Slashdot Mirror
Hybrid Drivers Provide Real-World Mileage Data
The hot-selling Toyota Prius averages 48 miles per gallon among over 150 cars from across the country, with most drivers achieving between 45 and 51. The V-6 Honda Accord Hybrid delivers 30 miles per gallon while Ford's Escape Hybrid SUV averages 28. All hybrid owners are encouraged to post their data for these and other cars on the Internet's largest hybrid mileage database.
Reliable fuel economy figures are increasingly important as consumers explore their options in an emerging hybrid car market. Hybrids, like the new Lexus RX 400h, pair combustion engines with electric motors that recharge while driving to improve gas efficiency. "Until lately," said GreenHybrid creator Jason Siegel, "consumers have associated hybrid vehicles with a small niche of fuel-conscious environmentalists, but today's hybrids offer the best combination of high performance, great mileage and luxury features of any cars on the market."
Basically, I floored it when taking off and took the car to the max.
You know what I found, I got 25 MPG in BOTH cases. In fact, I got slightly better milage when I was agreessive. Granted, this was not completely scientific, but it made me wonder about doing more accurate testing. I expected to see a 5-10 MPG difference. To follow up, I drove the last tank at a normal "in-between pace".
I was talking to someone at work about it and they thought that maybe today's engines are tuned so well and change with different environments that it doesn't make a difference. It only makes a difference if you are stopped a lot like in traffic jams.
Anyone in Central Indiana want to join me for some more scientific testing?
If you have to pay $5000 over the sticker price because of demand, are you really saving money? The demand is ridiculous.
Before anyone gets confused, I just want to point out that the Accord hybrid is not supposed to be super-efficient like the Prius. It's the top-of-the-line Accord, and the hybrid power is mostly used to increase performance while retaining similar fuel economy to the slower models. It's quite zippy; IIRC it has better 0-60 times than a V6 Mustang.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Turbo-Diesel owners have been seeing numbers in this range, or better, for years.
Seems what the market needs is a diesel/electric hybrid to get numbers that will impress any diesel owners.
Otherwise most TDI Volkswagens have been able to outshine these numbers for years. Plus you can't run a Prius on used cooking oil.
EPA estimates have never been really useful indicators of real-world results, nor were they intended to be.
What they do provide is a car-to-car comparison that is consistent regardless of driving style, load, weather or other conditions. When you compare EPA mileage statistics, you're comparing apples to apples.
Hybrids throw a monkeywrench into the mix, so we'll probably see an adjustment to the EPA methodology at some point.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I have a 1978 British Mini (the old ones) and the gas mileage is anywhere between 50 and 60 mpg. Here we are almost 30 years later and we are getting- lower gas mileage?
:)
Granted the Mini does not weigh anything and lacks AC- still. The 1 liter engine kicking out 55HP (in my slightly modified engine) is more than adequate to move such a light vehicle. Add to that a suprisingly roomy interior (it will seat 4 people comfortably despite being only 10 feet long) and a car that will corner like a go kart and you have to ask yourself what the auto industry is thinking. Not to mention being able to park _anywhere_
We have materials today that Alec Issigonis (the guy who created the Mini back in the 50's) could only dream of- lighter, stronger and easier to shape- and yet cars today are far heavier. We get worse gas mileage- sure the cars are more powerful but then again they have to be. I realize some of this weight is the result of safety improvements and the like but it just feels like there has to be a middle ground.
-sirket
Really sorry, guys. Slashdot sent me so many referrals the whole server went down! I won't be able to get ahold of my host for 2 hours, so please sit tight. Very sorry.
Jason Siegel
GreenHybrid.com
The amount of energy used by an average automobile over its lifetime (manufacture, operation, maintenance and disposal) that comes from the gasoline used to drive it is only a fraction (around 1/5 to 1/3) of the total.
A hybrid does reduce the total energy consumption of a car over its lifetime compared to a conventional car, but not by all that much. It still takes all the same materials and manufacturing processes to build, and poses the same disposal problem once it wears out.
The answer is a combination of fewer, longer-lasting, more-efficient cars, and less driving.
I get 42mpg in my daily drive, but not batteries to keep charged!
...is the visual display which tells you the target mileage given your current acceleration.
I drove a 04 Prius for a few months and found that the display which tells you the fuel economy you're getting is very helpful. After about a day you realize that speeding up hills eats at your economy and braking appropriately helps too.
If all cars had this feature, fuel economy would be increased. Regardless of the fact the Prius has a hybrid engine, low rolling resistance tires, etc, this simple display is a big psychological factor.
Most people never realize their driving habits affect fuel economy because it only hits them every two weeks at the pump. By that time they never link it to how they brake or accelerate. By closing the feedback loop, you start to change your driving habits.
Only expensive cars seem to have this feature, yet it's ridiculously simple to implement off a modern ECU. I wish they'd make it standard equipment and not a luxury feature.
Putting the flaming comment about people lying to make themselves feel better aside, the ROI for a Prius is decent. A Prius starts at about $20K so if someone "downgrades" from a larger, lower mpg car like say, a Nissan Maxima SE, s/he could feasibly save a lot of money.
:-P.
We are getting 50mpg instead of 20mpg, and we no longer have to buy premium gas...we are saving $1200 a year, not counting the lower loan payments for the car we traded in.
I would go on, but I am starting to feel way, way too good about myself
P.S. - I paid under MSRP for my Prius and got it in a week.
Hybrid cars seem like the answer to rising gas prices, increased pollution and growing dependence on foreign oil
Although I am the proud owner of a new Toyota Prius, I can unoquivically say that hybrid cars are not the answer; they are a stop-gap measure that may extend the period of time that oil is a primary fuel on the planet Earth. However, they are too little too late; I have the income to allow me to "do the right thing" but really, I should either move closer to where I work or take public transportation to really do the right thing. I'm not going to do that, and my neighbors are going to bitch about how much it costs to drive their SUVs but they don't look like they're selling them anytime soon.
So who cares what the mileage figures are? The hybrids are far better than the other cars on the road, but they won't amount to any appreciable percentage of the cars on the road until gasoline is priced high enough to force it, or the government mandates it. Neither is going to happen, so unless there's some miraculous breakthrough that provides a cheap source of hydrogen pretty damned soon, it's all moot.
Yeah, I'm kinda pessimistic about energy usage in the U.S. We're kinda like the guy who jumped off the really tall building saying, "Nothing will happen!" who could be heard saying as he fell past each floor "So far, so good!"
Still, I bought a Prius to support the company that made the R&D investment to give us a stop-gap solution, even if we're not moving to a viable alternate energy source with the urgency we should. Meaning, I don't know if my partial gesture will matter, but it's better than driving the car it replaced at half the mileage.
- Leo
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
Mass carnage was predicted when the double nickle speed limit was dropped. In fact the accident rate WENT DOWN.
There were several reasons for this. N.B., all of these were predicted by the proponents for the change, but dismissed by the safety "experts."
First, anyone with a clue knows that the biggest threat on the highway is traffic traveling at different speeds, not the absolute speed. People tend to stay in their own lanes - and can even comfortably stay in the right hand lane - if everyone is travelling at about the same speed. But if there's a 20 mph range (which was common in the interurban areas of the square states) there will be a lot of lane changes even when traffic is relatively light. At those speeds just tapping a car may be enough to cause the driver to lose control.
Second, a realistic speed limit actually lowered the speed of the fastest drivers. A driver going 20 mph over the posted speed limit doesn't have much motivation to avoid going 30 mph over the posted speed limit. But the same driver at the same original speed, if it's the speed limit, will often stay at that speed.
Finally, these roads were designed for traffic going at ~70 mph. At those speeds the road has just enough variability to keep the driver's attention. At the slower speeds the roads are mindnumbingly boring and the driver's attention tends to wander. You wouldn't think it would make that much of a difference, but I've driven between Denver and Seattle at both 55 and 75 and there is absolutely no comparison. (I-80 thru Wyoming and the Columbia River Gorge still suck because they were long, straight flat segments.)
That's why the death rate went down when the speed limits were raised. The annual death rate is climbing again, but that reflects more passenger-miles.
P.S., the Colorado Dept of Transportation will actually adjust the speed limit to match the drivers, not the other way around. They feel, reasonably, that thousands of drivers will make an informed decision about the best speed for a segment of road. Sometimes their hands are tied because of regulations, but I've seen them change the speed limit on other segments.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Well, at the risk of sounding like a Toyota ad, the Prius is built using 90% recyclable materials. For the soundproofing, they literally use shredded material from old cars. They use a tenth of the lead and a tenth of the PVC they were using in their cars in 1996. They even use plant-derived bioplastic for the floor mats.
http://www.toyota.co.jp/en/news/03/0901a.html
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Don't confuse hybrid cars (combining traditional gasoline with battery power) and pure-battery or pure-hydrogen cars. Hybrids generally don't need to be plugged in, since they have regenerative features that recharge the battery while running. For pure-electrical cars, which plug into the grid for juice, you are moving the pollution up the line to the power plant, as you say. But pollution from electrical production tends to be less at the power plant end. You can pack a lot more pollution-reducing devices and processes into a large powerplant than you can with a car trying to produce it's own energy directly from, say, gas.
~ The Fudge Report @ http://mywebpages.comcast.net/fudgereport/
Since aluminum manufacturing consumes a notoriously large amount of energy, let's assume cars are made of 100% aluminum.
The energy required to produce aluminum is about 15 KWh/Kg.
Assuming the average car weighs 2 tons, that's 1814 Kg of aluminum.
1814 Kg * 15 KWh/Kg comes out to 27,210 KWh. At 5 cents per KWh (industrial prices), that's $1500 worth of energy to smelt our aluminum. As far as materials costs go, that sounds about right.
Fine, now a gallon of gasoline contains 125,000 Btu of energy. That's about 37 KWh.
If your car's getting 40 mpg, and if you're driving it 10,000 miles per year, you're using 250 gallons of gasoline a year. 250 * 37 KWh is 9,250 KWh per year.
Drive your car for three years and you've used more energy than it took to build. If we wanted to compare the "theoretical maximum" amount of energy that can be extracted (at 50% efficiency) from gasoline, you're only looking at a year and a half. Any car built in the last ten years should last five to ten times that long.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I have 700 grams of stainless steel in my left leg that says that the potential price of a motorcycle is much higher than any amount of fuel efficiency.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Damage caused on impact with a stationary object increases linearly with speed (well, at least, damage to you).
Wrong. Please get a grip on basic physics.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
1. Electric engines and direct coupling are good and fine, but the problem nowadays is that, basically, batteries suck. They don't come anywhere _near_ the energy density of gasoline or diesel.
Which doesn't just limit your range in an all-electric car, but also makes the whole car heavier. It means you actually need more energy to move at the same speed and over the same distance.
Hybrids acknowledge that reality. The electricity in a hybrid ultimately comes from gasoline too, and is only used so often.
I.e., expect to see hybrids instead of all-electric cars for a long time.
2. The whole "waah, but oil is going to end" premise is bogus anyway.
Yes, fossil reserves will eventually end. But here's the fun part: we already know how to produce synthetic oil. We've known it for a long time. And not just theoretically: Germany's WW2 tank warfare was _based_ on synthetised fuel. It wasn't cheap, but it did keep the panzers rolling nevertheless.
That's really the only thing that keeps us using fossil fuels right now: it's cheaper than making synthetic fuel. If fossil reserves start running low, whoppee, we'll just start making synthetic fuel. And all those gasoline or diesel cars will keep running just the same.
In fact, doing that is probably a more economical and viable way to store energy than a ton of batteries in a car.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Virtually every accident I have witnessed that was clear caused serious property damange, injury and death (seen a few of those, unfortunately)... nearly 100% of those, if not 100% were people trying to swerve around slower or stopped traffic.
Why is that? People in the US are not taught how to control a car, they are only taught how to interact with other cars on the road. Watch someone who is a professional or amateur race driver (who understands vehicle dynamics at the limit) in those situations -- they react totally differently. Threshold brake, keep the ABS from engaging, and stay in a straight line. If you can't scrub the speed to the point where the impact will be a non-event (5mph), you were following WAY WAY too closely. Better to hit the car softly than risk oversteering into it, or worse understeering off the road or into another traffic lane. Once a car starts to lose traction, it takes a very skilled driver to make it go where they want it to.
If you don't know the reasons going 100mph is unsafe for most drivers no matter what the road conditions, you're not in the "knowledgable driver" camp. 100mph is dangerous in any situation in 99% of the cars on the road. Its not how the car and driver can handle expected situations, its how that car and driver can handle an unexpected one. In virtually every case, at 100mph they can't.
Two speed limits isn't the answer. Requiring something more than ten hours of on the road driving and 30 hours of classroom time is the answer. Require limited traction training the way many european countries do. Or maybe just even mention the concept of a traction cirle to young drivers and explain why their lives may depend on them understanding it. A properly trained driver can be in just as much control of a car with four wheel sliding as a badly trained driver on dry pavement.