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239 MPG Car
Kozmik writes "VW/Audi has a history of being a leader in creating super fuel efficient
vehicles. They currently sell the most fuel efficient car in the world, 3L
Lupo and the
Audi A2,
and the most fuel efficient station wagon (Jetta
TDI Wagon). Now VW is experimenting with something along the lines of the
Honda Insight ( a 2 person vehicle ). The
1L VW concept car
can achieve .89L/100kms or 239MPG. With
Biodiesel and
Ultra low
sulfur diesel becoming available, hopefully more of these vehicles will come
to North America. These fuels are already available in Europe and combined with
the new catalyst technology they use, these new engines produce very low
emissions." It's nice to talk about alternative fuels, but I have yet to see a gas station selling one of them.
It's called supply and demand. If no-one is driving the cars, why would they stock the fuel?
It's exactly the same problem that faced unleaded petrol.
Why did unleaded take off? Well, in the UK a government mandate was passed forcing all cars sold after 1st April 1989 to run on unleaded. An EU directive, 98/70/EC, made selling leaded leaded petrol in the UK after January 2000 illegal.
Until goverments give manufacturers and fuel suppliers a swift kick, errr, benefit to promote new fuels, no-one will bother. (Cue the usual comment about oil companies owning the US goernment here).
"The 'one-liter car' is powered by a single-cylinder diesel engine "
The reason why I am a big fan of VW's attempts to reduce fuel consuption is because of their attention to creating cars that will fit into the infastructure. Although it may not be as good as a hydrogen fueled fuel cell vehicle, if 10,000 high mileage diesel engine VW's are sold for every 100 of the more ideal but far less practical cars the enviromental improvment made by VW will beat those other efforts.
At the risk of being cynical, when did MPG become a consideration in the US? Gas prices are so cheap compared with Europe, so where's the incentive?
at the price of fuel in europe, those cars are not only friendly to the environment, but also to your budget. In belgium, prices for unleaded fuel float around 1 euro PER LITER.
When I went on a trip to the US 2 years ago, I remember everyone freaking out at prices that were less than half of what we pay here...
My current car (an opel Tigra) uses approx 10litres/100km (I do a lot of city traffic plus the car had heart surgery 5 months ago and never fully recovered in terms of fuel usage) making me refill for 40euro every week or so. I could save 36Euro per week, or 420 per year.
Assuming fuel prices will go up in the future (anyone remember anything else ?) I think I can safely say that such a car can save me 5000Euro in 10 years. That's Half a VW Lupo.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
I live in Washingon state and know of several gas stations in the Pacific Northwest that sell Bio-diesel. People who reply on diesel fuel like buring it occasionally (its more expensive) because it cleans outs diesel engines.
Jason
I can tell you just how far I can get on a tank full of ( Low sulpher diesel ) fuel - 450 miles. And how much it costs me - £25 , but I couldnt hope to tell you the MPG figures for it. Especially since fuel is sold in litres these days and not gallons.
Most people I know judge fuel consumption on the same basis. Cost, not MPG. We buy fuel by price, not volume.
Does anyone actually use MPG figures as an every day referance anymore?
We as a nation are ready.e lingsites/default.shtm
These are locations that are registered as selling biodisel:
http://www.biodiesel.org/buyingbiodiesel/retailfu
Now, the big question is: Are we as CONSUMERS ready? We americans love our big 12mpg SUV's...
Maybe Michael should RTFarticle...
The 'one-liter car' is powered by a single-cylinder diesel engine...
So how many places in the world is it impossible to get diesel? Given that this is the fuel *all* (bar none!) trucks use. The story poster had it right - there's new diesel fuels around which are less polluting, which makes this even better. But it'll still run just fine on plain old diesel.
The only trouble is selling diesel cars to the US market. Or in fact selling *any* fuel-efficient car to the US market.
Grab.
~160mph? Thats not fun thats just idiotic, perhaps such speed is fun to some people, to others it just means death. Remember the speed limits do actually mean something. I dont see most Americans driving at over 100 every where they go...
Id far rather be doing under a 100 in a Ferrari and just be smug in my knowledge that I own a Ferrari. But its not just the luxury cars in the US that are gas guzzlers, it seems the average car is still hugely inefficient. Hell BMW, Ferrari, Porsche all come from Europe, so we know about cars that drink fuel, but these cars dont make up the majority of those running on the road, if you paid the same for fuel as that in Europe you would soon see people thinking more about how much their cars drink, in Europe the only people who can afford 15mpg on a regular basis are the ones who can afford a luxury car, not some Redneck.
"Also, the US eats more oil than all of europe"
Thats something to be proud of? Its not just eating more of it, its how poorly it is used.
easy tiger - I wasn't boasting that I can get 80 out of my car (duh: I mean which continent do you think they developed that pocket-rocket M3 of yours on anyway? america's certainly not the only place people have fast cars) nor was I talking about driving for fun (note; I said I was talking about my daily commute,) and I certainly wasn't being xenophobic, I was just saying that getting smart responsive handling and a decent speed (for rural Scottish roads I mean - I'm talking the A70 over the Pentland hills Lanark to Edinburgh here for anyone interested) out of a regular affordable small hatchback is a big selling point for environmentally friendly fuels like the low-sulpur diesel my car runs on - that said I'd quite probably be driving an american-style gas guzzler if it weren't for prohibitive taxation (which in this case is a *GOOD THING*)
take the time to read bvefore reacting next time? and chill out.
Dear moderators,
If you disagree with what I've written (I have no problem with that), why don't you reply to my post instead of giving a "-1, Overrated" right from the start? Too bad "Overrated" mods are not caught in M2, I consider this to be serious shortcoming of the Slashdot moderation system.
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
American are number driven consumers. Trying to sell a highway vehicle here with 8 horsepower? Never happen. We have lawnmowers with more HP. You guys know it is the same with computers with the megahertz myth.
People do not understand power to weight ratios or torque. I can not tell you how many people thought there were faster than my 500 LBS 1.1 liter Honda CBR. I would say things like, "Look 500 pounds and 160 HP. Let me get you a calculator. I do not care if your car has 400 HP, I will cream you."
Now if you were to market the car as the "The 0-60 in 8 seconds / 200 MPG car" then you would have something! But you could never advertise 1 liter - 8 HP. No no.
Diesel is more fuel-efficient, but it's also burned less clean than gasoline. Diesel motors release particles into the air which are higly carcinogenic. Only very recently have there been trends to install filters in the cars which accumulate these particles and destroy them every so often. Some car manufacturers refuse to install them since the filters, in turn, decrease fuel efficience - but just by about 0.1l/100km, so that shouldn't be that big a deal. Anyway, without these filters, Diesel engines are not that great, environmentally.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Europe has chosen to tax fuel very heavily IN ORDER TO making non-gasoline options more attractive. Many European countries are -- contrary to your statement -- interested in keeping the fuel prices up. To protect the environment and to force the car manufacturers to invent motors with more reasonable fuel consumption.
It's not really an apples-to-apples comparison, as those taxes subsidize all kinds of other efforts and don't really reflect the true cost of driving on the consumer.They are intended to reflect at least part of the true costs -- also counting damages to environment and health, building of new roads, traffic management. Unfortunately, some means of transportation like trucks or planes are not taxed as heavily as others, which is IMO the wrong way.
SebastianI know of quite a few Lotus Elises, at ~1600lbs, that have been in serious crashes (collision, rolled, nose-first 12ft into a ditch) with little or no driver injuries. The driver sits in an extruded aluminum bathtub with a rollcage around him. The front and back are collapsible subframes and the body panels shatter. I feel quite safe.
Along with the McLaren F1 (also very safe at 2400lbs) it's the only car to be drivable after the front collision test.
You don't have to make cars heavier, just more intelligently.
Nevertheless, simple physics seems to dictate that if you were in a head-on collision with an Escalade, well, I think I'd rather be driving an Escalade myself than one of these 150 lb hybrid tupperware-mobiles.
Speed limits going up, car weight and size going down. There's all of 4 inches between your forehead and the windshield in an Insight. Eeek. Are you okay with your 16 year old daughter in a tinfoil 2 seater doing 75 on the interstate just to be the only person in your town to save some gas?
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
As another reply pointed out, this comment is completely wrong.
The most popular selling type of car in the US is the SUV, which is excluded from the CAFE. These can be as unefficient as 10mpg in certain conditions, and the manufacturers have no incentive to improve this.
Saying that the US is very interested in the fuel economy is absurd: not only will they not make any substantial effort to make sure manufacturer's increase efficiency, they also refuse to look at other factors (such as road surfacing) because large corporations might make a few bucks less.
That's why you get a Ford F-250 king cab diesel or any other big diesel thing and convert it to run on french fry grease. That is exactly my plan in the next year or so -- get a used Ford (why Ford? they are common in my neck of the woods (I hate to wait for parts) and my brother-in-law is a Ford mechanic) and do the mods for used grease (my wife works at a culinary school!). ANY diesel vehicle (even BIG OLD CHEVY SUBURBANS if you want to feel tank-like) will do. Mercedes are nice and safe. Escalade schmescalade - get a diesel EXCURSION!!
Considering that used grease is usually free, the $1000 install of the kit should pay for iself in short order -- at a minimum I go 40 miles a day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year. At $1.50 a gallon of something (and 15 mpg, though that is optimistic for a big thing) it will pay for the kit in ONE YEAR.
I'm thinking about it, therefore I might be.
I had a 1983 IBM PC with an Intel CPU and I can't see what the big deal was. Storage was on slow noisy small floppy disks. If I typed to fast in WordPerfect the screen lagged in updating. It didn't have a network connection. I could only get 16 colors on the screen at once (an it cost an arm and leg to do it). I wonder if anything has improved since then?
There is a problem compareaing straight numbers like that. The USA has some large empty areas like Alaska , and the south west deserts that are sparsely populated and skew the numbers significantly. You should see a map that plots population density to geographical area. You will find that parts of the USA, such as the eastern seaboard, have popluation densities that are more comparable to Europe.
They're also exempt from many other regulations too, like bumper height and several other safety related regulations (here in Europe and in the US).
In fact, non-conformity to bumper height regulations is the prime reason they are so destructive when hitting normal cars.
Yes, manufacturers who want to sell vehicles in the US have to meet those standards. But do you think the foreign makes have to try very hard to meet them? If they do, they are the luxury car makes and they treat the fines as a tax and bump up the price of the vehicle a bit. Their target market isn't going to care that much. BWM is having success with the Mini because it's a nice well made small car. They saw that they could exploit a niche that would otherwise buy VWs or Japanese cars and if it does help w/o the CAFE fines, that's even better. Unfortunately, a large number of people still refer to these things as death traps and think they are a tin can like the Metro just because they are small.
However, if you haven't noticed, the US automakers are pushing SUVs, light trucks, and minivans because they are mature designs, have higher markup and aren't subject to the same CAFE standards. That's why US ave fuel economy has gone down over the last decade. Light trucks weren't included with passenger vehicles in the 70s because most of those were use for commercial and agricultural uses. Subjecting them to the higher standards would have limited their usefulness in those roles. The manufacturers are exploiting that loophole and minority of what is in the light truck category is actually used for what they were designed for. They are largely passenger vehicles. Even though the PT Cruiser is based on the Dodge Neon, because of the body design puts it in the light truck category, so their sales do not impact the CAFE averages for Chrysler. IMHO, since light trucks are largely being used for passenger vehicles, they should be included in the CAFE standards. Some of the existing designs could continue to be sold as heavy duty variants that require a commercial license to purchase.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Of course. What this means, though, is that there are also segments of the United States where there is room to continue spreading. I live in Southern California, and while I have the luxury of a shift that does not require me to drive in heavy traffic all that often, I do quickly tire of traffic when I do have to experience it. I'm considering moving in the next couple of years to a somewhat less fully-populated area, probably far from the current locale.
Europe, on the other hand, has considerably less expansion room, other than up. This means less room for new roads and highways, and dictates more spending on railways and busses, which can carry a higher proportion of people per volume. I'd love to see more rail here in SoCal. There was recently a plan to add a nice 35-mile rail system linking just north and central Orange County, with some spurs including around where I work and live. I was all for it -- except the central county NIMBYs have managed to scale it back to a mere 12-mile line, and it goes nowhere near where I work and live. Oh, well.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Did you have a problem with the data, or the analysis of the data?
Oh, I'm sorry, that was an ad hominem attack. Okay, well then...
Of course Cato gets funding from car and oil companies. Cato lists as the title on its home page The Cato Institute: Public Policy Analysis, Limited Government, Free Markets. If they're engaged in a shadow conspiracy with the oil companies, they're not covering it up very well.
So...let's hear some criticism of the actual report. What? You can't tell a regression analysis from a Subway sandwich? Color me surprised.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.