EU Car Makers Manipulating Fuel Efficiency Figures 431
pev writes with a report in The Guardian that "European car manufacturers are rigging fuel efficiency tests by stripping down car interiors, over inflating tyres, taping over panel gaps and generally cheating. This overestimates the figures by 25% to 50%. One would have thought that a simple clause stating that cars have to be tested in the conditions that they are sold in would have been obvious?"
Re:Another way to cheat (Score:4, Informative)
Diesel causes cancer [cancer.org]. Diesel particles could raise heart attack risks [bbc.co.uk]. And I'm sure there are tons of other stuff Diesel is good for, by all means let's have some more.
Re:useable tricks (Score:3, Informative)
The reason overinflating tires reduces fuel consumption is that it reduces the contact patch between the car and the road. Unless designed for that smaller contact patch it means worse braking distance and handling.
Re:Human Nature (Score:5, Informative)
I've heard there are a lot of consumers who like to be open the doors too.
Re:European Magic (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, yes it does. Gasoline ~34.2 MJ/L; E10~33.18(~3% less); E85~26.5. Ethanol has less energy per liter, so if you have to add it to your fuel, you will get fewer MPGs.
Re:European Magic (Score:4, Informative)
There is at least as much fudging there.
Fudging is hard, but not impossible (see Kia [cnn.com]). The EPA spot-checks 15% of all vehicles sold in the US in its own lab, each year. 2/3 of those are randomly selected. So you, as cheating Joe Automaker, have a 1/10 chance that your model will get selected at random. Even if you only have one model that you cheat on, this can't be a long-term strategy or you will get caught, on average, once every 10 years.
And to complicate things, the MPG figure you see on the window sticker is not the same figure used to calculate aggregate fuel efficiency for CAFE requirements.
That was sort-of true until this year. It is true that automakers could use the older methods to calculate fuel economy. But they then had to run the results through a set of equations that estimated the results if the more modern tesst were used instead. Starting this year, everyone has to use the more modern tests.
The cars are tested with pure gas
That isn't true, though I'm not sure what you mean by "pure gas", which itself is a cocktail. They have a standard fuel that they test with, which is 93-octane. For CA-rated cars, they use 91-octane. To get to 93-octane, you need to have ethanol, or some other anti-knock agent "watering" down the gas. The differences you get tank-to-tank are going to account for far more than the variation you'll see between a bit more ethanol added here or there compared to the EPA test.
Anyway, there will never be a "paragon" for predicting how consumers will drive a yet-to-be-sold car - all we can do is try to guess. The EPA test does a fair job, though I think people see the highway number as a bit optimistic unless you really restrain yourself. The city number is pretty realistic.
Re:European Magic (Score:3, Informative)
The cars are tested with pure gas, but regulations require a certain amount of ethanol to be blended into the real-world gasoline supply (up to 10% and the lobby wants to raise it higher), and this drastically hurts efficiency.
Well, "drastically" might be a bit of an overstatement ... on a volumetric basis, ethanol has 36% less energy than gasoline, so E10 (10% ethanol by volume) has 3.6% less energy. In real-world terms, this means getting 29 mpg instead of 30. It's measurable, but not, perhaps, "drastic."
You are correct on certifications being performed using E0 fuel, while E10 is the norm almost everywhere in the US. There is some desire to allow certifications using higher ethanol blends for flex-fuel vehicles, which would let automakers take advantage of some of the other fuel properties of ethanol (e.g., very high octane rating) to make engines more efficient (and have those efficiency gains actually count for CAFE purposes) and thus offset the energy density penalty.
Re:Duh ! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Relativity (Score:5, Informative)
Everybody knows hybrids aren't 'worth it' from a present value _or_ environmentalist POV.
Whether they're "worth it" or not depends on 5 factors:
1. Difference in initial cost.
2. The average price of gasoline.
3. Distance driven over the lifetime of the car.
4. Difference in efficiency between the hybrid and non-hybrid.
5. Potential investment income on the difference in initial cost over the lifetime of the car.
An example (using the ignorant American measurements I'm unfortunately used to):
A. Hybrid sedan - $25K, gets 44 miles per gallon.
B. Standard sedan - $13K, gets 22 miles per gallon
Price of gasoline at $4.25 per gallon, expected total driving 220,000 miles over 10 years, expected investment return of 5% annually.
1. The standard sedan uses up 10,000 gallons of fuel for a total fuel cost of $42,500. The hybrid uses up half that, 5,000 gallons of fuel for a total fuel cost of $21,250, leaving a difference in fuel costs of $21,250 in favor of the hybrid.
2. The hybrid costs $12K more initially, which over those 10 years can earn an additional $7700 in investment returns, for a total of $19,700 in favor of the standard engine.
3. That means that for the buyer in this situation, the hybrid will save him $1550 total.
So what "everybody knows" may or may not be true, and the best way to answer the question is to look at the numbers for the vehicles you're considering and your own driving habits, and do the math. The general formula looks like this, where Ch is the cost of the hybrid, Cs the cost of the standard, IR is the investment return, Y is the lifetime in years, M is the lifetime in mileage, Eh is the hybrid's miles per gallon, Es is the standard's miles per gallon, and G is the cost of gasoline:
Total extra cost of a hybrid = (Ch - Cs)*(1 + IR)^Y + (Ch - Cs) - M / (Eh - Es) * G
Of course, all this doesn't work if the numbers you plug into the formula are wrong.
Re:Slow news day? (Score:2, Informative)
We're not talking MPG, we're talking KPL here (kilometers per litre)
Anecdote time to counter your anecdote: With the exception of cars I've modified ('87 Toyota Tercel hatchback, '87 Pontiac Recaro T/A Firebird, '98 Ford Taurus SE) none of them have met their estimated MPG/KPL within 25% margin.
Re:Slow news day? (Score:4, Informative)
Modern cars have to meet much more stringent emissions requirements than older cars did. It was a lot easier to get good gas mileage when the car could exhaust more crap. Cars are also getting heavier bigger, heavier, and more powerful.
Exhausting unburned hydrocarbons is *bad* for efficiency, not good for it.
It's the weight that the emissions control and safety systems add which is affecting mileage on modern cars. If you have the same BHP in your car and weigh 200kg more, then your efficiency and performance characteristics are going to suffer. Fitting a bigger engine will actually improve efficiency, if it's being driven sanely, because most engines also lose efficiency when they are running closer to their limits.
But it's also the car manufacturers' faults... how Chev managed to only get 103HP out of the 2007 Aveo's 1.6L engine is a mystery, for example... You see significantly more than that out of 1.6L engines in European cars and it makes an enormous difference to the overall efficiency (let alone adding a turbo or two, or going to diesel). And they are still doing the same thing today on many of their models.
The Europeans may be fudging the numbers a bit, but take everything an auto manufacturer says with a grain of salt anyway. The European cars are still better on the efficiency front, because they're designed for a market where gas costs 3x as much.