8128 miles Per (US) Gallon

idletask writes: "Yes, you read well. This is the new record established this year in the Shell International Mileage Marathon (NOTE: English link, their figures are calculated using UK gallons), held this year on June 1st and 2nd on the Circuit of Nogaro, by a team from Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, France. This yearly contest, sponsored by Shell since 1977, consists in travelling the longest distance with only one liter of gas (the record is therefore actually 3494km with 1 liter), at a minimum pace of 25kph (~15mph). Full results of the contest can be found in a PDF file. The only US team who participated this year scored 69th, with 1136mpg (483km with 1l)."

Comments

Go U.S.!

[tchdab1]

"The only US team who participated this year scored 69th, with 1136mpg (483km with 1l)."

Yes, but the US team's Sport Utility Test Vehicle pulled an ultralight trailer with a teeny boat on it.

Measurements

[Wrexen]

I know some of you are having a tough time with the miles-per-gallon or kilometers-per-liter measurement, so I've taken the liberty of converting this to a useful measurement we can all relate to.

Simply put, 483km/1L is 1.2425 x 10^-6 earth-moon distances per cubic centimeter of fuel. I think that puts in it perspective

Ummm

[snubber1]

Of course 2171 actual miles on one liter of fuel would probally NOT scale very well when you are carying 4x the fuel at the beginning (One gallon instead of one liter). With numbers like this, weight must be a very important consideration.

More info

[DeadSea]

Junkyard wars had an episode in which the contestants had to build super fuel efficient vehicles. They showed some clips of these actual races. The basic premise is that you get very light, very aerodynamic, much lubrication, and thin tires with a large diameter to reduce rolling resistance. Most of the entrants burn their fuel in stages and build up speed and then cut the motor and coast because engines need some amount of fuel flow to keep running and their efficiency goes to where flow would be below this minimum.

The most fuel efficient car you can get in the US is still the Hybrid Electtric Honda Insight. I have about 63 mpg average over the two years that I've had mine.

Description is misleading

[GregWebb]

Unless they've recently changed the rules, they most definitely do _NOT_ give them their litre of fuel and tell them to keep going until they get bored. 8000 MPG, average speed of 20 MPH (say), that's over 2 weeks of continuous driving.

Last I heard they took the cars, ran them over an agreed course of a few miles maximum, excluded those who ran too slowly then measured the amount of fuel left in all the cars VERY CAREFULLY :-) and computed the MPG from that.

boring...

[kurowski]

it would be much more interesting to see who, given one liter of gas, could win a race over a road circuit. steady-state driving at low speed doesn't relate to most real-world driving.

Re:Lack of information

[Christopher Thomas]

None of the links in the story provide any useful information at all, as far as I can see. The first is for a "Mileage marathon society" which doesn't appear to have any information about a particular recent contest. The second is for the location at which the event was held; the third links to a blank page inside Shell with some plugin that doesn't work in my Mozilla. Searching Shell for "Mileage Marathon" produces lots of results in other languages and from 1998-99, but nothing topical.

A few links in, there's more information. Here are the contest rules:

http://www.shef.ac.uk/~mms/rules.html

They have to do 6 laps of a 1.64 mile course with a minimum _average_ speed of 15 miles per hour. The vehicle with the lowest fuel consumption wins.

The vehicles have people in them, which puts a lower limit on their size. Engine technology can be anything that qualifies as a heat engine and runs on unleaded gasoline.

Supermileage

[Tablespork]

I participated in the Minnesota Technology Education Association's Supermileage Challenge in May. It was basically the same thing except it was just a bunch of high school teams. It really is a great competition, I learned a lot and had tons of fun.
My team ended up with a top mileage of 305 mpg, this was for the stock class. Fairly good considering we had limited time, budget, and experience.
The way our competition worked is this: Each team is given a fuel bottle and it is weighed before the start. You then go around 2 laps (of the 3 mile track at Brainerd International Raceway) for a total of 6 miles. They then weigh your fuel bottle again to determine how much gas is used (making sure there are no air bubbles in the fuel line). This ends up a pretty accurate way of determining gas mileage. The weight of the gas really shouldn't matter that much, since more weight would mean you carry your momentum longer. You have to complete 6 runs and they take the average of that.
Now since we are high school students, our main goal was to build a working car. You then focus on aerodynamics, good bearings so it rolls well, wheel alignment, steering, and driving practice. Getting practice is key. Not only to determine what will break, but also to get good at controlling your burns. Short burns at high rpm's get you up to speed(roughly 30, which was the max), at which point you cut the engine and coast down to around 10(you have to maintain an average of 15). By the end of the 2 day competition, you saw drivers getting very good at rolling to a stop inches over the finish line.
It was a really fun competition, we saw some very cool cars with everything from carbon fiber bodies, to computer sensors and lcd displays mounted on the steering wheel, and you could download all the data to a computer for analysis. Sweet stuff.

Re:Not entirely correct.

[tbmaddux]

Actually the Golf/Jetta TDIs don't even approach the top 10 of most fuel-efficient cars (by EPA combined mileage rating) ever sold in the U.S, going back as far as 1986 (when the numbers changed a bit). If you can't top 50 mpg, you can't play with the big boys:

1. 2000-02 Honda Insight 5spd (65 mpg)
2. 1986-87 Chevy Sprint Er (57 mpg)
3. 1988 Chevy Sprint Metro (56 mpg)
4. 2001-02 Honda Insight CVT (56 mpg)
5. 1990-94 Geo Metro XFI (55 mpg)
6. 1986-87 Honda Civic Coupe HF (54 mpg)
7. 1988-89 Honda Civic CRX HF (52 mpg)
8. 1992-95 Honda Civic HB VX (51 mpg)
9. 1990-91 Honda Civic CRX HF (50 mpg)
10. 1985 Chevy Sprint (50 mpg)
11. 1985 Suzuki Sa310 (50 mpg)
12. 2000- Toyota Prius (48 mpg)
13. 2003 Honda Civic Hybrid (48 mpg)

I think you can make a case for those 4 Civic models being essentially the same car. There may be some other older cars that I missed, but they'd have to be older than 1986. As far as overall "greenness," the batteries in the Insight are nickel-metal-hydride, not nickel-cadmium, as someone else pointed out, and the diesels are rated with a score of 1 out of 10 on emissions. The CVT Insight gets an 8 or a 10, the manual Insight gets a 5 or a 6, and the Prius gets a 7 or a 10. Until biodiesel is widely available, the VW diesels definitely aren't a good "green" choice, and we may have fuel cells before biodiesel...