passes other cars frequently, and brakes late at lights - I know he is not getting the mileage he thinks he is... Had he had a display on his dash, like the Insight, that told him his mileage, he might believe me
Good suplement, poor replacement (Score:5, Insightful)
At the moment it is only twice as expensive as diesel here in the US (although what will all the agricultural tarriffs jacking prices up and subsidies bringing them down, it is damn near impossible to calculate the true economic cost of biodiesal). There is the kink that all of our fertilizers are fossil fuel based, so the cost of producing biodiesal will go up as the cost of fossil fuel goes up. The only other alternative is to go to crop cycling and other natural sustainable methods of fertalization, which are also less cost efficient.
However the real killer is that if you sit down and do the back of the envelope calculations, you will find that growing enough biofuel to replace all the world's oil usage would require all the arable land on the entire planet. In other words we would have to bulldoze all the woods, rainforests, plains, and marshes, and replace them with biomass crops. Not only will will destroy most of the natural habitats on the planet, but at this point we also loose the carbon neutral benifit because we are taking other plants out of the carbon cycle to put ours in.
So Biodiesal, like solar, is a good supplement to our enegry needs, but not a sustainable complete replacement.
one reason ... (Score:3, Insightful)
However, diesel engines don't have pumping losses (or, much less significant losses), so there isn't so much to gain making diesel hybrids (since with a diesel hybrid, you will lose most of the benefit to losses in your electro-mechanical transmission).
But, if there is a more efficient way to store the excess energy, it may become feasible.
Re:Better than nothing (Score:4, Insightful)
This addresses a consumer cost issue with the battery packs, not any environmental issue.
Unrepresentative sample (Score:3, Insightful)
I have a deisel which gets good millage (not as good as the epa test, but NOONE gets the epa millage, it allows you to kinda compare car to car). Hybrids especially the toyota which turns its gas engine off at stops in city driving will get better city than highway.
These hybrid owners are relegious about monitoring there gas millage, to the point of obsesion. Google for milage and you'll see.
Here is one site guys site that shows things aren't as bad as they would appear Prius [john1701a.com]. If you search you'll see details about millage.
Re:Better than nothing (Score:1, Insightful)
Take a conventional car getting 31.5mpg, a hybrid getting 31.5mpg, and a Harley cruiser rumbling along setting off car alarms at 45.5mpg. Guess who's best for the environment?
Another thing I see a lot of is the Hollywood "elite" driving Priuses (Priusi?) and making a big deal of it like they're doing the world a favor. Bill "I'm a smarmy asshat in need of a beating" Maher drives a Pruis, and that alone is reason enough for me to not buy one.
A BIG step toward lowering the environmental harm from cars would be to force the "gross polluters", those people driving cars in bad states of tune that belch oil smoke and unburned gas into the air, to GET THEIR CARS FIXED. These cars account for most of the pollution emitted by all vehicles. If everyone in the world who drives now drove a brand-new Ford Excursion (a.k.a. really big SUV), the overall pollution level would be LOWER than it is now. Not because Ford Excursions are especially clean vehicles, but because they would be new, and in reasonably good condition. There would be no gross polluters. Finding and citing gross polluters would be easy. There are already machines on the market that can detect excess hydrocarbons coming from a passing car's exhaust and take a picture of the car's license plate, just like a red-light camera. Send the offending driver a voucher for a "repair your car or pay a $350 fine".
Advertisers: the real junk science (Score:3, Insightful)
Surely there were plenty of independent channels he could have turned to, including locals with the same type of car, for real-world independent info before he bought the car.
The recent junk-science story here lamented lack of critical thinking in everyday life: Believe TV advertisers at your own peril.
FWIW, EPA give plenty of caveats on their web site regarding lack of applicability of their mileage-rating model to individual performance, so calling them out for this also doesn't work.
Re:A message I posted to a friend a while back... (Score:5, Insightful)
So for the US market diesel has a bad reputation for pollutants - so probably simply won't appeal to people who would buy hybrid for environmental reasons.
Re:Better than nothing (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Better than nothing (Score:2, Insightful)
The batteries is a hybrid have nothing to do with lower emissions, that is all managed by computerized engine controls and catalytic converters.
Any car with a proper combination of engine controls and exhaust set up can easily qualify as an LEV, regardless of the gas mileage that they get. It is mearly a measure of the make up of the exhaust gases, typically so many parts per million of certain polutants compared to the total output, which is mostly water vapor and carbon dioxide.
While I follow the development of hybrid and alternative fuel vehicles, they have a long way to go before they are ready for main stream use. The current hybrids are too small to be useful for anything more than driving to work. They are not terribly strong and I would not want to be in one if it was ever in an accident. Plus, what sort of environmental impact are these vehicles going to have in a junkyard in ten years with all of the highly toxic batteries, and how much pollution came about as a result of making the batteries. It may not be much as compared to the millions of typical car batteries currently rotting in junk yards around the world, but it just may be enough to bridge the gap between the hybrids and normal cars.
As for other alternative fuels, E85 (ethanol) is very promising, and once it becomes mass-produced, the costs should go down, until we have a drought in the Midwest. Then we are going to have high demand for those crops for food and fuel. Hydrogen is not terribly practical other than used in fuel cells for an electric car, and there are problems with storage of the hydrogen.
For now, give me a modern gasoline engine, on a modern car. Until the other technologies are more mature, they are not much of an option, at least for me.
Re:Better than nothing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:TDI rocks! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Better than nothing (Score:2, Insightful)
You can be assured, if a reputable manufacturer offers a warranty on a product, it will last that long at a minimum. Otherwise the company goes out of business replacing the poor parts. I don't see toyota/honda going broke any time soon, myself.
125,000 miles is a long way and definately shows that honda/toyota are willing to keep the environment clean of broken batteries by desgining long life ones.
Diesel sulphur content in US vs Europe (Score:3, Insightful)
Diesel fuel in Europe is of much higher quality, with a sulphur content of 50ppm, against a sulphur content of up to 3,400ppm in the States. In my view it is the unwillingness of the US oil companies to do something about their sulphur content that is stopping modern diesel technology from really breaking into the US market.
Speed... (Score:1, Insightful)
Knowing that drag force is proportional to the square of the speed, going 65 instead of 55 will increase the drag (thus fuel consumption) by as much as 40%, but your speed is only about 20% faster.
Of course, I'm neglecting the fact that engines can be more efficient at a precise RPM, etc., but you get the idea.
Re:TDI rocks! (Score:2, Insightful)
You could go with a Ford, but if you dislike recalls purchasing a car with one of the higest recall rates is probably not a good idea.
Sure, I'm a biased VW nut, but take your VW out for a spin and get broad-sided. When you realize you're alive and OK, you may change your mind.
Re:Better than nothing (Score:3, Insightful)
It all comes down to different driving patterns. I'm generally pretty easy on the accelerator, shift into higher gears early (stickshifts are wonderful), and generally keep my speed under 65. I also throw the car into neutral on long downhills, which takes a couple thousand unneeded RPMs off the engine. But I wouldn't recommend this, as people keep trying to convince me that it's either unsafe or bad for the transmission. Screw 'em.
My car before that was an '89 Ford Festiva, which generally got around 48MPG. I loved that car so very very much.
Small cars more efficient (Score:3, Insightful)
As a side benefit, small cars make the roads safer, and take up less space (which many people don't care about, but with tight street parking a small car is pretty sweet). And if you are really concerned about the environment, I suspect a small car has a lot less up-front environmental cost. I have a feeling a hybrid has significant costs above a typical gas car because of all the batteries (which are little bundles of toxicity, no doubt with many toxic byproducts during production).
Of course if you want real efficiency, a motorcycle beats them all.
Re:Better than nothing (Score:2, Insightful)
The engine is obviously LESS efficient in the hybrid. Its being assisted by an electronic motor and still only producing the same results in terms of MPG as the escort.
Re:Volkswagen Golf TDI (Score:3, Insightful)
The amount of energy is directly related to the CO2 emissions, hence the energy content is relevant to anyone concerned with reducing the CO2 coming out of their tailpipe.
Diesel and gasoline are basically the same -- mid-sized alkane molecules, basically chains of carbon surrounded by hydrogen. The amount of energy in each molecule is (essentially) proportional to how many carbons it has. The only difference is that diesel is a denser fuel and thus has more energy (and carbon) per gallon.
A gallon of diesel burned produces more CO2 than a gallon of gasoline burned. The mileages are still pretty good, but not quite as good as the naive "miles per gallon" comparison would lead you to believe.
Re:Better than nothing (Score:2, Insightful)
Add into all this the fact that different catalyic converters do better at different temperatures, pressures, etc. & you see that for a given mpg it is possible to have different pollutant levels.
Re:Better than nothing (Score:3, Insightful)
I believe people are seeking an answer to the question of where these batteries wil eventually end up. Even if they are "long-life" batteries, they will eventually no longer be used. It doesn't matter if it takes 30 years until they get tossed into a landfill and leak harmful chemicals, they would still be harmful to the environment. It's just a matter of delaying the issue, rather than solving it.
So, if anyone knows what's supposed to happen to these batteries in the long-term, please share.
Re:What were they doing to those poor cars?!? (Score:2, Insightful)
They're bad because they're huge, dangerous, tippy, vision-blocking, gas guzzling road hazards.
They're the 00's minivan for stupid people who think bigger=better.
No offense to you personally, you may be one of those SUV drivers who has it for a real reason, not because it's kewl.
Re:Better than nothing (Score:2, Insightful)
As I drive alot of highway miles, I wouldn't get a hybrid vehicle as their gas milage is worse on the highways than many normal cars. They make more sense for the limited distance/slow speed/frequent stops of city driving. That and even at $2 a gallon, it'd take a huge amount of driving for the better milage to make a difference.
Let's check some some figures: assume 50 miles a day, at ~25 miles to the gallon. That's 730 gallons a year. At $2 a gallon, that's $1,460 dollars a year. Your yearly savings, before maintenance, is $730 a year for going with a hybrid that gets ~50 miles to the gallon. If the hybrid costs $5k more, that's 7 years until you break even. Oh, and you're going to have to replace the batteries by then? Tack on a few more years. I bet maint. costs will more than eat up any differences. It gets even more difficult if the MPG difference is only 6.
Re:Better than nothing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What's going to pass them? (Score:4, Insightful)
Aside from biodiesel, which doesn't seem to be getting any attention from auto manufacturers, our options are HEV, electric, and fuel cell. When weighing the differences among these, the big thing you have to remember is that in all three cases, you're burning fossil fuels to generate the energy that drives your car. That's right - the electricity that runs your electric car has to be generated somewhere, and the electricity that is used to produce the hydrogen that is used in your car also has to be generated somewhere. (From this standpoint, a hydrogen fuel cell isn't an energy source in itself so much as a fancy kind of battery.)
So if we're going to be burning fossil fuels no matter what, it seems that the most important thing to do would be to pick the cleanest fossil fuel to burn. In the case of HEVs, we're burning gasoline. In the case of electric and fuel cell cars, we're getting the electricity from lots of sources, but far and away the biggest source is burning coal.
Last I checked, coal is a hell of a lot dirtier than gasoline, which, contrary to popular belief, is one of the cleaner fossil fuels we have, and probably will be for a long time.
With that in mind I ask if the fuel reformer / fuel cell combo is really cleaner, or is it just cleaner if you only need 10 feet of space surrounding your car to be cleaner and not all the air you breathe day to day.
Actual Numbers, Actual Owner (Score:3, Insightful)
I drove my 2002 Prius exactly 300 miles door-to-door from Canton Ohio to South Bend Indiana this past Monday with the cruise control set at 72 MPH and the A/C on the entire trip. My fuel economy, as reported to me right on the center console? 47.1 MPG.
I *ROUTINELY* get 49-52 MPG around town. ROUTINELY. These are NOT inflated sticker numbers. This is NOT granny driving. I briskly accellerate to 5 MPH over the posted limit and set the cruise control, even in town at speeds 30 MPH+. Doing this WILL deliver those window sticker numbers.
Nosir. The people posting "My XYZ car gets 44 MPG on the highway" are missing the point. Great. My car would do that with 3 passengers, 200 pounds of luggage and the heater running. What your XYZ car does NOT do:
-50+ MPG CITY.
-Shut the engine off at stops or very low forward speed
Hybrids are the perfect stop gap until practical hydrogen arrives.
My mileage doesn't vary.