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Hybrids Beware? EPA Revises Mileage Standards
Shivetya writes "The federal Environmental Protection Agency announced a new system for determining the fuel economy of many cars and trucks. Hardest hit will be hybrids as all-electric driving is not considered. At the same time, many medium-duty vehicles will get rated, but not have to be published until 2011 This move to more realistic ratings will severely reduce the high numbers some cars have posted."
Chili Palmer: How many miles to the gallon to you get on those Hummers, about 12?
Dabu: Nine.
From the EPA site itself http://www.epa.gov/fueleconomy/420f06009.htm#fuele stimates
u estVehicle
u estVehicle
A site to enter your own observed information http://www.fueleconomy.gov/mpg/MPG.do?action=addG
or lookup what others have recorded http://www.fueleconomy.gov/mpg/MPG.do?action=addG
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Look, the reality of milage doesn't change because the EPA changes their testing methodology. Yes, the current EPA numbers are inflated. Sounds like the new ones will be deflated. Regardless, I get a real world 40 MPG out of my Prius and that's better than the real world high 20's, low 30's I got out of my previous cars with similar performance. What's the big deal? Why do so many folks go nutty over proving that hybrids are the greatest thing ever or the stupidest thing ever? All cars have different performance, comfort, efficiency, safety, appearance, and cost metrics. So you choose one you like.
By the way, I don't hate HUMMER owners.
Cheers.
I have Hyundai Sonata and the mileage quoted on the sticker at the lot is *exactly* what I've gotten. Aside from the hybrid variety, are certain cars more likely to get lower mileage than the EPA estimate?
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
This won't affect the Insight at all; it doesn't have an all-electric mode.
It is, that said, an exceptionally stupid rule; the Prius gets a huge benefit from the all-electric mode, and that ought to be included in the mileage calculations, because it's the bottom line that affects a real user. If your car can do three miles of bumper to bumper traffic with the engine off, instead of burning a quarter gallon of gas idling, you have saved a quarter gallon of gas. That your engine didn't need to be on to achieve this is a feature, not a bug.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Getting the US off of the foreign oil tit should be a national security imperative.
I thought MythBusters covered this one.
The final thoughts were that no modern air conditioning system should vastly impact gas mileage.
They even tested it on some SUV and came out with very similar gas mileage. (Windows down actually caused slightly more loss).
I'm sure someone will chime in here and clear this up a bit. I was just a bit confused when the article claimed air conditioning was a gas hog. (Note, on an older car I had when I kicked in the AC I really did feel the engine jump to compensate, but this was ages ago.)
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
My little 93 Geo Metro XFi would still get pretty much the same mileage as the old EPA ratings 51/58. I currently get 57 MPG driving it like a nut. There are a few metros on the road getting 70+mpg on the road right now.
In order to get off the "foreign oil tit", as you put it, we'd have to do alternatives for lubricants, plastics, asphalt, jet fuel, diesel oil, heating oil, etc.
Sure, there are alternatives for may of those (biodiesel, corn-starch plastics, electricity generation fueled by something besides oil, etc), but the alternatives are often more costly (and less efficient) to create than the original... or can be worse for the environment (e.g. coal-fired electrical generation vs. oil-fired). Until oil is expensive enough to make those alternatives more attractive, we're kinda stuck.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Typical drive train loss is 15-30% depending on the configuration. Smaller front wheel drive 5 speeds have less drive train loss then a rear wheel big v8 automatic with OD. I've found some comparisons with Google in the past when I was reseaching figures for my own car and setup. I have 450 rear wheel HP as indicated by various dyno runs and was trying to estimate engine HP.
Even more important then the markeeting driven "HP rating" should be a simple graph showing a dyno run with peak torque and HP noted. Oh, the graph might confuse consumers! Well we are even more let down, fooled, and confused by the peak HP claim that companies use now.
One of my compact cars is rated at 140HP. My mini van that weighs at least 1500lbs more is rated at 165HP. My van will blow that car off of the road even while pulling a 1000lb trailer. The peak HP are almost meaningless. Torque is more important for determining real world output and neither alone are as informative as looking at a dyno run sheet would be. Hell, I guess you could skip the dyno chart and include a 60ft, 1/8 mile and 1/4 time with the trap speed.
http://money.cnn.com/2006/12/26/news/companies/gm_ fuel.reut/index.htm?cnn=yes
t /index.html
Personnaly I am sort of happy to see GM get thier lunch eaten. They've been asleep at the switch for too many years.
Here an interesting article as well. http://www.cnn.com/2006/BUSINESS/12/22/toyota.reu
A choice quoute from the head of Toyota: '"The important thing is to be a leader in car-making, and that's done by improving products," he told a year-end news conference, adding that vehicle quality will be Toyota's top priority at a time of rising vehicle recalls.'
An American manager would have spoken some crap about "leveraging synergys for value added customer delight", in other words not admitting to a problem and just engaging in window dressing. American management seems to have lost thier way, focusing on image without addressing fundamentals.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
51.4% of a barrel of oil goes towards gasoline according to the state of California.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
I drive a diesel (VW Jetta) and it is awesome. No cold weather starting problems, either, even when I lived in central new york, where the temperature was regularly in the single digits. Most fuel sellers put additives in their diesel in the winter to prevent the fuel from gelling, and engines have very good glow plugs these days. The motors are even quiet and soot-free these days (unless you really floor the gas pedal)...every time I've told a passenger in my car that it's diesel, they've been surprised and/or didn't believe me.
It's also zippy as heck. The motor produces a ton of torque at really low RPMs so it feels a lot faster than it really is, but the feeling makes it a ton of fun to drive.
The biggest reason that more diesels aren't sold in the states is that California banned the sale of new ones. Several other states adopted California's emissions laws (New York and most of the northeastern states). Consequently not many car companies are interested in investing the time, effort (replace previous two words with 'money') to bring diesels to the US -- it's illegal to sell them in many states so it would be a lot of money spent for not much return in sales revenue.
You can buy used diesel passenger vehicles in any of those states, but it's hard to find them (since they were never sold as new there in the first place) and they fetch a premium. Case in point: I bought mine *used* for $19,500 in New Jersey (where new diesels are actually legal to sell), and it had 42k miles on it at the time. New, the car's sticker price was about $22,000. Now it has 60k miles on it and my car will fetch $21,000 without too much trouble (I live in California these days). It's kind of a shame they aren't more common, as the mileage is good (36 city/50 highway is my real-world driving).
Before people call me a diesel zealot, I'll definitely mention the bad things: they are bad in that they create more particulate in their exhaust, which has been shown in studies to be a carcinogen. Old-skool diesel fuel sold in the US also contained lots of sulfur, which created sulfur dioxide in the exhaust, which in turn created acid rain. The sulfur also prevented good catalytic converters from being used, so diesels create way more NOx. Now that we have low-sulfur diesel in the US, I think diesel cars will become quite a bit better...but the reputation they garnered as smoking, smelly, sooty, bad-for-the-environment cars through the 70s and 80s will probably hurt their chance at widespread adoption in the US.
Diesel is also interestingly becoming more expensive than gasoline where I live. I find it funny, because diesel fuel is a lot easier to produce than gasoline, or so my fuel engineer friend tells me. Still, mile for mile diesel fuel is cheaper, since I get about the double the mileage that I would in a similar gasoline vehicle...
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
5 Passengers and a load as well...
http://phoenixmotorcars.com/models/fleet.html
An electric vehicle has almost no parts which require servicing; no valves, no spark plugs, no oil to change, no air filter, no piston rings. Basically it'll last as long as the chassis is structurally sound and the bodywork remains reasonable. The only bits which'll wear out are the consumables, the battery and bearings. With a battery which can last for 20 years, there's no real reason the vehicle shouldn't do a million miles with bugger all servicing.
The battery:
"In addition to high power the Altairnano NanoSafe
batteries deliver:
Long life - potentially up to 20+ year life
Very fast charge - rechargeable in minutes
Extremely wide operating temperature range
from -50C/-60F to +75C/165F
Inherent safety - no risk of thermal runaway"
Deleted
All current hybrids use NiMH batteries, which have no cadmium toxicity issues (unlike NiCd). They're soon going to switch to Li-ion because the specific power (kW/kg) and energy (Wh/kg) are better with some of the new chemistries.
Li-ion batteries have few toxicity issues either, and the new chemistries like iron phosphate and titanium spinel have even less.
Of course, it still makes sense to recycle batteries instead of landfilling them. Lead-acid car batteries are already the most-recycled items in the USA, and the more valuable the materials in the battery (nickel, lithium, cobalt in the old Li-ions) the more attractive it will be to recycle them.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
...is something like a Nielsen rating for mileage. Pay some people to put a black box in their car that records the mileage. For new models, you just publish the EPA "laboratory" mileage. For cars with a year or more of real-world driving, they could post "actual" mileage. One big problem however, is that you might not be able to get enough people to sign up. You need enough people to sort out the lemons (although if mileage lemons are produced, that's important to know).
Kudos to the EPA for taking this a step closer to the real world.
Now, it wouldn't carry the same weight as a controlled data-gathering or testing effort, but is anybody aware of a mileage website, where people just enter their mileage for various makes and models? Sounds like something GasBuddy could add as a feature.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I know this is probably flamebait anyway, but I'll bite. First off, saying American people like to drive "big SUV which have lazy fat motors" is like saying Europeans drive cars that make them look stuck up. There are plenty of people who don't like big SUVs. Why do you think Toyotas, Hondas, and Hyundais sell so well in America? Fuel stingy Toyota has already surpassed Ford and its lazy fat (discontinued) Excursion in market share, so what does that tell you? I'm not defending many Americans' decision to drive fuel inefficient vehicles, but I won't go so far as to take that choice away from them. I do wish that Europeans' tastes' for diesels would reach our shores. I think they are a great alternative to anemic small displacement gas engines and hybrids. As for American cars' "several decades old" motors, that may have been true even 8 years ago, but today is the exception rather than the rule. Look at Ford's Duratec, GM's Ecotec and LSx engines. Even the small block Chevy, now in its 53rd year, bears little resemblence to the original, or event o its predecessor from 3-4 years ago.
This sig only exists because you are observing it.
Going up grade the car performs great. Last week I drove up to Flagstaff and had no problems maintaining 65 for the 5-10 mile stretches of 5-7% grade with 4 people in the car. The electric engine augments the ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) and that helps the performance.
On the A/C front, the Prius has a multistage compressor so the hit on the car is minimal under moderate heat. I see plenty of hot conditions out here and the milage doesn't seem to be effected much at all even at maximum cooling. If anything, the mileage is a bit lower in cold conditions due to the engine running longer to bring the engine up to temp for emisions management. It also is an ELECTRIC motor compressor so the power used is not directly from the gas engine. That should help with the new EPA tests.
Do I drive like a type "A" personality? No, that never did appeal to me to race up to a stop light to get one car ahead. I do drive to take advantage of the car I have. YMMV.
I admit that it bothers me a little that hybrids get a free Carpool/HOV pass.
I thought the point of HOV lanes was to have fewer cars on the road.
Allowing hybrids there does not encourage fewer cars out there.
But, you say, hybrids are really efficient, and the allowances helps fight polution.
Well, hybrids, by design are the most efficient in stop and go traffics.
Braking charges the batteries.
But in the HOV lane, hybrids are slowing less, so using the gas engine more.
With the number of suckers paying insane amounts of money just to save $1 on gas, we'd probably be better off with a total cost of ownership measurement.
It would seem much more logical to expose a truly random selection of cars to exhaustive tests over a wider range of conditions for longer periods of time. Instead of averaging, you plot against a distribution and take the average of the distribution. This, however, is not the quoted figure for any car. It's merely the baseline for that model. Each car has to have some nominal testing - at least to see if the engine will start. Assuming that the distribution will be the same with merely the offsets being different, you then derive the effective MPG from the distribution and where that specific car is believed to be on it.
You now have an MPG per car, but it's still a single value and single values are useless. I'd therefore do the above with nine distributions, not one. One for 0-25 mph, one for 25-50, one for 50-75, and each of those for smooth traffic flow, heavy traffic and stop/go traffic.
Consumers tend to drown out lots of stats, though, and nine numbers - trivial to any geek - would be murderous on your average couch potato. On the other hand, colours tend to be workable. Simply do a rainbow spectrum, where violet is so far above average that driving round the planet uses less fuel than a typical hummvee uses to get out the parking lot, and where red is where you're escorted to the grocery store by an oil tanker. Nice and visual, though with hard data for those who actually want hard data to work with.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)