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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
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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.
Getting the US off of the foreign oil tit should be a national security imperative.
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.
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
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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+
You're only getting good mileage on a Hyundai because the vehicle keeps on getting lighter from parts falling off.
*used to own a Hyundai Excel and will NEVER EVER drive in a Hyundai again*
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,
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"?
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.