Students Build 2752 MPG Hypermiling Vehicle 233
MikeChino sends along this awe-inspiring excerpt: "Think claims of electric vehicles that get over 200 MPG are impressive? Try this on for size: a group of mechanical engineering students at Cal Poly have developed a vehicle that can get up to 2752.3 MPG — and it doesn't even use batteries. The Cal Poly Supermileage Team's wondercar, dubbed the Black Widow, has been under construction since 2005. The 96 pound car has three wheels, a drag coefficient of 0.12, a top speed of 30 MPH, and a modified 3 horsepower Honda 50cc four-stroke engine. It originally clocked in at 861 MPG and has been continuously tweaked to achieve the mileage we see today." It's not quite as street-worthy, though, as Volkswagen's 235 MPG One-Liter concept. Updated 20:01 GMT: The Cal Poly car's earlier incarnation achieved 861 MPG, not MPH; corrected above.
They say others did better (Score:5, Informative)
Not to steal their thunder (and this mpg result is old news), but according to their own blog [blogspot.com], Universite Laval got 2757 mpg in that race. And Mater Dei High School hold the record with 2,843.4 mpg [materdeiwildcats.com].
Rather pointless (Score:4, Informative)
A consequence of this is that MPG exaggerates the benefit of highly fuel-efficient vehicles. 2752 MPG sounds like a lot. But switching from a 25 MPG vehicle to a 50 MPG vehicle saves you more gas than switching from a 50 MPG vehicle to a 2752 MPG vehicle. To cover a distance of 50 miles, the 25 MPG vehicle would consume 2 gallons. The 50 MPG vehicle would consume 1 gallon, for a savings of 1 gallon. The 2752 MPG vehicle would consume 0.018 gallons, for a savings of 0.982 gallons. This is less improvement than the switch from 25 MPG to 50 MPG. Because MPG is inverted, a 10 MPG improvement on a 25 MPG vehicle saves a lot more fuel than a 10 MPG improvement on a 2000 MPG vehicle.
Consequently, the most important thing for reducing overall fuel consumption is to get people out of gas guzzlers and into more fuel efficient vehicles. Stuff like hypermiling vehicles getting >2000 MPG are interesting from an engineering and design standpoint, but they serve little practical use. Even if you could develop a real car which got 2000 MPG, getting a single SUV driver to switch to a Prius would save 3.5x as much fuel as getting a single Prius driver to switch to this new ultra-high MPG vehicle.
This is why most of the rest of the world measures fuel efficiency in liters/100 km. It makes the amount of fuel your car will use for a typical drive pretty obvious, and makes it dirt simple to compare how much fuel you'll save switching to a different vehicle (just subtract the two numbers):
SUV = 16 liters/100 km
sedan = 9.4 liters/100 km
Prius = 4.7 liters/100 km
vehicle in article = 0.085 liters/100 km
UC Davis got 3313 mpg in 1992 (Score:4, Informative)
In 1992, UC Davis students working under Professor Andy Frank achieved 3313 mpg with its SideFX and Shamu. The school later developed some of the first hybrid car technology, among other things.
http://books.google.com/books?id=OeMDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA10&lpg=PA10&dq=uc+davis+side+fx&source=bl&ots=yNnL_bcwLY&sig=hhexAD2-JnRF_cp2YeJRXn20AVI&hl=en&ei=DVCAS-GrI4zgswOL7-SHBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9&ved=0CB8Q6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=uc%20davis%20side%20fx&f=false [google.com]
Re:hypermiling is useless.y v (Score:3, Informative)
Troll!
There's plenty more to hypermiling than driving technique. Aerodynamics, weight reduction, use of lightweight oils, making sure tires aren't underinflated, and keeping the engined tuned and clean. Quite a few of those things increase safety as well as fuel economy.
You speak as if hypermiling is totally selfish. Some of the techniques are rude and dangerous-- drafting leaps to mind. But many driving techniques can save everyone gas. Coasting up to a red light definitely saves everyone gas, both for the coaster and those behind. Going as slow as the speed limit (imagine that!) saves gas compared to going 10 plus mph over. Funny how you pick on hypermilers for alleged inattentiveness while overlooking cell phone users. Bashing on hypermiling in general because you can't stand sharing the road with a few hybrid drivers who might not even be doing any real hypermiling makes about as much sense as hating all uses of cellphones.
But picking on drivers is too far down the food chain. Where's your outrage over bad road routing and design? Bad stoplight timing, too many stoplights, too many stop signs, too many intersections? Terrible urban planning and building location? I'll give you a few examples. A southbound street that was the shortest way out of an area with approximately 10000 people used to connect to an east-west highway until the highway was changed into a tollway. Now that street only connects to the westbound service road, and to go east, people have to drive 1 mile west to a U-turn. There is no shorter way. Those tollroad planners screwed a lot of people. Another is the typical street interchange. At regular intersections, the lights are set up so 2 opposing left turn lanes (assume driving on the right) can go at the same time. But at a stoplighted interchange, the opposite directions are separated by a highway, making it impossible to do that neat little left turn trick. So instead they often make the interchange a 4 cycler, allowing only one direction to go at a time. Or they double stop the left turners. Do we have to put up with this? No! The interchange could be better designed. For instance, if the position of the highway and the service roads was swapped, so the fast lane is the right lane and the slow lane with the exits is the left lane, then we could do the double left turn just like at an intersection of 2 streets. As for suburban sprawl, the typical strip mall and miscellaneous group of independent stores is so hostile to pedestrian travel that people actually drive from store to store within the same strip mall. Because, you know, who wants to cross 4 or 6 lanes of traffic to get to that coffee shop on the other side of the street even though it's less than 100 feet away?
And where's the outrage over the crap the automakers have done? They haven't hesitated to save themselves a few pennies though it costs fuel economy. They'll even waste gas for the sake of appearances, such as the useless grill opening that is much wider than the radiator and condenser. Sure scoops a lot more air into that giant forward facing steel drag chute known as the engine compartment. One of the biggest is the classic automatic tranny with torque converter. 20% hit to fuel economy so you don't have to shift gears. A top gear that isn't high enough, so that you can roar around slower cars without having to downshift. But you know what? We can have an automatic that doesn't need a torque converter. Another gigantic one is instant starting and stopping of engines so cars don't burn gas while sitting at a red light or in a drive through. We could have had that by now if anyone cared for it.
I'd rather bicycle. (Score:4, Informative)
shell marathon (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Rather pointless (Score:3, Informative)
The point is to use less fuel. The gallons per mile measure makes it clearer how much fuel will be saved for an average trip, or how much fuel will be saved by by getting the more efficient vehicle. The GP is obviously aware that the ratio is simply inverted but most people wouldn't recognize this.
A similar situation exists with sunblock cream, where effectiveness is currently advertised as sun protection factor, or SPF. This is just the inverse of the amount of UV the gets through the cream - so SPF 50 means 98% of the UV is blocked. A doubling of SPF in this case would mean a very slightly more effective suncream. SImilarly, a doubling of MPG for a very efficient car means a very small amount of fuel is saved.
Shell Eco marathon (Score:2, Informative)
. http://www.shell.com/home/content/ecomarathon/about/current_records/ [shell.com] [shell.com] http://www-static.shell.com/static/deu/downloads/aboutshell/media/news/shell_eco_marathon_press_kit_2009.pdf [shell.com] [shell.com]
a) The CalPoly is an IC Prototype (futuristic) entry; as some noted, the record is held by the Microjoule, St Joseph La Joliverie, 3,771km/l (8870mpg per wolfram Alpha) b) There are categories for Urban Course - realistic quasi street legal modifications, with significant economy wins by the Norwegian and danish teams (fuel cell and ic engine