Official MPG Figures Unrealistic, Says UK Auto Magazine 238
Taco Cowboy (5327) writes "Research carried out by UK consumer magazine What Car? which concluded that official manufacturers' MPG figures are unrealistic. Based on the research, new car buyers in the UK who trust official, government-sanctioned fuel economy figures will pay an average of £1,000 (€1,216) more than they expect on fuel over a three-year period. Since launching True MPG two years ago, What Car? has tested almost 400 cars in real-world conditions, using cutting-edge test equipment and achieving economy figures that are on average 19% lower than the government figures."
Real-world conditions (Score:5, Insightful)
Under-inflated tires, lousy fuel, ignored maintenance, rapid acceleration, more than one occupant / actual cargo, stop-and-go traffic, air pollution, air pressure variation, air temperature variation, elevation variation...
And these are just a few of the things that would cause your "official" MPG figures to deviate from observations.
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Probably also driving too fast... European emission standards require testing at 90km/h, while the max speed in most EU countries is 120 or 130km/h
Driving faster help my MPG ... YMMV (Score:5, Interesting)
Probably also driving too fast... European emission standards require testing at 90km/h, while the max speed in most EU countries is 120 or 130km/h
I'm in the U.S. and my car is rated 22mph city 29 mph highway. The city rating is dead on. The highway rating is off, I actually get 34 mph rather than the stated 29. My typical highway is designated 65 mph and when traffic is light it is practical to do 75 mph. At 75 mph I get 34. The rating of 29 may be based on obsolete 1970's 55 mph standards.
Maybe 55 was optimal with 1970's auto technology but it doesn't seem so today, at least for me. And of course YMMV is quite appropriate here.
Re:Real-world conditions (Score:4, Informative)
That's the key here. EU mileage figures are rated based on the NEDC cycle [5-stroke-engine.com], which gives about 15% better mileage figures than the EPA combined cycle. Given that this guy is saying real world is 19% worse than the NEDC, then that's a pretty good testament to the EPA combined cycle.
At least the NEDC is better than the laughable Japanese 10-15 cycle [epa.gov], which gives figures about 10-15% even better than the NEDC.
It's one thing that drives me crazy when Americans point out to cars overseas and say, "Look, how come they get cars that are so much better mileage than ours?" The truth is, there's not actually all that much difference. UK car figures are often even worse because they're usually reported in miles per imperial gallon, which gives an extra 20% boost to mpg figures. On top of that, a large percent of European cars are diesels. While it's fair to compare diesels to gasoline cars when comparing what ou have to pay for fuel, it's not so for an environmental comparison. Diesel is 10-15% denser than gasoline; a gallon of diesel represents 10-15% more oil consumption and emits roughly correspondingly more CO2 than a gallon of gasoline. If one cares about CO2, the best approach is to ignore MPG and look at g/100km figures, which are almost always based on the same cycle (NEDC) and take into account differences in the fuel.
Re:Real-world conditions (Score:5, Informative)
Under-inflated tires, lousy fuel, ignored maintenance, rapid acceleration, more than one occupant / actual cargo, stop-and-go traffic, air pollution, air pressure variation, air temperature variation, elevation variation...
And these are just a few of the things that would cause your "official" MPG figures to deviate from observations.
That's all true, but manufacturers go to great lengths to inflate the figure. They disconnect the alternator, tape up cracks in the bodywork to improve airflow, remove wing mirrors(!), disconnect the brakes to reduce friction and use special oils in the engine to improve efficiency. [carconsultantni.com] Figures are not just a bit off but way off. My car has an official figure of 68.9mpg. On a good trip, driving on a flat road at about 70 mph I can get 54, but my usual average is 35 mpg. This is with gentle driving, I can easily take it down to 25 if I don't take care.
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That's all true, but manufacturers go to great lengths to inflate the figure.
I do wonder how someone so odiously dishonest as to participate in the practices you describe could ever become an engineer for a successful international brand.
Then, as someone who has been self-employed since 2003 and who has seen such a huge change in the way clients behave over the past decade, I wonder whether odious dishonesty today is a job requirement.
Engineering (Score:3)
That's all true, but manufacturers go to great lengths to inflate the figure.
I do wonder how someone so odiously dishonest as to participate in the practices you describe could ever become an engineer for a successful international brand.
Then, as someone who has been self-employed since 2003 and who has seen such a huge change in the way clients behave over the past decade, I wonder whether odious dishonesty today is a job requirement.
You have it backwards. They move toward dishonesty because they are working in a culture that (without calling it dishonesty) does dishonest things. For example, recently there was a memo in the News showing that GM prohibited engineers from using certain words like "defect" so that those words wouldn't show up in future lawsuits. This process is insidious--by itself it doesn't *have* to be dishonest, but it distorts the truth enough to make people a little more comfortable with distorting the truth.
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So, 3D-printed cars would be good for capitalism. But won't the capitalist car makers fight them tooth and nail? Like dealerships fight Tesla trying to sell direct to consumers? Capitalism is rife with perverse incentives and moral hazards. Slavery was eminently capitalist. Adam Smith thought that workers should have a right to sell their own labor; but capitalism, left to its pure self, won't respect that right. You need something higher than capitalism, like a government committed to the General Welfare.
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You missed a step there. The Car makers are not fighting by competing, but by manipulating the "government committed to the General Welfare"
Without a powerful government to influence and have pass laws against selling cars directly, the big Car Makers would have to compete with Tesla.
Then again, Tesla only exists and can sell cars because another part of the "Government committed to the General Welfare" subsidizes their product, so they are not competing either, but lobbying the Government to pass laws to m
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If government didn't exist or didn't regulate, capitalism would create it and create the regulations necessary to protect its players. Example: the private banking system evolved centralization on its own long before the Fed. J. P. Morgan ended the Panic of 1907 by creating his own "clearinghouse certificates" which supplied needed liquidity to the system. But even capitalists recognized it probably wasn't a good idea to rely on Morgan to get them out of another crisis; Morgan, being a profit-minded capital
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Nothing you said has any bearing on advertised gas mileage. Nobody has patented gas mileage number calculations.
I'm guessing where you're going with this is the idea that without patents, everybody would design their cars identically to maximum gas efficiency, and we'd all know it was identical, and thus there would be no need to exaggerate. I think you'll find a lot of things besides patents that would do that, not least of which is borne out by the fact that companies put out multiple vehicles with mult
Which is why sometimes small engines ... (Score:4, Interesting)
.... arn't the best solution. If they're so underpowered or peaky - like a lot of the new generation coming along - then people will tend to drive with their foot flat to the floor a lot mroe often which hammers fuel consumption and doesn't do the mechanicals any favours. Whereas with a bigger engine this is less of the case and you can get equivalent mpg except with a less stressed engine that isn't going to blow a seal after 75K miles because of components being worked to their limit to make up for the idiotically small capacity.
Of course left to their own devices no manufacturer would be dumb enough to put a 1.0L engine in a 1.5 ton car but EU regs now require silly emissions targets being met in these unrealistics tests so the manufacturers have no choice.
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Re:Which is why sometimes small engines ... (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Which is why sometimes small engines ... (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of the "new generation" of cars will have small turbocharged engines with direct injection and variable valve timing. Most will develop over 200Nm torque from below 2000rpm, not peaky at all. In fact, a lot of these cars with these engines are already on the road and have proven themselves both reliable and fuel efficient, as long as the owners actually drive them properly.
My car is decidedly old-tech in comparison, with a 2.2L naturally-aspirated 4-cylinder, rated at 8.8L/100km (27.7mpg). I average 9.0L/100km (26.1mpg) in mostly city and motorway driving, with ~160,000km on the odometer. I drive normally, stick to the speed limit or 5-10 over depending on the situation, and try to look ahead and anticipate traffic. It really isn't that hard to get very close to the ideal fuel consumption figures, you just have to relearn how to drive instead of going full-throttle/full-brake all the time.
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In realitiy, it's much more complex than that. Large engines tend to be inefficient because they are driven with the throttles opened just a small amount -- google "pumping losses" for an explanation. Wide open throttle at low engine speed
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I'm surprised they don't test the mpg by throwing the cars from a high altitude bomber.
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infinite mpg looks suspicious so far. Give it time.
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Re:Real-world conditions (Score:5, Informative)
This story is about European standards which are a bit wacky, but I know they get spot-checked in the US. Hyundai paid out a huge settlement for (apparently honestly) screwing up the testing.
Remember that your competitors are probably testing your cars, too :)
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Even if the honest reporting of fuel economies was a high priority, these folks who measure vehicles versus a standardized test would get better and better results over time using the same automobile. Rather than a general improvement in mileage rates for the average customer, the results would be indicative of learning to perform better on the test.
The purchaser of the vehicle would be ensured a mileage rating that was measured in a specific way, which may or may not be reflective of the way he will be dr
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There are a lot of factors that affect fuel mileage, but it's been suggested that the ECM can detect whether they're on a standardized emissions or efficiency test and change the settings accordingly. I wish I remembered where I had seen that article.
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If you mean "use high-octane fuel", unless your car is designed for high-octane fuel, then all you are doing is wasting money.
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I'm a hypermiler. I get 51 mpg out of my diesel minivan, But I have to work really hard at it, drive slowly, draft trucks, avoid braking, coast and engine-brake whenever I can. It's so much work I usually can't drive with the radio on, to avoid distraction.
Fuelly [fuelly.com] shows the same model/year minivan routinely gets 35 mpg or less in normal driving condition. So it's almost entirely a matter of driving style rather than technical tricks.
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I'm a hypermiler.
Stopped reading right there. It's assholes like you that make driving worse for everyone else.
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Hypermiling is as far from driving safely and responsibly as is the videogame style driving you're imagining. It's just as antisocial, self-centered, and dangerous, but the goal is saving gas and not arriving sooner (or having fun or whatever).
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As far as I can tell, drafting trucks is pretty idiotic all by itself. You can't see where you're going, and in order for it to help (if you're too far back the turbulence may make things worse) you're so close that if he slams on breaks or hits something, you die.
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yeah; I remember Mythbusters tried this out... It didn't start to actually make any difference until they were something like 18" behind the truck... I really think only a "Hypermiler" would be stupid enough to actually do that.
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No, it helps smooth the truck's slip stream as well.
Re:Real-world conditions (Score:5, Interesting)
Also set up wrong by the manufacturer. The 2007 honda civic has a highway MPG rating of 40mpg. I regularly get 44-46 while speeding after I fixed their design flaw in the rear end. they set the car with significant negative rear camber and with about 2 degrees of toe, I reset it to zero and zero and not only did fuel mileage numbers skyrocket by 10-15% but rear tire wear dropped to zero or undetectable. From what I can tell they STILL sell civics with this flaw, and the Honda Fit as well suffers from it.
Granted I only have about 10,000 miles of testing on this new adjustment, but there is no measurable tire wear on the rear and my wife has been driving it to work and back daily on a 45 mile commute as if she was in an indy car race trying to do 75-80mph. Gas mileage is measured two ways. 1st odometer+fuel used at the pump and a Scan Gauge I installed. they are within 1mpg of each other.
There is only one drawback to the change, the car is slightly more sensitive to steering input. I notice it, she does not. I am going to next add 2 degree of camber from the front to make it closer to zero as well as remove 2 degree of toe that may make the steering a bit too twitchy but you never know until you try. right now it has more than 8 degrees of camber and what looks like 9 degrees of toe. so the removal of that should further boost highway fuel economy but not as significantly as the rear end change. The rear was doing nothing but scrubbing the tires all the time, as most civic owners will tell you they have to replace the rear tires a lot as they start to cup, this is because of the dramatic flaw in how the rear end is set up on all 8th gen Civics.
Oh and I do these alignment changes in my garage, the "laser alignment" crap is nothing more than a scam. You can do a better alignment on your garage floor or driveway than the "experts" with the "highly advanced laser system" can.
Re:Real-world conditions (Score:5, Informative)
Also set up wrong by the manufacturer. The 2007 honda civic has a highway MPG rating of 40mpg. I regularly get 44-46 while speeding after I fixed their design flaw in the rear end. they set the car with significant negative rear camber and with about 2 degrees of toe, I reset it to zero and zero and not only did fuel mileage numbers skyrocket by 10-15% but rear tire wear dropped to zero or undetectable. From what I can tell they STILL sell civics with this flaw, and the Honda Fit as well suffers from it.
That's not a flaw, it's a deliberate design to improve stability and handling, especially during mid-corner corrections and emergency maneuvers. The slight toe-in also helps straight line stability.
My car (Peugeot 406) is setup like that as well, it has enough negative rear camber that it is immediately noticeable when looking at the car. If you try to "correct" this by dialing out the camber, the car will be less stable over mid-corner bumps, and the small amount of passive rear steering built in the rear suspension will be negated, further worsening the handling.
What you have done is make your car go from being relatively neutral in corners, to having positive camber when the suspension is loaded up. If you've ever read "Unsafe at any speed" or seen an old VW Beetle corner hard, you will know that having positive camber is one of the most dangerous situations you can be in. So you've actually made your car significantly less safe, all for the sake of a few MPG. Congratulations, I hope you're proud.
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If it eats the rear tires within 15,000 miles and introduces a vibration within 8000 miles due to cupping, It's a flaw.
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Cupping has nothing to do with camber or toe, it happens because of bad damping and is a completely unrelated issue.
Regarding the rear tire wear, perhaps you should try a different make and model of tire, or you could try driving less aggressively or less over-loaded. 15000 miles is perfectly normal for a tire with sporting pretensions.
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A lawsuit does not magically make whatever it alleges true. It just means a lawyer managed to convince a judge to rule in his/his clients' favor.
Oddly enough, the Civic and Fit/Jazz are very popular vehicles here, yet no one has raised a stink about anything suspension-related. Funny that.
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The flaw is it has stupidly hard roll bars and coil overs, something that modern sporty hatchbacks seem to have. You need this camber (and toe) to bring stability back.
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If you need a negative camber for stability and you're not on a race track, you've fucked up design somewhere.
I've been working on vehicles for roughly 15 years and I've got roughly 400+K miles flawless driving record. The idiots with cambered tires tend to perform very poorly on drag race strips and drifting tracks, and lose control because of the reduced contact between the road and tires. It's the dumbest thing to do and the PROPER way to alleviate this is an a-frame sway bar with MacPherson (or similar)
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Exactly right. I have an offroad vehicle with air suspension... I can raise/lower the truck about 8 inches... At factory height; the truck drives normal... If I raise it just a few inches, the front axle rotates enough that driving it is like trying to hold on to a slippery eel.. It doesn't take much in terms of suspension changes to dramatically affect the handling of a vehicle. This is why there are properly engineered suspension _kits_ vs shoving blocks between spring/axle to make your truck look cool.
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Your limited knowledge of car suspension is risking your wife's life. At 80 mph your civic will understeer and roll over with any sudden steering input, such as an emergency lane change. You should put the cost savings from your mileage improvement into the funeral fund - those things are expensive you know.
Or it could be be you know more about suspension setups then Honda, who won the Indy 500 yesterday. Yeah, that's it. You should really write them a letter about their 'design flaw'.
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"Or it could be be you know more about suspension setups then Honda, who won the Indy 500 yesterday."
Considering it's all turns in one direction, uh, no. Honda still knows jack shit about suspension setups. Their FIT is top-heavy and will roll on a whim. Their old 4x4 WAGON had one of the most horrible suspensions I've ever dealt with. The old CRX was like trying to ride a fixie on a garden gravel road. Even their motorcycles (like the older shadow 500) had shit suspensions and shocks.
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Oh yeah. Before I put modern progressive springs on it, the 75 CB550 was like a squirrelly jackhammer.
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Also set up wrong by the manufacturer. The 2007 honda civic has a highway MPG rating of 40mpg. I regularly get 44-46 while speeding after I fixed their design flaw in the rear end. they set the car with significant negative rear camber and with about 2 degrees of toe, I reset it to zero and zero and not only did fuel mileage numbers skyrocket by 10-15% but rear tire wear dropped to zero or undetectable.
Oh. Dear. So what you've done is make the cornering worse. Mind you given that US cars are a bit crap when it comes to bends you probably don't notice any difference.
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No fuel economy figures are going be right (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't the more important thing that the all the cars figures are comparable.
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Exactly. If they've got good precision, the information is still useful. You can tell that Car A uses significantly more fuel per mile (or whatever the heck a "kilometer" is) than Car B.
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How much MPG inflation was applied to "Car A" vs "Car B" ?
If Car A scores 50MPG using a tweaked evaluation rebuild while Car B scores 40MPG in all-stock off-the-assembly-line configuration, there is a fairly good chance Car B may actually fare better under real-world conditions than a stock version of Car A.
It is a bit like F1 racing: under ideal conditions, the engine would be designed to just barely not fall apart until the last race of the season is over. For an MPG evaluation, the car only needs to last
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An inaccurate but precise measure is great if it's consistently inaccurate. But if it's consistently inaccurate, why not just measure the inaccuracy and correct all the values?
Because inaccurate measurements are rarely consistently so.
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A test not producing results that reflect what it purports to be measuring is kinda the definition of inaccurate. Perhaps you're confusing accuracy and precision?
We knew the gist already (Score:4, Insightful)
We pretty much already knew that the MPG we saw on the sticker was higher than the MPG we would actually be getting. Hence the phrase "your mileage may vary."
But we also know that the sticker MPG numbers are good for comparing among similar cars, and that's mostly how we use the sticker MPGs. Kudos and thanks to 'What Car?' for calculating the 19% offset figure. I wonder if they could tell us how the offset varies among different types of cars. Maybe SUVs vs econoboxes vs sports cars have somewhat different offsets.
BTW, I would bet that different driving styles, lead foot vs hypermiling [ecomodder.com], makes a bigger differnece than the 19% calculated by 'What Car?'
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The only important thing is whether the figures can reverse on you. If it's an across the board reduction, who cares? I'd be way more interested if it was possible for the relative efficiency of two vehicles to actually switch around.
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> But we also know that the sticker MPG numbers are good for comparing among similar cars,
No, you don't know that. You assume that.
When the benchmark doesn't test the things you care about then you can not count on a linear correspondence between the benchmark performance and performance on what you want to measure.
Think of it this way - the manufacturers are "teaching to the test" when they design their cars now. A student who only memorizes the test questions isn't going to have a real knowledge of
Lower? (Score:3)
Usually I think of lower figures as better. Especially in the UK with litres / 100km.
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In that aspect, Canada is similar to the UK.
This is not new news (Score:3, Insightful)
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watch the program on 5th gear (Score:5, Interesting)
before making *any* judgement you *need* to watch the program on 5th gear which covers exactly this question in some detail. basically the test was designed originally for people driving sensibly, and it was designed i think well over 20 possibly even 30 years ago. so it has a very *very* gentle acceleration and deceleration curve. gentle acceleration because that is not only fuel-efficient but also the cars of that time simply could not accelerate that much, and gentle braking because again that is more fuel-efficient but also because if you had drum brakes they would overheat.
people no longer drive sensibly: they are more aggressive with other drivers (not keeping a safe distance), they put their foot down hard on the accelerator and they put their foot down hard on the brake. also as the cars are more reliable they tend to not maintain them properly: until i watched another program on 5th gear about how badly old oil affects fuel economy and the lifetime of the engine i had absolutely no intention of changing oil regularly in the decade-year-old cars i buy.
so, in effect, people should stop complaining and start driving in more fuel-efficient ways... *regardless* of how aggressive the person behind them gets when they set off from the lights at the same acceleration rate as a 40 tonne cargo lorry. that's the other person's problem.
Re:watch the program on 5th gear (Score:5, Funny)
WTF are you blabbering on about? Cars from 1980 or 1990 could not accelerate that much?
You must be a young kid or something, but not everything before your time was primitive by virtue of you not having come along yet.
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He should watch the documentary "Grease" to see how people drove back in ye olden days :D
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I think GP was referring to gutless European econoboxes.
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people no longer drive sensibly
[citation needed]
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people no longer drive sensibly: they are more aggressive with other drivers (not keeping a safe distance)
Is that why traffic deaths have consistently gone down since 20 or 30 years ago? - Killed_on_British_Roads.png [wikipedia.org]
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That's a tough correlation to make. Cars and roads are also safer now, and lifesaving techniques have improved.
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With these statistics, it means riding a bicycle is safer than driving a Hummer.
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As a trend (Score:2)
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>Heh I've moved down from a 929cc missile down to a more sensible 650cc with 1/3 of the horse power..
I assume you're talking about a motorbike?
Even a "sensible" 650cc bike will leave almost all cars apart from high end supercars for dead at the lights so on a day to day commute I doubt you'll notice much difference :o)
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The other thing that's changed is the way people drive on motorways. When I was first driving, back in the early 90s, you could sit on the motorway at 80mph (for those outside the UK, that's a little above the legal limit of 70) and be overtaken by a steady stream of ton-up drivers. The outside lane was a hazard and you'd need a huge gap to overtake and still have frustrated drivers getting right up your arse.
It still happens to an extent, but it does seem that the average speed has dropped. I see far fewer
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It's just the way they're tested. (Score:2)
The testing standards for the EU fuel consumption numbers are very strict and stringent and have never actually stated that you'll be able to reach these figures yourself. The cars are tested indoors, and are not in any way subject to real world conditions during this test. It's just a tool to standardize the way the cars are tested so as to give the consumer a clue when comparing different cars.
Because of course the car manufacturers are going to game the system by not only "cheating" with taping, over-inf
All relatively the same (Score:2)
economy figures that are on average 19% lower than the government figures
So long as ALL the official figures are equally inaccurate, the ranking still feeds into the choice of which cars are the more fuel-efficient and which are less so.
Therefore it makes little difference whether the figures are exactly what one would expect (though nobody is ever that naive) or out by a factor of two. You'd still expect that the little runabout with a 80 MPG "official" figure would be cheaper to keep topped up than an 30 MPG gas-guzzler.
As it is, few people take much notice of figures: offic
Obvious explanation (Score:2)
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rules (Score:2)
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When my car had a bad thermostat the mileage (and power) of the car dropped significantly. This was during the winter. After replacing the thermostat, efficiency and power were back up!
Isn't this true in North America as well? (Score:2)
Isn't MPG based on an out-dated formula which everyone knows is wrong?
I also thought all the people who bought hybrids were annoyed to discover their actual mileage was nowhere near accurate, all because you're required by law to use the EPA formula which is essentially useless. I even seem to remember some people wanted to sue the car makers for using misleading numbers, but since they can only report the numbers one way, it's not something that can honestly report.
Sounds like it's time for someone to co
All I know is that the cars I want to drive (Score:2)
are not the ones that get the highest mileage ratings. Cars are not just transportation. Some people actually get pleasure out of driving, and some cars are definitely more pleasurable to drive than others. The ones that are most pleasurable, be they high end luxury sedans with all the comforts of your living room, or high performance sports car, get lousy fuel economy. That's the way it has always been and with the exception of electric sports cars, the way it's going to be for a long time to come.
Look
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Oops!
my anecdotal evidence differs (Score:2)
Of course I'm not in the UK (even if I was wouldn't i be concerned with km/litre instead of m/g?) Anyhoo I drive a 2003 VW Jetta Wagon TDI (manual transmission) and according to fueleconomy.gov (http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=sbs&id=18793), the car gets 35 mpg city 45 mpg (avg 39) highway. From my experience it never gets less than 50mpg on highways (close to 60 driving between CT and NH), but now that I live in the city, with traffic jams, waiting several light changes in queues to mak
True MPG does not matter; true relative does (Score:2)
BUT, knowing that something is rated at say 30 MPG vs. 40 MPG using the same car that I would buy (i.e. nothing rigged by the makers), will make a difference.
Of course, a number of us are moving from MPG to MPC (miles per charge).
In further news (Score:2)
The sky is blue, ice is cold, and politicians lie
US city figures too (Score:2)
Probably unknown to many people is that US city epa estimates include driving on the highway.
UK thing? (Score:2)
My car gets better mileage... (Score:2)
My car is rated 27/38 by US EPA.
Over the first 36,000 miles, I have averaged 42 MPG (two drivers).
I'm obviously happy with this result.
This Has ALWAYS Been True (Score:2)
One of the biggest "Doh!" moments lately. I can't believe some consider this news.
Re:What's that in KPL? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What's that in KPL? (Score:4, Insightful)
Your concern might be less of a troll if you knew that the standard metric measure for fuel economy isn't km/l, but rather l / 100km.
While km/L is less common, it certainly does appear as an alternative measure in many countries, particularly to allow people to compare it to mpg metrics (as the GP was suggesting here, since the title of this story is about "MPG"). You are correct that in many countries, L/100km is standard.
Before we get the standard debate about this crap that comes up every time this topic comes around, let me just point out that the reciprocal relationship between these two measurements doesn't mean one is "more correct" than the other. Rather, both will give intuitive results for different questions or given different constraints.
For example, if you're buying a car primarily for commuting, gas consumption per distance (e.g., L/100km) will give you an intuitive sense of your fuel cost, since your daily distance is relatively fixed. If your L/100km doubles, your fuel cost for fixed commutes will double.
On the other hand, if you're buying a car primarily for occasional longer trips and not using it for regular commuting, distance per gas unit (e.g., mpg or km/L) will give you a more intuitive sense of how far you'll be able to travel with the same gas budget. People buying a car only for occasional trips probably are more likely to care about how far they can go with a given amount of fuel rather than how the fuel cost will vary for a fixed distance. If your MPG doubles, you can go twice as far with the same amount of fuel.
Different metrics are useful for different things. These two have a very clear relationship, but when non-math-literate people are comparing the raw numbers, one can be better than another in making decisions depending on the situation.
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Except that the Prius costs more energy to make than many vehicles with a higher fuel consumption.
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Except that the Prius costs more energy to make than many vehicles with a higher fuel consumption.
I'm willing to bet that it doesn't take much more energy than other cars its weight.
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If you ignore the lithium ion battery pack? yes.
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The Prius battery is NiMH. Some other hybrids might use Li-ion.
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Toyota, Honda and Ford got sued by plenty of people about overstated fuel efficiency - particularly in colder states and Canada where many complain that their hybrid car has worse real-world MPG than plain ICE cars.
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I'm suspicious of the Prius simply because they don't offer a non-hybrid version. The aerodynamics shape and narrow tires seem well-suited to fuel economy no matter what the engine. The hybrid Camry is an economic non-starter for my use case.
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Pretty much, yeah. Toyota designed an Atkinson cycle engine, which is much more efficient than the traditional Otto cycle. The problem is that it doesn't produce much torque, meaning that it doesn't take off as quickly as people would like. So they added an electric booster to make up the torque shortfall. The fuel savings from running on battery are minimal - the internal combustion engine usually kicks in within seconds of setting off, and stays on unless coasting. Conventional cars don't use fuel wh
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You're referring to an exceedingly small number of cases here. If you look at fuelly's numbers, only 55 out of 1879 Corollas tracked average more than 40 MPG (2.9%), while only 178 out of all 2930 Prii tracked get *less than* 40 MPG (6%). In the overwhelming majority of cases, the Prius gets better fuel efficiency than Corollas.
That, and the Prius' chief advantage is in city driving, which taxis operate in virtually exclusively. Since you're claiming Corollas beat them in their home environment, I call bullshit on your argument.
Not just city driving, but taxis do a lot more idling and waiting than a normal passenger car.
Stranger things have happened. Initially the city of Toronto failed to see as large of savings on Hybrid transit buses (seeing 10-20% vs. promised 20-30%), largely because they operated on suburban routes instead of stop and go urban routes.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com... [theglobeandmail.com]
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I'd pay a hell of a lot more for a pint if I got free head!
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There's already a rule about the size of the head but as usual it vaguely defined. As I remember it, "the head may not form a substantial part of the pint". This isn't helped by the fact that some drinks, e.g. lagers and ciders generally don't have much of a head at all, while others such as Guinness are expected to have a comparatively deep one.
The only way you're likely to get a landlord to top off your drink is if a) they're obviously taking the piss and b) you're not the only one at the bar. Having your
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In Canada most places use lined glasses. The bartender is almost never going to actually look at the line, so you always get a bit extra. The point is that you know you're going to get a minimum amount of beer. Crappy bartender who pours a giant amount of head? No problem.
Fuel economy is the same thing. You can't tell if the inflated numbers for one car are more or less inflated than the numbers for another car. Not to mention you can't actually do any planning based on them.