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.
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.
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.
its chassis was made from aluminum that was bonded together with what was basically glue. the entire chassis under the fiberglass body only weighed 160 pounds.
it had airbags but the small size and weight of the car usually meant that crashes didn't end well for the occupants. not so much because of the car itself, but because every other car it might collide with was twice its weight and size. by comparison, here is a lotus elise next to a pickup truck:
i loved it and took it to the racetrack quite often (that picture posted the other day of dhh's lamborghini was taken by me while at a track day with him) and only sold it because i was going to buy and assemble an ultima gtr:
but my life situation changed and that plan got scrapped, so i still have my old volkswagen r32. maybe later in life i'll move back to the suburbs and have a big garage filled with cars. (but probably not a custom pagani zonda ahem)
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.
I can't belive no-one has been taken aback by your airbags are useless comment! Side airbags? Curtain airbags? All of these are proven to reduce that chance of brain damage and death in various impacts.
"Research conducted in the USA estimates that head protecting airbags can reduce driver deaths in the event of a side impact crash by close to 40%*."
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?
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.
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.
Diesel got a very bad rap in the US in the 70's and 80's because some engines were essentially derived from gasoline engines. Also, until recently, the US standards for diesel were very low with high particulate matter in the exhaust. High efficiency European engines wouldnt work with that gunk.
US diesel seems to be pretty bad. (The fuel itself that is) I remember reading something about higher sulfur content than elsewhere in the world.
I also hate diesel cars (I would buy one, but I hate other people in them) because everyone in a diesel around here invariably fills up with french fry grease. I ride bikes, so I'm directly exposed to their stench.
I'm not a car enthusiast, but I'll give my .02. My first car was my parents 56 Chevy V8 that weighed over 3000 pounds and got 15mpg on premium (.35 per gallon). My current car is a little over 2000 pounds and gets 38 mpg, 4 cyl, nothing special. Typical cars are quite a bit smaller and lighter now. Vans and SUV's are not, because they are classified as truck and have had much less stringent mileage requirements.
The car in the story was probably super lightweight, maybe less than 1000 pounds. It has a small lightweight efficient engine that in a normal car would give you 0-60 mph in about a week.
Driving style makes a huge difference in this type of demonstration, slow acceleration, no AC, going downhill in neutral or with the engine off, etc. A friend of min in high school got 50 mpg from and old Plymouth by coasting downhill to school and "driving" on the half back home. We live in a rural area with no traffic.
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...
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.
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.)
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...
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.