
Washington State Man Drives 1,400 Miles Without Refueling - ankimal
http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/home-built-car-drives-1400-miles-without-refueling/
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waivej
It's not too hard to get good gas mileage on open roads. A few years ago me
and my girlfriend drove a 2001 Honda Insight 1040 miles on one 12 gallon tank.
(85mpg - fully loaded with luggage + nasty traffic.) In the Tour De Sol rally,
we got 94mpg. Keep in mind it is a stock car and there was a lot of weight we
could have removed. (AC, second person, interior, hybrid parts, spare tire,
air bags, glass, etc.) We also only came in second place.

The car is truly light (1850 lbs), but weight mostly affects rolling
resistance (unless you hit brakes). With a lighter car, you can use a smaller
engine. Though, around the same time I drove an 80s sedan with a v8 engine
several hundred miles on the open road and got 40 mpg. It was so loaded down I
mostly drove 50-55mph.

For open roads, aerodynamics is everything. 80% of the energy is spent moving
the wind at highway speeds. Even hills aren't a problem (they store energy
like batteries). Perhaps cars could look more like airplanes? Then we could go
80mph and still get good mpg.

Also, I find it curious that you need to modify a car to make it "safe" for
use on a race track. They have insurance policies that require cages, fire
suppression, rigid seats, 6 point belts, air bags removed, etc. They still
tend to be quite light.

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mey
Race cars are safe, but not comfortable or pretty. People want nice seats,
powerful air, a quiet ride, loud stereo, leather, room for the dog, etc.

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hugh3
While I realise that the HN guidelines encourage keeping the original
headline, knowing the size of the gas tank he used to drive those 1400 miles
would be much more interesting than knowing the fact that he's from Washington
State.

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showerst
Totally cool, but the car is made of fiberglass, so what happens when it gets
in a crash? Does it have airbags?

I've heard (although have no good source) that we've made big leaps in fuel
efficiency in the past 30 years, but much of it has been eaten by safety
advances that make the car significantly heavier.

Can any gear head HN'ers comment?

~~~
oiuygtfrtghyju
Airbags are of no real use if you are wearing a seatbelt.

Cars have got bigger because everybody wants one of those nice safe SUVs with
the special rollover feature.

My 1989 Citroen AX 1.3L diesel used to do >60mpg commuting and a factory tuned
one did 90mpg on a run across europe - it weighted 650kg. A VW polo of the
same era does about the same.

Of course they didn't have 27 cupholders or 7 speaker DVD surround - they are
just cars, limited to transporting 4people at the highway speed limit. They
can't climb mountains or make you irresistible to women.

~~~
showerst
Good point that it's not just safety advances making cars heavier...

It still seems strange to me that even hyper-small cars (by modern US
standards) like the Mini Cooper or Smart still don't seem to break about
40mpg.

Is this related to the US' aversion to diesel? Or just the fact that all of
our cars are comparatively luxury because our standard equipment includes big
seats and air conditioning?

~~~
oiuygtfrtghyju
> hyper-small cars

The new mini isn't hyper small. The original mini cooper had a 2m wheel base
and weighed around 600kg. The new 'mini' has a 2.5m wheelbase and weighs twice
as much.

Cars tend to put on weight in middle age. The clearest example is VolksWagon.
Originally the VW Golf was a small 650kg cheap sub-compact, then as it grew
into it's current size they introduced the smaller Polo which was about the
size of the previous Golf, then as the Polo grew with each new model year they
introduced the Lupo - which was about the size of the original Golf...

Mostly this is economics, as you add more features you can charge more for the
car, so every year it gains features (safety or entertainment) - all of which
add weight.

Then there was the realization by somebody in the early 90s that you could
take a dirt cheap truck chassis, add a cheap minivan body and create a luxury
SUV with a 50% profit margin.

Not sure why the US has such an aversion to diesel. You would think that as a
man's fuel (after all it's used by trucks and tanks) it would be preferred to
the girly fuel you put in scooters.

~~~
ams6110
The US passenger car market hates diesels because of the absolutely awful
"LF9" diesel engines GM put out in the 1980s. They were plagued with problems
and poisoned the market for years afterwards. This is far enough in the past
that its influence may be waning; the VW TDI sells strongly and is often
exempted from sales promotions as a result.

Currently, another roadblock to selling diesels in the US are the draconian
emissions requirements by California.

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sokoloff
Headline omits a critical piece of info. Semi-trucks can do the headline claim
easily, provided the driver is male and from Washington state. It may take
them 250 gallons to do it...

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johngalt
MPG numbers mean less and less as they get higher. It's much more important to
go from 10mpg to 20mpg, than it is to go from 20mpg to 50mpg.

It would be better to list fuel consumption in "gallonage" rather than
"mileage". If you drive: 10k miles @ 10mpg = 1000gal of fuel burned, 10k miles
@ 20mpg = 500gal (600gal less), 10k miles @ 50mpg = 200gal (300gal less)

The compromises you have to make to reach higher mpgs are generally not worth
it to most drivers.

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eru
Yes. In Germany you usually give litres per 100 km. (Though the car companies
tend to cheat, so you should only trust the `gallonage' as stated by, say,
independent magazines.)

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harshpotatoes
For a high school summer job, I used to work at the facilities which test the
emissions on cars as per washington state law. I got to see a wide variety of
vehicles this way. In particular, when I worked at some of the places in north
seattle, a surprising amount of yuppies would come through in very old hondas
with 3 cylinder engines. They were getting 50mpg regularly in city driving. It
was surprising to me at that age to see how long we've been able to get cars
with such good gas mileage, it didnt make sense to me why more city dwellers
weren't driving these small cars, especially since so many people were
spending so much money on newer expensive prius's...

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ams6110
Those early Hondas are deathtraps in a crash though.

