Hybrids Beware? EPA Revises Mileage Standards 550
Shivetya writes "The federal Environmental Protection Agency announced a new system for determining the fuel economy of many cars and trucks. Hardest hit will be hybrids as all-electric driving is not considered. At the same time, many medium-duty vehicles will get rated, but not have to be published until 2011 This move to more realistic ratings will severely reduce the high numbers some cars have posted."
Finally, a new sales pitch for Hummers (Score:5, Funny)
Dabu: Nine.
more information about this... (Score:5, Informative)
A site to enter your own observed information http://www.fueleconomy.gov/mpg/MPG.do?action=addG
or lookup what others have recorded http://www.fueleconomy.gov/mpg/MPG.do?action=addG
Beware of what? (Score:5, Insightful)
By the way, I don't hate HUMMER owners.
Cheers.
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I was going to buy a prius, until I realized I could get a 2000$ kia pos and run it into the ground and still save hundreds of dollars in gas, over a thousand dollars in insurance, and about 24k on the car itself.
Sure, the I want to send the KIA careening off a cliff, but as far as fuel efficiency *and* economi
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Why do so many folks go nutty over proving that hybrids are the greatest thing ever or the stupidest thing ever?
Don't you watch South Park? The folks with hybrids bend over and fart into glasses because they think their farts smell so good. The hybrid drivers are so much more evolved than the rest of us, or so they would have you believe.
I don't really hate hybrids but I do get annoyed when things seem to be rigged for hybrids and against diesel when recent diesel engines are much cleaner than they used to be and on the freeway do much better than a hybrid. You also don't have to pay the weight penalty of batteri
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available just about everywhere, cars will be sold that take advantage of it (dare I speculate about
diesel electric hybrids in 2009?).
In the long term, I see biodiesel being more practical than ethanol (easier to make, transport, and
more efficient to use in an internal combustion engine (at least until high-compression engines
optimized for ethanol are built...not these crippled flex fuel engines)), so I'm all fo
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Go ahead. Diesels have less compression braking, which allows for better regenerative braking for a hybrid over gasoline/electrics. When the prices come way down for hybrid components (as they have for airbags, EFI systems and ABS controllers over the past couple of decades), expect to see hybrid diesels bring together city efficiency and freeway efficiency.
Re:Beware of what? (Score:4, Informative)
With a 22.5 to 1 compression ratio (close to 500 lbs engine compression) it had lots of engine braking.
I think the difference is that this engine had a butterfly valve in the intake hooked up to the throttle and a vacuum line to the fuel pump for throttle operation and others have the throttle connected straight to the fuel pump with no valve in the manifold to create vacuum.
Another nice thing about that engine that given a hill to jump start it you didn't need electric power for it to run.
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I'd love to see a diesel electric hybrid, that would be awesome.
Side note about alternative fuel energy gains*:
Ethanol from corn: 25%
Biodiesel from soybeans: 93%
Source: Science News, July 15 2006, vol 170 pg 36-37 "Farm-Fuel Feedback"
*energy provided vs energy to produce. Also, corn takes tons more fertalizer and other crap to grow, it's a crap energy sourc
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The best plant for energy, both alcohol and biodiesel as well as plastic, and one hell of a lot of other useful things is hemp.
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Re:Beware of what? (Score:4, Interesting)
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My dodge stratus was 2-5 mg higher than what was posted. Whiles my liberty only gets it's highway rating while going from gas station to gas station while driving on the highway.
these are only supposed to more accurately reflect real world driving conditions. Fact is while many hybrids get better than average gas millage a lot of them never see the full numbers posted. driving a hybrid optimally isn't how americans drive.
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The big deal is that I get a "real world" 40 mpg out of my 96 Honda Civic, and I don't have a trunk full of toxic batteries. Sure all EPA gas mileage ratings are currently very optimistic, but they are especially optimistic for hybrids, and that's a problem.
The Prius is a great car, but you could almost certainly have gotten a non-hybrid car that was more efficient in real world driving at a much lower price. You wouldn't have to worry about batteries either. As a concrete example my 96 Civic gets much
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Re:Beware of what? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Beware of what? (Score:5, Insightful)
What the new rules are designed to do, and what the American car manufacturers is upset about, is to close a loophole that allows the American manufacturers to ignore minimum standards in the fuel consumption of the fleet. This is not an evil plot by the government, this is something that the government was forced to enact due to the repeated failure of the manufacturers to obey the spirit of the law.
Two examples. Cars had certain requirements to help protect our environment, but trucks necessarily did not. The manufactures created this loop hole by saying the farmers and small business could not afford the extra equipment and such equipment was not necessary if rural areas. The congress agreed. In response to this loophole the manufacturers started pushing the SUV because they did not have to put as much technology in it, and therefore the cost to produce was often cheaper. Then, due to certain vagaries in the tax law, they realized the could push really huge SUV and trucks, as the cost after tax deduction can actually be cheaper than smaller, better built, more fuel efficient vehicle. Such things forces responsible manufacturer, like subaru, to end up a competitive disadvantage when they build cars that won't kill the family of four in the Honda Cvcc.
Which brings us to today. The fuel consumption estimates for hybrids is a jake, and allows manufacturers to seriously underestimate the average fuel consumption for of their fleet. For example, for can use the wildly overestimated fuel consumption on the Hybrid escape to compensate for the fuel consumption on the Expedition, which, even though fuel saving technology increases every year, the fuel consumption does not get better. With the old rules this basically evened out, and the overall fuel consumption remained constant. However, with the new rules they are in trouble. Ford wants to blame the company trouble on health care of the line workers, but I bet it is more an issue of using funds for executive pay rather than R&D. Why else were they so afraid of disclosing executive pay, and why else would they be so happy that the SEC rescinded the requirement to fully disclose compensation. And the fact that the order came the day before christmas was even more interesting.
Which leads to today.
Toxic batteries? Sez who? (Score:5, Informative)
Li-ion batteries have few toxicity issues either, and the new chemistries like iron phosphate and titanium spinel have even less.
Of course, it still makes sense to recycle batteries instead of landfilling them. Lead-acid car batteries are already the most-recycled items in the USA, and the more valuable the materials in the battery (nickel, lithium, cobalt in the old Li-ions) the more attractive it will be to recycle them.
Re:Beware of what? (Score:4, Informative)
What nobody is posting is the fuel ratings for many diffrent styles of driving. Highway and city are fine, but what about all the mail delivery and newspaper routes. During the big storm in Louisana, many people simply ran out of gas on the freeway because they were getting less than 5 MPG in the creep and stop driving. I hope the EPA includes local delivery estimates to the mix.
I do have a Prius. I have stuck a kilowatt inverter in it. It doubles as an emergency generator. I have run for days at a time off it. It would start, run at a fast idle for about 5 minutes and shut down again and repeat in about 20 minutes. A regular car would be out of gas in under 24 hour sitting at idle. I use about 1/8 of a tank a day running this way while running a couple CF lights, the fireplace blower, the small TV, the fridg, and a small chest freezer. I ran that way for an ice storm that knocked out the power for 2 days. When I ran low on gas, I filled it and still got 32 MPG on that tank. (my all time low) Not bad for 2 days of running getting 0 MPG and a week of commuting.
I would have never been able to do that with a conventional car.
The choice of a car sometimes comes down to more than just a replacement for public transportation.
I would like to see the real world numbers for letter carriers and city buses.
Just my honest opinion here. (Score:4, Interesting)
It would seem much more logical to expose a truly random selection of cars to exhaustive tests over a wider range of conditions for longer periods of time. Instead of averaging, you plot against a distribution and take the average of the distribution. This, however, is not the quoted figure for any car. It's merely the baseline for that model. Each car has to have some nominal testing - at least to see if the engine will start. Assuming that the distribution will be the same with merely the offsets being different, you then derive the effective MPG from the distribution and where that specific car is believed to be on it.
You now have an MPG per car, but it's still a single value and single values are useless. I'd therefore do the above with nine distributions, not one. One for 0-25 mph, one for 25-50, one for 50-75, and each of those for smooth traffic flow, heavy traffic and stop/go traffic.
Consumers tend to drown out lots of stats, though, and nine numbers - trivial to any geek - would be murderous on your average couch potato. On the other hand, colours tend to be workable. Simply do a rainbow spectrum, where violet is so far above average that driving round the planet uses less fuel than a typical hummvee uses to get out the parking lot, and where red is where you're escorted to the grocery store by an oil tanker. Nice and visual, though with hard data for those who actually want hard data to work with.
Re:Beware of what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because the most vocal group of hybrid owners are agenda-pushing, "I'm better than you because I'm hugging trees" (based on what the media tells me, but I don't really know the facts), starbucks-moca-frappa-apple-cina-chino-at-$6-a-po
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For some people, hybrids are the environmentally smug way to show off how big your penis is.
Despite all the data saying that hybrids do not create a net energy savings, a lot of people treat 'em as an eco-conscious status symbol.
The energy that goes into building a car outstrips, by far, the amount of gasoline you're going to burn during the 'normal' service life. If you want to do the world a fav
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Either way, people need to keep in mind that alternative engery sources and hybrids are still works in progress. Even if they aren't economically or environmentally more efficient than traditional vehicles, the current cr
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I think that if a Prius gets in the HOV lane for that, then a Celica should as well.
Re:Beware of what? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're not paying extra for a car that gets exceptionally good MPG. You're paying extra for a car with good MPG that doesn't suck to drive.
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I've given up wondering why so many people seem to simply not care whether they live or die, and keep all my attention on not killing them.
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As a pedestrian, when trying to cross the road, I put some effort into looking like I'm completely oblivious to the cars in the road and just walking into the road like an idiot trying to get myself killed. This works way better at getting them to stop and let me cross than stopping and staring at them does. I do make sure that if the cars don't stop for me I'm not actually going to be in the way, but watching a car out of the corner of my eye while blatantly looking the other way and walking towards the ro
Hybrids and cold weather... (Score:2)
I summer, th
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:Which cars are overrated? (Score:5, Funny)
*used to own a Hyundai Excel and will NEVER EVER drive in a Hyundai again*
Hybrids are all gas powered (Score:2)
Insight never goes all-electric (Score:3, Insightful)
It is, that said, an exceptionally stupid rule; the Prius gets a huge benefit from the all-electric mode, and that ought to be included in the mileage calculations, because it's the bottom line that affects a real user. If your car can do three miles of bumper to bumper traffic with the engine off, instead of burning a quarter gallon of gas idling, you have saved a quarter gallon of gas. That your engine didn't need to be on to achieve this is a feature, not a bug.
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Re:Insight never goes all-electric (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Insight never goes all-electric (Score:4, Insightful)
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As I understand it, none of the Honda models will run all-electric. They are optimized for highway driving with the electric motors as an assist. The Toyota models are optimized for city driving (where all electric makes more sense), hence the higher city than highway mileage rating.
I think the logic is that engines are more efficient at highway speeds, and motors at city speeds.
From a design sense, the Honda system scales be
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RTFA (Score:3, Informative)
It very well may be included. The article summary omits a couple of words -- namely "some of"-- from the sentance in the article that says. "Hybrids will be hit harder because the new test eliminates some of the all-electric driving that helped them produce impressive results under the present system" The article is not specific about
One-Two Punch (Score:5, Insightful)
Getting the US off of the foreign oil tit should be a national security imperative.
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Foreign Oil has ethical issues more severe than coffee. Often enough you get a local strongman supported by oil money, or a clan of bloody thieves.
Oil has a billion and one environmental issues, from CO2, which is claimed to cause the current global warming (although I'm skeptical of causation rather than collation). Not to mention Sulfur, trace minerals, lead, benzene exposure, oil spills killing cute and fuzzy animals.
Or better yet, oil being
I agree, but good luck... (Score:3, Insightful)
In order to get off the "foreign oil tit", as you put it, we'd have to do alternatives for lubricants, plastics, asphalt, jet fuel, diesel oil, heating oil, etc.
Sure, there are alternatives for may of those (biodiesel, corn-starch plastics, electricity generation fueled by something besides oil, etc), but the alternatives are often more costly (and less efficient) to create than the original... or can be worse for the environment (e.g. coal-fired elect
California disagrees (Score:4, Informative)
Fair 'nuff: I was 1.4% off according to CA (Score:3, Insightful)
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It would be interesting to find out if the breakdown simply reflects the refining process and its byproducts or whether the consumption breakdown can be skewed to gasoline over the other uses reflected in the California study.
We ARE in luck. Look at the numbers. (Score:3, Informative)
Your claim is refuted by the facts.
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Collecting fuel efficiency data for medium-duty vehicles but not publishing it until 2011? What a bold initiative!
This is about stalling until the domestics can come up with something to compete with Toyota. They won't, though, because they suck at making anything with tight tolerances.
*thpppppt*
-Isaac
Free juice from the man (Score:2)
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We bought a Prius in September. We average about 55 MPG in warmer weather, and 47 MPG in driving in cold Michigan/Canadian weather (both city and highway), so I don't think Hybrids will see as big of a dr
Fuel Economy Hasn't Changed Much (Score:2, Troll)
On a
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Only if a significant improvement in fuel efficiency was directly profitable to the automobile manufacturer. I say this not as a slap at the "greedy car companies" but simply to point out the obvious: the car companies are in business to make money, and as long as lower fuel efficiency and larger body/frame is "profitable" (as long as it sells) they're not going to "wa
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The point is - the Otto (Petrol) motor is a mature technology and it won't improve anymore. In contrast, we have been getting 50MpG with Diesel cars since about 1975. Gawd knows why Diesel cars are not marketed in North America.
air conditioning effects mileage? (Score:4, Interesting)
The final thoughts were that no modern air conditioning system should vastly impact gas mileage.
They even tested it on some SUV and came out with very similar gas mileage. (Windows down actually caused slightly more loss).
I'm sure someone will chime in here and clear this up a bit. I was just a bit confused when the article claimed air conditioning was a gas hog. (Note, on an older car I had when I kicked in the AC I really did feel the engine jump to compensate, but this was ages ago.)
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for instance, my car tells me i get about 2-3mpg less when driving around without the turbo spooled (4-banger, below 3000rpm). that's an extra tank of gas consumed per month, and my car is relatively newish. who knows how much those ol
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When the AC kicks in on my car I can feel it, because I have 110 hp to work with (peak) - when the car is cruising it's probably making about 25 hp, and single-system automotive AC (the norm) takes 3-5 hp. That's a very large percentage of the power the engine is making.
As you say, you tend to actually get slightly better mileage with the AC on than with the windows down, because modern cars tend to be highly aerodynamic (in an effort to get better mileage ratings.) Open the windows and all that aerodyn
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I did these tests on my own, recording engine load, fuel flow, AC during idling, and AC during driving. The AC can be VERY taxing.
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When I turn on the air conditioning, I litterally get an "air-brake" effect.
If the cruise-control is on, the RPM's jump up to compensate (IIRC about 200~400rpm).
If I am manually controlling the speed and engage the air-conditioner, I drop speed and available horsepower.
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All relative? (Score:2)
The most energy-efficient vehicle in the world... (Score:2, Informative)
won't change my car (Score:4, Interesting)
leave it to the government (Score:2, Insightful)
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http://www.toyota.co.jp/en/k_forum/tenji/pdf/pgr_e
from http://wikicars.org/en/Toyota_Prius [wikicars.org]
Total energy used to produce the car and run it is only slightly better than an all gas model because initial energy requirements for a similar sized car is MUCH higher, something that goes contrary to "common sense".
That gets payed back over the years in better gas milage. The wikicar
Why no Diesels in North America? (Score:2)
A hybrid is a very expensive way to get the same mileage as a diesel. They are hard to start in Winter compared to a petrol engine, but the Europeans make do somehow.
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*yes, that includes even the brand-new ones in many cases
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Why are diesel cars unavailable in the USA/Canada?
Diesels in autos were banned in California (and I believe New York, as well) due to emissions problems, even though clean-burning diesel technology has existed for ages. Since California represents a huge market, and since it doesn't make much sense for the automakers to have separate models for the California market, diesel autos are relatively rare. Of course, rather than banning diesels, CA could have required the automakers to use the clean-burning technology despite the resistance. Anyways, look ho
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Re:Why no Diesels in North America? (Score:5, Informative)
It's also zippy as heck. The motor produces a ton of torque at really low RPMs so it feels a lot faster than it really is, but the feeling makes it a ton of fun to drive.
The biggest reason that more diesels aren't sold in the states is that California banned the sale of new ones. Several other states adopted California's emissions laws (New York and most of the northeastern states). Consequently not many car companies are interested in investing the time, effort (replace previous two words with 'money') to bring diesels to the US -- it's illegal to sell them in many states so it would be a lot of money spent for not much return in sales revenue.
You can buy used diesel passenger vehicles in any of those states, but it's hard to find them (since they were never sold as new there in the first place) and they fetch a premium. Case in point: I bought mine *used* for $19,500 in New Jersey (where new diesels are actually legal to sell), and it had 42k miles on it at the time. New, the car's sticker price was about $22,000. Now it has 60k miles on it and my car will fetch $21,000 without too much trouble (I live in California these days). It's kind of a shame they aren't more common, as the mileage is good (36 city/50 highway is my real-world driving).
Before people call me a diesel zealot, I'll definitely mention the bad things: they are bad in that they create more particulate in their exhaust, which has been shown in studies to be a carcinogen. Old-skool diesel fuel sold in the US also contained lots of sulfur, which created sulfur dioxide in the exhaust, which in turn created acid rain. The sulfur also prevented good catalytic converters from being used, so diesels create way more NOx. Now that we have low-sulfur diesel in the US, I think diesel cars will become quite a bit better...but the reputation they garnered as smoking, smelly, sooty, bad-for-the-environment cars through the 70s and 80s will probably hurt their chance at widespread adoption in the US.
Diesel is also interestingly becoming more expensive than gasoline where I live. I find it funny, because diesel fuel is a lot easier to produce than gasoline, or so my fuel engineer friend tells me. Still, mile for mile diesel fuel is cheaper, since I get about the double the mileage that I would in a similar gasoline vehicle...
Hybrids not so affected (Score:3, Informative)
So bravo for these changes being added. Toyota and Honda are obviously the leaders in this field and they'll either make no change to their strategy and just keep having the highest EPA numbers, or adjust their strategy slightly to keep high EPA numbers but handle rapid accelleration with good mileage numbers - something that, by the way, the current Prius does not do, regardless of how many claims salesmen and Prius enthusiasts made. It gets its great numbers when cruising, or starting and stopping at low speeds - which is just what the old EPA standards tested.
Any environmentalist worried about the Prius dropping from 60mpg EPA to 44mpg should keep in mind 2 things:
The Hummer will probably drop from 11mpg to 9. Single digits won't improve sales. They might harm them. Might.
The 2008/2009 Prius has been claimed by Toyota to get 75mpg under the current standards - so it's entirely possible the new EPA measure will put it at... 60mpg.
So even if the new tests somehow favored gas guzzlers, which I doubt, Honda and Toyota have the technological lead and their MPG numbers are only going to continue to run away from the rest of the pack leaving GM and Ford's "hybrid" sub-30mpg numbers further and further behind.
Real Estimates? (Score:2)
So what if they have decided to change the test to simulate driving in sub-freezing and balmy temperatures in the same drive. The reason why the EPA numbers always seem high when you are calculating your fuel economy at the pump is there is now way to perfectly model how an actual person drives th
learn to drive (Score:3, Informative)
how many people do you know who always have their foot flooring the gas or brake? if people learned to use the accelerator and brakes effectively they would probably save 10 mpg on every tank.
i'll bet i get better mileage in my eclipse than a decent percentage of hybrid owners, simply because most people don't think about how they drive.
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I'll bet your
Looks like GM is none to happy (Score:5, Interesting)
Personnaly I am sort of happy to see GM get thier lunch eaten. They've been asleep at the switch for too many years.
Here an interesting article as well. http://www.cnn.com/2006/BUSINESS/12/22/toyota.reu
A choice quoute from the head of Toyota: '"The important thing is to be a leader in car-making, and that's done by improving products," he told a year-end news conference, adding that vehicle quality will be Toyota's top priority at a time of rising vehicle recalls.'
An American manager would have spoken some crap about "leveraging synergys for value added customer delight", in other words not admitting to a problem and just engaging in window dressing. American management seems to have lost thier way, focusing on image without addressing fundamentals.
Hoo-fucking-ray. (Score:2)
Nevermind... I'm reaching
Not a big change in my Diesel :) (Score:2)
It's good that they are revamping the test, but it's bad that it may not accurately reflect the real life experiences that full electric drivers will experience.
-Rick
95mph, 250mile, 10 minute charge electric vehicle (Score:4, Interesting)
http://phoenixmotorcars.com/models/fleet.html [phoenixmotorcars.com]
An electric vehicle has almost no parts which require servicing; no valves, no spark plugs, no oil to change, no air filter, no piston rings. Basically it'll last as long as the chassis is structurally sound and the bodywork remains reasonable. The only bits which'll wear out are the consumables, the battery and bearings. With a battery which can last for 20 years, there's no real reason the vehicle shouldn't do a million miles with bugger all servicing.
The battery:
"In addition to high power the Altairnano NanoSafe
batteries deliver:
Long life - potentially up to 20+ year life
Very fast charge - rechargeable in minutes
Extremely wide operating temperature range
from -50C/-60F to +75C/165F
Inherent safety - no risk of thermal runaway"
Maybe what we really need... (Score:5, Interesting)
...is something like a Nielsen rating for mileage. Pay some people to put a black box in their car that records the mileage. For new models, you just publish the EPA "laboratory" mileage. For cars with a year or more of real-world driving, they could post "actual" mileage. One big problem however, is that you might not be able to get enough people to sign up. You need enough people to sort out the lemons (although if mileage lemons are produced, that's important to know).
Kudos to the EPA for taking this a step closer to the real world.
Now, it wouldn't carry the same weight as a controlled data-gathering or testing effort, but is anybody aware of a mileage website, where people just enter their mileage for various makes and models? Sounds like something GasBuddy could add as a feature.
Ture Hybrid numbers from an owner (Score:3, Informative)
Going up grade the car performs great. Last week I drove up to Flagstaff and had no problems maintaining 65 for the 5-10 mile stretches of 5-7% grade with 4 people in the car. The electric engine augments the ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) and that helps the performance.
On the A/C front, the Prius has a multistage compressor so the hit on the car is minimal under moderate heat. I see plenty of hot conditions out here and the milage doesn't seem to be effected much at all even at maximum cooling. If anything, the mileage is a bit lower in cold conditions due to the engine running longer to bring the engine up to temp for emisions management. It also is an ELECTRIC motor compressor so the power used is not directly from the gas engine. That should help with the new EPA tests.
Do I drive like a type "A" personality? No, that never did appeal to me to race up to a stop light to get one car ahead. I do drive to take advantage of the car I have. YMMV.
Carpool/HOV lanes (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought the point of HOV lanes was to have fewer cars on the road.
Allowing hybrids there does not encourage fewer cars out there.
But, you say, hybrids are really efficient, and the allowances helps fight polution.
Well, hybrids, by design are the most efficient in stop and go traffics.
Braking charges the batteries.
But in the HOV lane, hybrids are slowing less, so using the gas engine more.
Really need a total cost of ownership (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:GOOD. (Score:4, Interesting)
Even more important then the markeeting driven "HP rating" should be a simple graph showing a dyno run with peak torque and HP noted. Oh, the graph might confuse consumers! Well we are even more let down, fooled, and confused by the peak HP claim that companies use now.
One of my compact cars is rated at 140HP. My mini van that weighs at least 1500lbs more is rated at 165HP. My van will blow that car off of the road even while pulling a 1000lb trailer. The peak HP are almost meaningless. Torque is more important for determining real world output and neither alone are as informative as looking at a dyno run sheet would be. Hell, I guess you could skip the dyno chart and include a 60ft, 1/8 mile and 1/4 time with the trap speed.
Re:GOOD. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Just in case you seriously didn't know, though, the displacement is the difference in volume of the cylinder with the piston at top dead center and bottom dead center. That's a space filled with air (and atomized fuel, ideally), and the air is *displaced* by the piston moving through the cylinder. You change displacement one of two ways - change stroke length or change bore diameter. In other words, either the cylinder of air being displaced gets
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* SUV's are the only category of vehicle that is available with 7+ passenger seating, aside from minivans. There are whole swaths of suburbia where mommies and daddies cart their kids and their kids' friends around every weekend. A 4 passenger econobox is simply not adequate for this task and I absolutely guarantee that this is part of the purchase decision. (Minivans, as an alternative, are not much mo
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I own a 2005 Toyota Prius, and I can get 53-57 miles per gallon (or more) easily. This is not just measurements on local roads, but includes highway driving, some stop & go traffic, and all the things seen on my daily commute.
The above was calculated not just over short distances, but over the full 400+ miles I can get out of the ~11 gallon tank before I decide to refill it (typically, I put 8-9 gallons in, and calculate mileage both via the on board computer, and how much fuel I put it versus the tr
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