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Hybrid Cars Don't Live Up to Mileage Claims
Omega1045 writes "Wired News is running a great little article about how hybrid cars (specifically Honda and Toyota models) do not come anywhere close to living up to their fuel efficiency claims. The article highlights that the EPA tests are more to blame than the car manufactures. Consumer reports has shown that the mileage for these cars can be as low as 60% of the claims. The article also links to a blog authored by hybrid enthusiast Pete Blackshaw detailing his failures getting any real answers on why his Honda Civic Hybrid isn't getting better fuel mileage. It looks like these cars are more hype than help in the battle against pollution and foreign fuel reliance."
Personally, I'm interested in hybrids but not for fuel efficiency reasons. I'd like to see auto makers combine the output from different energy sources into all-wheel acceleration of a normal car. I remember seeing something on the news a few years ago about Ford experimenting with that on an Explorer, trying to jazz up the acceleration of a bigger vehicle. I don't know what became of that testing, if anything. But it would be extremely cool to see that technology in a small, sporty car.
It has to do with the way the milage per gallon is calculated. It's not the same as really driving.
Let's go Hurricanes!!! 2006 Stanley Cup Champions!!!
I get 32MPG out of my 1.8T Jetta (5-speed stick) on the highway. But I've read all over the place that the zippy little turbo belches all kinds of nasties when fully engaged.
What I'd be more interested in is the air and environment impact of charging batteries vs. providing high torgue. Not to mention what one does with batteries that can no longer hold a charge. Land fills?
Let's not look at just the MPG's on this. Let's look at the over-all impact of the vehicle throughout it's lifespan. Even if it doesn't immediately effect your bottom-line... it could effect your quality of life in 25 years.
cheers,
Levendis47
--==[ AOL YIM ICQ : Levendis47 : levendis47@yahoo.com ]==--
I'm glad. Maybe this will discourage more companies from jumping on the hybrid bandwagon, and spend their research money on hydrogen-powered cars instead.
Hybrids are only delaying the inevitable, and (according to this article) not by as much as we thought.
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I think you just contradicted yourself there buddy. If you are more efficient, it requires less fuel to produce the same amount of power, a function of time and energy. Less fuel can produce just as much or even MORE energy with better efficacy.
I am laughing, cause my TDI (Diesel) actually gets 40-50mpg, is thousands less then a hybrid and diesel is now way cheaper then gasoline.
I didn't see this answered in the article
Don't lie. You didn't read the article. Most of it is about that very fact. You couldn't have gotten past the first two paragraphs.
This isn't informative, it's a half-truth. So what if you can't create more energy? A huge amount of the energy that burning gas (exploding gas fumes, really) liberates is wasted in heat out the engine, heat out the gas pipe, and heat due to friction on the brake pads. Offhandedly dismissing the impact that reclaiming some of that wasted energy can have is ignorant. It's like looking at a river and thinking "Well, we can't make this water create any additional power". Build a dam and create a manmade lake, and you can generate billions of kilowatt hours per year.
Hydrogen Fuel Cell Baby
We can make it here
You can drink the exhaust (h20)
You can tell OPEC to rotate.
Many a long talk since then I have had with the man in the moon; he had my confidence on the voyage. Joshua Slocum
Honda has a new Diesel powered car that isn't a hybrid, and is getting 76 MPG (U.S. gallons) in real-world testing by the FIA. It's also breaking speed records for its class in the FIA testing (with the exact same cars used for the fuel efficiency test). I'm curious as to why diesel powered cars aren't more popular in the US, they can be much more efficient, and with recent advances in catalytic converters, and technology, these new diesel engines run very clean and very quietly.
There's no batteries to worry about, and you get a fullsize (well... not subcompact like most hybrids anyway, hehe) car with a full trunk to use.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
Diesel cars with similar fuel effiecncy, but definitely not the cleaniness, have been around for ages.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
You're wrong in many ways.
You CAN create more energy from less fuel, of course you usually talk about USABLE energy... so, improving efficiency leads to more usable energy.
A lot of cinetic energy (which is a form of ordered, high quality energy) is wasted in the brakes, here's where you can improve efficency.
The act of moving doesn't theoretically need energy (except for the pure cinetic energy you reach during the travel) so, there's a lot of space for improvements.
The principle behind hybrid cars does make sense, it tries to recover some energy that otherwise would be wasted (engine at idle, brakes, etc...)
Like all cars, hybrids need more power when you're overcoming inertia (and that's when they go to the gasoline teat). If you're in a hilly suburban area where you're accelerating to speed, only to immediately stop again, yeah, you're going to get crapulent mileage. Notice that the ratings are for "highway" (fairly constant cruising, once you're at speed), and "city" (low-speed stop and go traffic, where you can stay on battery half the time).
If your hypothetical bloated SUV had one of those nice little LCD consumption displays like my '04 Prius, I bet you'd find that it needed several decimal places to display anything other than 0 when dragging its lard ass up a hill. I suspect that all such mileage ratings are for "ideal conditions," and even those nice little plain-gasoline economy cars get 5-10 mpg less than the 30-40 on the sticker.
As a data point, my Prius averages 45 mpg (well, 45.4 on the current tank, around mile 400). I tend to float between 50-70 on I-495 around DC, depending on traffic conditions, and have five minutes or so of 25 mpg deadweight in the suburban areas at the endpoints of my commute.
I drive a honda civic, and spent the last week driving my sisters civic hybrid (been considering getting one).
:) but it still performed perfectly well
At first I thought it felt remarkably close to the standard civic in performance, then I went back to the standard civic
But according to the car (its readout not my calculations) I got about 39-40 MPG durring the week, where as I calculate any where from 28-35 MPG on my civic.
Not a big increase, but It seemed like they could have done more to make little improvements, like according to the car the electric motor never assists unless your really heavily accelerating or going up an incline. also it turns the gas motro of at a stop light, but if you move again it wont turn it off unless you exceed 5 MPH, so if your in real bumper-to-bumper traffic the motro stays on, now I realize the design of the engine(s) probably makes it so the car can't move without the electric but it seems to me it would be morte asthetically pleasing to keep the gas off until you actually start moving faster than say 5MPH. (there would have been stretches of 20-30 minutes in traffic without the engine even running if that were the case for me.
all in all I would definatly consider a hybrid when I purchase my next car, but my milage expectations have been brought to earth.
Overall, I've gotten an average of just over 50 miles per gallon over the last 16,000 miles. In the summertime, I get about 53-55 mpg, and in the winter it's just under 50.
I definitely changed how I drove to maximize my fuel efficiency. If you don't leave the car in gear as you're braking to stop at a light or stop sign, the engine won't charge and you're mileage goes way down. If you accelerate like a bat outta hell after stopping, you lose mileage big time - instead you have to just accept that you're gonna accelerate slower than other cars.
Others have asked the question, and I'd be curious to know the answer: do non-hybrid cars live up to the EPA mileage reports? One would imagine that the EPA would have some consistency in their testing, so it'd be okay to compare numbers.
Interestingly, on my Civic hybrid, the dashboard display of the average mileage for this trip seems to exaggerate the mileage consistently by about 4-5 miles per gallon. I reset one of the trip odometers each time I fill up the tank, and use the odometer reading (number of miles travelled) along with the number of gallons I put in to make my own calculation of mileage. It's always at least 3 or 4 miles per gallon lower than what the display reports. My Honda dealer is clueless about the hybrid, and couldn't even understand the question when I asked them about this difference.
Bio is also over 3$ a gallon. Thats over 43$ a tank of gas!
Err, gas in the US is gettin there (and in Hawaii it's already there)...
Considering we should be slapping a Gulf War tax on every gallon of gasoline sold, perhaps homegrown fuel would be less of a 'sacrifice'..
(frankly we should put a war tax on gasoline and subsidize biofuels, removing agricultural subsidies that are alleviated by increased pricing due to legitimate demand and giving 3rd world agribiz better access to our markets... but that's another rant..)
I love my Golf TDI. It averages 40-45mpg (seasonal) for commuting and 45-50mpg on interstate trips, actual verified mileage as opposed to the useless EPA estimates that this article talks about. But please don't kid yourself about pollution. TDIs still make more soot than gas engines, and it'll be years before low sulfur diesel is standard in the US.
I bought it for the mileage. My goal is to always have higher MPG than my age. IMO, suburban SUV owners (not park rangers, USGS, etc) are supporters of terrorism.But if I can get double the mileage out of a diesel then it's effectively two tanks in your car. Given the gas prices currently, 2 tanks on any sedan will likely be more than $43.
If you think about it, city driving involves less aerodynamic drag, so it should require less energy to accomplish. Motorcycles (driven sanely) regularly do better in town than on the highway, largely because their aerodynamics are crap. Hybrids are typically designed with lots of efficient features (as you point out) and hence do OK on the highway -- but where they really shine is in city conditions, where they use less fuel per mile [and a regular car would use more fuel per mile].
I have about 35k miles on my Honda Insight, and I am getting the mileage as advertised. It is rated, if memory serves, to get between 62 and 68 mpg. I am averaging about 63. Granted, because most of my miles are highway miles, you could argue that I should be getting 68, but I cannot exactly complain with 63.
;)
One thing this car has taught me, however, is that I don't think any car will get the mileage as advertised if you do not drive it "correctly." Because the Insight gives me constant feedback about what sort of MPGs I am getting at any given time, I have learned and adopted different driving patterns to maximize MPGs. For example, when coming up to a red light, I tend to coast and slow down gradually, rather than accelerating right up to it, and braking more quickly. Anyone in the passenger seat does not notice the behavior as weird, and at this point I just do it naturally and without thinking. However, when I am in a friend's car with them driving, I do notice that they tend to accelerate right up until the light, and then break fairly quickly. Little behaviors like that affect what sort of MPGs you get, and unless you drive a car that gives you that sort of feedback, many people do not tend to think about such things as having a real effect on their mileage.
I have a friend that just bought a new car, and it is advertised as allegedly getting around 30mpgs... However, as he accelerates quickly on highways, passes other cars frequently, and brakes late at lights - I know he is not getting the mileage he thinks he is... Had he had a display on his dash, like the Insight, that told him his mileage, he might believe me
my religion lies somewhere between buddhism and super monkey ball - pamphlet?
Biodiesal is a good fuel for replacing some of our oil usage. The other main benifit that you forgot to mention is that it is carbon neutral since any CO2 put into the air from exhaust is balenced by the CO2 taken out of the air by the plants grown to create the biodiesel.
At the moment it is only twice as expensive as diesel here in the US (although what will all the agricultural tarriffs jacking prices up and subsidies bringing them down, it is damn near impossible to calculate the true economic cost of biodiesal). There is the kink that all of our fertilizers are fossil fuel based, so the cost of producing biodiesal will go up as the cost of fossil fuel goes up. The only other alternative is to go to crop cycling and other natural sustainable methods of fertalization, which are also less cost efficient.
However the real killer is that if you sit down and do the back of the envelope calculations, you will find that growing enough biofuel to replace all the world's oil usage would require all the arable land on the entire planet. In other words we would have to bulldoze all the woods, rainforests, plains, and marshes, and replace them with biomass crops. Not only will will destroy most of the natural habitats on the planet, but at this point we also loose the carbon neutral benifit because we are taking other plants out of the carbon cycle to put ours in.
So Biodiesal, like solar, is a good supplement to our enegry needs, but not a sustainable complete replacement.
is that one of the primary ways to improve the efficiency of petrol (ok, gasoline, or more technically, spark ignition engines) is to prevent your pumping losses (required since the air/fuel ratio must be constant, so at lower throttle settings you have to induce resistance in the intake to reduce the air going in). This is why you need to try and run the spark ignition engine at wide-open-throttle as much as possible (and stick the extra energy in something like a battery).
However, diesel engines don't have pumping losses (or, much less significant losses), so there isn't so much to gain making diesel hybrids (since with a diesel hybrid, you will lose most of the benefit to losses in your electro-mechanical transmission).
But, if there is a more efficient way to store the excess energy, it may become feasible.
Some guy in cincinatti not getting excellent fuel econmomy in first 1000 miles. This is when an engine hasn't even been broken in...This is news
I have a deisel which gets good millage (not as good as the epa test, but NOONE gets the epa millage, it allows you to kinda compare car to car). Hybrids especially the toyota which turns its gas engine off at stops in city driving will get better city than highway.
These hybrid owners are relegious about monitoring there gas millage, to the point of obsesion. Google for milage and you'll see.
Here is one site guys site that shows things aren't as bad as they would appear Prius . If you search you'll see details about millage.
His main problem is not the car, but the fact that he believed what he was sold from Honda Dealer would all be true.
Surely there were plenty of independent channels he could have turned to, including locals with the same type of car, for real-world independent info before he bought the car.
The recent junk-science story here lamented lack of critical thinking in everyday life: Believe TV advertisers at your own peril.
FWIW, EPA give plenty of caveats on their web site regarding lack of applicability of their mileage-rating model to individual performance, so calling them out for this also doesn't work.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
I think that in the US market the typical diesel is still nasty high-sulphur stuff - fuel which the newer cleaner diesel engines used in Europe don't cope with very well.
So for the US market diesel has a bad reputation for pollutants - so probably simply won't appeal to people who would buy hybrid for environmental reasons.
Is there a technical reason they don't use diesel engines in these hybrids?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
The worst component of diesel exhaust is sulphur. Not only does it cause respitory diseases, it also makes it harder for the catalytic converter to do its work. Pn top of that, sulphur is harmful for the engine.
Diesel fuel in Europe is of much higher quality, with a sulphur content of 50ppm, against a sulphur content of up to 3,400ppm in the States. In my view it is the unwillingness of the US oil companies to do something about their sulphur content that is stopping modern diesel technology from really breaking into the US market.
People usually don't realize just how much speed will make a difference. At highway speed on a flat road, 90% or so of the *useful* energy produced by the engine is used to fight the wind drag. The other 10 is for friction, etc.
Knowing that drag force is proportional to the square of the speed, going 65 instead of 55 will increase the drag (thus fuel consumption) by as much as 40%, but your speed is only about 20% faster.
Of course, I'm neglecting the fact that engines can be more efficient at a precise RPM, etc., but you get the idea.
Well, those are all recalls, but none are really threatening the saftey of the driver/passengers. No exploding gas tanks, brake failure, etc. And they are all cheap and easy fixes you can easily do yourself. Plus almost all of these problems lie in the parts that VW purchased from other companies (Bosch, etc).
:o)
You could go with a Ford, but if you dislike recalls purchasing a car with one of the higest recall rates is probably not a good idea.
Sure, I'm a biased VW nut, but take your VW out for a spin and get broad-sided. When you realize you're alive and OK, you may change your mind.
As a side benefit, small cars make the roads safer, and take up less space (which many people don't care about, but with tight street parking a small car is pretty sweet). And if you are really concerned about the environment, I suspect a small car has a lot less up-front environmental cost. I have a feeling a hybrid has significant costs above a typical gas car because of all the batteries (which are little bundles of toxicity, no doubt with many toxic byproducts during production).
Of course if you want real efficiency, a motorcycle beats them all.
They're bad not because they're popular.
They're bad because they're huge, dangerous, tippy, vision-blocking, gas guzzling road hazards.
They're the 00's minivan for stupid people who think bigger=better.
No offense to you personally, you may be one of those SUV drivers who has it for a real reason, not because it's kewl.
In the law there is no overlap between theft and copyright infringement whatsoever.
Let's look at this from a clean air standpoint, since that's the big reason for the push for different car fuel technologies.
Aside from biodiesel, which doesn't seem to be getting any attention from auto manufacturers, our options are HEV, electric, and fuel cell. When weighing the differences among these, the big thing you have to remember is that in all three cases, you're burning fossil fuels to generate the energy that drives your car. That's right - the electricity that runs your electric car has to be generated somewhere, and the electricity that is used to produce the hydrogen that is used in your car also has to be generated somewhere. (From this standpoint, a hydrogen fuel cell isn't an energy source in itself so much as a fancy kind of battery.)
So if we're going to be burning fossil fuels no matter what, it seems that the most important thing to do would be to pick the cleanest fossil fuel to burn. In the case of HEVs, we're burning gasoline. In the case of electric and fuel cell cars, we're getting the electricity from lots of sources, but far and away the biggest source is burning coal.
Last I checked, coal is a hell of a lot dirtier than gasoline, which, contrary to popular belief, is one of the cleaner fossil fuels we have, and probably will be for a long time.
With that in mind I ask if the fuel reformer / fuel cell combo is really cleaner, or is it just cleaner if you only need 10 feet of space surrounding your car to be cleaner and not all the air you breathe day to day.
You guys are all hitting the crack pipe.
I drove my 2002 Prius exactly 300 miles door-to-door from Canton Ohio to South Bend Indiana this past Monday with the cruise control set at 72 MPH and the A/C on the entire trip. My fuel economy, as reported to me right on the center console? 47.1 MPG.
I *ROUTINELY* get 49-52 MPG around town. ROUTINELY. These are NOT inflated sticker numbers. This is NOT granny driving. I briskly accellerate to 5 MPH over the posted limit and set the cruise control, even in town at speeds 30 MPH+. Doing this WILL deliver those window sticker numbers.
Nosir. The people posting "My XYZ car gets 44 MPG on the highway" are missing the point. Great. My car would do that with 3 passengers, 200 pounds of luggage and the heater running. What your XYZ car does NOT do:
-50+ MPG CITY.
-Shut the engine off at stops or very low forward speed
Hybrids are the perfect stop gap until practical hydrogen arrives.
My mileage doesn't vary.
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