Slashdot Mirror

Or choose your car carefully. My car is 8 years old, gets 4L/100km (65mpg) combined and cost me $3,500 last year. I've saved $4,000 in fuel costs so far - mainly because I had to drive a lot for a short period of time - 40,000 miles in one year.

Don't believe me? Well, here you go and this figure *is* accurate, I get about 750 miles (1,200km) in between refills of about 45 litres.

Sad thing is that this is still the most fuel efficient medium sized car available in the UK today. There are now a lot more fuel efficient superminis though, compared to only 2 when the car was new.

Yes you can
http://www.vcacarfueldata.org.uk/information/how-to-use-the-data-tables.asp#petrol

The Ford Fiesta looks like the most efficient at 76.3mpg or 305.2 miles per passenger gallon. The Smart is a two seater car and gets slightly more miles per gallon if you are driving alone or with one other person.

No, we have smaller gallons and fuel economy numbers that are realistic.

My Prius gets 60 miles per US gallon on the highway, according to http://www.vcacarfueldata.org.uk/.

According to the EPA, it gets 42 miles per US gallon on the highway.

Guess what? I get around 48 miles per US gallon in reality.

Polo Bluemotion does 57.6/88.3 mpg city/highway
http://www.vcacarfueldata.org.uk/search/vehicleDetails.asp?id=20690

The Jetta certainly isn't one of the 80 MPG cars - it's pretty big by European standards - there are 3 smaller models in the UK line-up. It depends on exactly which model you got and where you were driving I guess. Automatics are significantly lower efficiency than manuals - in fact for the smallest diesel engined Jetta, with automatic transmission, driving in town, the quoted fuel economy is 36 mpg.

There is a VW Polo model that does 57mpg urban and over 88mpg extra-urban. It's one of the 1.4 diesels and there are quite a few similar models with similar fuel economy.

This black puff of smoke idea, I'm not too sure where you get this idea - I rarely see this. I've just got a diesel myself, 5 year old Ford Focus, so fairly average in terms of emissions. There is a very small amount of soot when the accelerator is genuinely floored, but even driving aggressively it's pretty rare and pointless to floor it, and I'm not sure the tiny amount of smoke would be noticed by any other drivers. Only poorly maintained cars or really old ones emit a significant amount of soot.

The Jetta certainly isn't one of the 80 MPG cars - it's pretty big by European standards - there are 3 smaller models in the UK line-up. It depends on exactly which model you got and where you were driving I guess. Automatics are significantly lower efficiency than manuals - in fact for the smallest diesel engined Jetta, with automatic transmission, driving in town, the quoted fuel economy is 36 mpg.

There is a VW Polo model that does 57mpg urban and over 88mpg extra-urban. It's one of the 1.4 diesels and there are quite a few similar models with similar fuel economy.

This black puff of smoke idea, I'm not too sure where you get this idea - I rarely see this. I've just got a diesel myself, 5 year old Ford Focus, so fairly average in terms of emissions. There is a very small amount of soot when the accelerator is genuinely floored, but even driving aggressively it's pretty rare and pointless to floor it, and I'm not sure the tiny amount of smoke would be noticed by any other drivers. Only poorly maintained cars or really old ones emit a significant amount of soot.

The Aygo diesel gets 68.9mpg. The Prius hybrid gets 65.7 mpg. Both figures in UK gallons taken from http://www.vcacarfueldata.org.uk/

http://www.vcacarfueldata.org.uk/

Using the official government figures at http://www.vcacarfueldata.org.uk/ , the Prius gets 65.7 mpg.

Models with traditional engines from Toyota include the Aygo - 68.9 mpg and the Yaris - 62.8 mpg, so other than the fact that some road tolls and parking permit charges are cheaper on the Prius, there isn't really much point in getting it.

These figures are in British gallons. There's about 1.2 US Gallons in a British Gallon, so the 65.7 mpg is comparable to your 55 mpg.

This takes in slow city traffic, faster freeway traffic and top speed travelling, approximate to an average consumers car usage.

Using petrol is kinda what your stuck with at the moment (or diesel, which is still a fossil fuel).

Most efficient car available is the Honda Insight M5, getting 83.1MPG and having the lowest CO2 emmisions of any car (80g/km, which is about 25% lower than the next contender). Unfortunately they're damned near impossible to get - the best quote I've found is £62,000 and no honda dealer I've talked to has even heard of it...

Next you've got a bunch of diesels (Citroen C2 1.4HDi at 68.9mpg & 108g/km), the Prius is quite a way down the list at 13th (65.7mpg but with lower co2 emissions).

The most efficient petrol engine available (Peugot 107) is only 61.3mpg... I'd like to see the figures for this BMW to see if it can beat that.

(source: http://www.vcacarfueldata.org.uk/)

Followup: I couldn't find an equivalent fuel economy site for Europe, but this official-looking site:
    http://www.vcacarfueldata.org.uk/

has a bunch of data on UK fuel economy. Of course, they use a different testing methodology over there, which makes comparisons against the US figures somewhat problematic. If we assume the difference in methodology isn't critical, we can use the Prius as a calibration poiunt against the more fuel-efficient cars in their database.

Toyota shows the US Prius as having a 55 MPG combined city/highway rating. Converting that to Imperial gallons so we can compare with the data on the vcacarfueldata.org.uk site, that's 66 MPG (Imperial). Their chart shows 65.6 for the Prius, which seems like a pretty fair match.

Okay, so what gets better mileage than the Prius?
* Citroen C1, C2, C3 (with 1.4 Diesel engine)
* Renault Clio (with 1.5 Diesel engine)
* Fiat New Panda (with 1.3 Diesel)
* Honda Insight (the other high-MPG gas-electric hybrid)

Okay, ignoring the Insight (which is a two-seater, and a gas-burner, anyway), the best of these is about 5% better in overall MPG than the Prius. To be fair, some of them do have substantially higher Extra-Urban (highway) ratings. Probably any of the Citroens on the list would get better MPG on a relatively-long highway trip than my Prius does.

It's worth noting that all of these cars are substantially smaller than the Prius, though. Like 3 feet shorter, half the luggage space, that sort of thing. These are *tiny* cars.

All of the diesel cars produce roughly 5-20% more CO2/mile than the Prius, and 10-40 TIMES as much NOx pollution. With those sorts of numbers, I'm pretty sure I won't be seeing these on the roads in California any time soon...

Anyway, to get back on point - there are certainly cars available outside the US which get better gas mileage than the Toyota Prius, but there's nothing magical about these cars - they're just small cars with Diesel engines.

And it's not like the majority of cars "over there" are way more efficient than the Prius - these are specific fuel-economy-focused models of smaller cars.

I just found this table on a UK Department of Transport website:
http://www.vcacarfueldata.org.uk/information/table s.asp%23petrol
The Toyoya Prius comes second in the fuel efficiency stakes in the 'petrol' category to the Honda Insight, which gets 83mpg, apparently, on a 995cc engine.

It's worth noting that all of the top 10 cars tested get fuel efficiencies of more than 50mpg (yes, Imperial gallons).

Just an observation.

My point wasn't merely to swap the numbers arbitrarily but to illustrate that 60mpg isn't revolutionary in terms of the fuel efficiency of consumer vehicles. There are other cars that already top this, the Citroen C2 can even reach just short of 80mpg. This site might be useful, it lists tens of cars that do greater than 60mpg.