Students Build 2752 MPG Hypermiling Vehicle

MikeChino sends along this awe-inspiring excerpt: "Think claims of electric vehicles that get over 200 MPG are impressive? Try this on for size: a group of mechanical engineering students at Cal Poly have developed a vehicle that can get up to 2752.3 MPG — and it doesn't even use batteries. The Cal Poly Supermileage Team's wondercar, dubbed the Black Widow, has been under construction since 2005. The 96 pound car has three wheels, a drag coefficient of 0.12, a top speed of 30 MPH, and a modified 3 horsepower Honda 50cc four-stroke engine. It originally clocked in at 861 MPG and has been continuously tweaked to achieve the mileage we see today." It's not quite as street-worthy, though, as Volkswagen's 235 MPG One-Liter concept. Updated 20:01 GMT: The Cal Poly car's earlier incarnation achieved 861 MPG, not MPH; corrected above.

Comments

clocked in at 861 MPH

[itomato]

Really?

Pfft.

Not even proofsniffed.

Re:clocked in at 861 MPH

[MWoody]

Yeah, I could make a car that went 861 MPH and got 2k+ MPG if I dropped it out of a plane, too.

Re:clocked in at 861 MPH

[Sockatume]

You misunderstand, they started with the Thrust SSC and then stripped it back a bit. Their next project will use the SR-71 as a starting design on the same principle.

Re:clocked in at 861 MPH

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, but I think you'd find that terminal velocity would limit your ability to achieve this claim.

Re:clocked in at 861 MPH

[Anonymous Coward]

The SR-71 wouldn't be stripped back. It gets more efficient the faster it goes.

Re:clocked in at 861 MPH

[KDR_11k]

Okay, then let's drop it from orbit.

Re:clocked in at 861 MPH

[Anonymous Coward]

No, lets /NUKE/ it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Re:clocked in at 861 MPH

[Anonymous Coward]

> Okay, then let's drop it from orbit.

It's actually quite hard to "drop" something from an orbit. It tends to just orbit with you. You could throw it out backwards, but it would probably just settle into a lower orbit.

Re:clocked in at 861 MPH

[mysidia]

Except you have to count fuel used by the plane to reach that height in the calculation, so it's not 2k MPG :)

Re:clocked in at 861 MPH

[mysidia]

That's even better.... the more times it orbits, the higher its average MPG will be, since it's not consuming any fuel to orbit, its fuel mileage is essentially infinite, that is, until its orbit decays and comes crashing to earth.

Still, it could be a few million miles of travel before that happens.

It must kill the resale value though. "This car has 5 million miles on it" (miles it was travelling in orbit around planet earth)

Then again, it may get some collectors' value.

Re:clocked in at 861 MPH

[ComaVN]

it would probably just settle into a lower orbit.

If my understanding of orbital mechanics is correct, it would settle in a more excentric orbit, as long as the perigee isn't inside the earth's atmosphere, but it would swing right back to the point where you threw it.

To get it into a proper lower orbit you need to apply a force at least twice.

Re:clocked in at 861 MPH

[earthforce_1]

Damn typos. And I was just about to order one too. The cops would have needed an F-16 on full afterburners to catch me!

Re:clocked in at 861 MPH

[theeddie55]

Or you could throw it backwards at the speed at which you're orbitting, hence leaving it standing, at which point it will fall to Earth. The biggest flaw with this being that the average car isn't designed for re-entry into earths atmosphere.

Re:clocked in at 861 MPH

[KDR_11k]

That or a wall.

The supercar version was better

[jandrese]

Daww, I'd be far more interested in a car that can get up to:

...It originally clocked in at 861 MPH ...

Instead of something that putters around at 30mph and bores its driver to death before running out of fuel.

Re:The supercar version was better

[kae_verens]

the speed limit for the centre of Dublin, Ireland, is slower than that - 30KPH.

so the car may be slow for most people, but would be ideal for Dubliners.

Re:The supercar version was better

[commodore64_love]

>>>Instead of something that putters around at 30mph and bores its driver to death

Well to each his own. My Honda Insight may be "boring" when I'm driving it only 55 (the Pres. Carter speed limit), but being able to drive to work and back on only $2.00 is a pretty good deal. (It averages over 90 MPG for me.) Even if I speed along at 80mph, it still gets a decent 60 MPG, so no complaints either way.

We need more cars like this, not less, and if I had the opportunity I'd buy this Caltech car (after it's made roadworthy) or the Volkswagen 240 MPG car or the Volkswagen 88 MPG Lupo 3L. I enjoy saving money, and I don't need a Ford Living Room SUV just to go to hell..... er, I mean work and back.

BTW where is that Volkswagen 240 MPG car? They were supposed to make a production model for 2010, but still no sign of it. :-|

Re:The supercar version was better

[commodore64_love]

P.S. For comparison this prototype car is 3 hp and 50 cc. My Honda is 70hp and the VW Lupo is 60hp - at approximately 1000 cc each.

Re:The supercar version was better

[rwa2]

I've long dreamed about a vehicle like this while walking to school. Well, except mine was hybrid pedal powered, but nonetheless, the form factor looks roughly the same as what I had envisioned. I became a mechanical engineer in order to work on stuff like this; however in the DC area the only jobs I've been able to snag were relatively boring defense programming drivel. Someday... when I move far away and can have a garage and setup a shop...

Re:The supercar version was better

[Rei]

The problem is, "making it roadworthy" will ruin their numbers. Let's go into the gory details, shall we?

First off, take a look at those front wheels. Notice something? How about *a lack of ability to make relevant turns*? Note that it only holds one passenger, and that's being generous. Not even the slightest bit of comfort or safety features. It's rolling along on overinflated bicycle tires. And it gets its performance at speeds where aerodynamic drag is basically zero, with no stops and starts.

In short, you simply cannot get numbers anything like that in any sort of realistic driving.

If you want to see what sort of mileage you can get in a semi-normal vehicle, the Aptera 2e is probably as good a case study as you can get. It's also a case study of a board of directors ruining a company by bringing in a lousy leadership team, but that's neither here nor there. The idea was to get two people and a reasonable amount of cargo around in a comfortable, affordable vehicle with as little energy as possible and without sacrifice to safety. To do this, they threw all *normal* conventions of style and what a vehicle should be out the window and let physics optimize it. The drag coefficient clocked in at 0.15 -- not much more than this vehicle (but with all of the things needed for "normal" vehicles, such as stability and the ability to make sharp turns and the like). But to hold two people in comfort and carry a reasonable amount of cargo, the cross sectional area has to be *way* bigger. Not as big as many cars, but still way bigger than this. Also, the affordability requirement led them to use a fiberglass/VE/foam core structure instead of carbon fiber/epoxy/foam core, which would be a little lighter. The notably larger size meant notably more total material, and the need for the ability to survive crashes and rollovers increased it still. Nonetheless, the shell was only a fraction of the 1500 pounds that the vehicle ended up at. The Aptera team tried to trim weight everywhere possible -- even using an aircraft-style wiring harness. But all of the subsystems we demand in a vehicle led the weight to grow. Also, the battery pack (since it's electric) added a couple hundred pounds, although not nearly as much as the pack in most EVs (due to the efficiency). The gasoline vehicle would be lighter, but not as much as you might expect if you want it to actually be able to have even *remotely* acceptable performance; small ICEs kind of suck in terms of power output (as well as running worse)

Anyway, all in all, the vehicle ended up being able to do 120 miles at a steady 55mph on ~10kWh. That's nearly three times as efficient as a Prius. The plug-in hybrid version was predicted to average 130mpg combined in charge-sustaining mode.

Since then, under the new management a lot of the streamlining and weight reduction has been thrown out the window, and its energy use keeps creeping up -- although still nothing like a normal car. And now the company is nearly broke, since the new CEO hasn't raised a dime in the past year and a half (unlike the old team, which raised over $30m). A tragic end to an amazing vehicle.

So, when you see these claims of thousands of MPGs, look at the Aptera as an example of what happens when you try to turn such a vehicle into a real car. What could be improved over the Aptera design? Not much, but there are some things. You could use carbon fiber and epoxy, but your costs will be higher. You could use a tandem two-seater, but not only could you not sit next to each other, but it'd mean giving up most of your storage space. You could make the passengers lean back further to reduce frontal area, but that will reduce cargo area and make the passengers less comfortable -- same with making the body narrower. You could have suppliers make ultralight versions of all of the "comfort" hardware (and safety hardware) needed for a real car, but you better have a huge budget for all of that tooling. There are small tweaks here and there you could make to t

Re:The supercar version was better

[OrangeCatholic]

What we need are new roads for these cars. Essentially something along the lines of a glorified bike path.

At that point, these cars will essentially design themselves. They're so lightweight...I can imagine hundreds of different varieties will pop into existence.

These roads would be cheaper and easier to maintain, and require fewer traffic signals.

Now if someone would only come out with a decent version of SimCity, I could at least play with my fantasy.

Re:The supercar version was better

[OrangeCatholic]

As long as you're competing with 200hp monsters on the main road, these ultralights will creep up to normal-ish weight.

But if all the cars on the road were ultralights, it's unlikely that you would need air bags, crumple zones, or whatever else is slowing you down.

A bike is basically the minimalist model of what you should be basing the design on. It carries 1 passenger (how often do you give someone a ride to work?), 20-30lbs of cargo (milk and bread, for example), does about 10mph (maybe more...I have a mountain bike), and has no shell or safety features. It costs practically nothing to maintain, meaning there's nothing stopping you from having 2 or 3 vehicles (of varying weights) for different purposes. The only downsides of a bike is that it's slowish, and you might have to shower afterward.

But as long as you don't crash into an SUV, that's good enough. The solution is to get the SUVs on the parkway where they belong.

Re:The supercar version was better

[countertrolling]

...the Pres. Carter speed limit...

You mean this Pres. Carter? *sigh* Just goes to show... And guess who was president when it was repealed. I mean, not that these little trivialities really make a difference.

Re:The supercar version was better

[Rei]

Even if you get all of the SUVs off the road, there are still semis and buses.
Even if you get semis and buses off the road, there are still large, heavy inanimate objects (bridge supports, trees, culverts, etc).

Bikes are not a substitute for a car. Rain, snow, ice, cargo capacity, passenger capacity, safety, speed, etc as just a few examples. A non-shelled bike has as much drag as the much larger Aptera -- bike drag coefficients suck, and they only get by on having a small cross section. And non-ebikes are bad because they require the extremely environmentally costly energy conversion method, copious amounts of light + copious amounts of water + copious amounts of fertilizer + copious amounts of land -> small amount of food energy -> inefficiently converted to mechanical energy. Again, the only way that bikes aren't as bad for the environment as the horribly inefficient conversion would suggest is simply how small and light they are -- which comes at the downside of low speeds, no safety, tiny cargo capacity, single passenger, no protection from the elements, etc, etc.

Re:The supercar version was better

[KDR_11k]

You need airbags, crumple zones, etc for more than just hitting cars, if you run into a tree those measures are needed too.

Re:The supercar version was better

[Black Gold Alchemist]

A tragic end to an amazing vehicle.

Here's an article (and it's part II) on the Aptera management crisis. Basically, a standard issue Wall Street scammer got in a destroyed everything. She previously planned one of the "one of the largest accounting frauds in US history" according to the SEC.

How about the opposite approach? How about a huge all-American SUV filled with literally a ton of batteries. For example, imagine a Hummer H3 filled with 1 ton of nickel-iron batteries. It would go about 150 miles on a charge at 65 mph. If we could apply modern techniques to making the battery, we could get it for a very low price. This would bust down the primary obstacles to the adoption of electric vehicles: cost and battery durability.

Re:The supercar version was better

[theaveng]

>>>And guess who was president when it was repealed. I mean, not that these little trivialities really make a difference.

You're right. They don't. It doesn't matter to me who passed the 55mph speed limit, because that was not the point of my post. But since your brought-up politics:

- Rep or Dem, they both have demonstrated themselves intent upon increasing government, and decreasing individual liberty, while completely ignoring the People's Constitution as if it did not exist. The fact you engage in such R v. D nonsense indicates you are still stuck in the sports mentality, rather than thinking logically & rationally about government. :-)

Re:The supercar version was better

[countertrolling]

Guess you didn't get the gist of my reply, but yours is even funnier...

861 MPH!!!!!!!

[Black Gold Alchemist]

It originally clocked in at 861 MPH and has been continuously tweaked to achieve the mileage we see today.

Not only eco-friendly, it leaves some fighter aircraft in the dust! How do they prevent the sonic boom?

Re:861 MPH!!!!!!!

[Mitchell314]

Drive in a vacuum, duh. Do it anyways so there's less air friction.

Re:861 MPH!!!!!!!

[Black Gold Alchemist]

Even bricks are aerodynamic in a vacuum - that really sucks if you worked so hard making your car aerodynamic.

Re:861 MPH!!!!!!!

[xquark]

quote from the rtfa: "It originally clocked in at 861 MPG and has been continuously tweaked to achieve the mileage we see today."

Re:861 MPH!!!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you captain obvious for your insight into things we already know

Re:861 MPH!!!!!!!

[Black Gold Alchemist]

That wooooosssssshhhhh is a lot more pleasant at 30 mph than at 861 mph, ain't it?

Re:861 MPH!!!!!!!

[Rei]

Reminds me of a hypermiling competition I read about a good while ago. The team that won totalled the competition... by cheating. ;) They built a wheeled plexiglass box (without a bottom), big enough for their car to be inside with extra room in all directions (esp. front and back). They then had a truck tow the box down the highway while they drove their car inside it at the same speed. No wind resistance! ;)

Re:861 MPH!!!!!!!

[fedxone-v86]

RTFA stands for "read the fucking article". The way you use RTFA makes no sense.

A top speed of 30mph

[Anonymous Coward]

...and it just went from cool to useless.

Re:A top speed of 30mph

[OrangeCatholic]

>A top speed of 30mph...and it just went from cool to useless.

Hardly. I average 20-30mph to work each day. That's getting up to 60mph and then stopping at a light every couple of minutes. Considering I'm getting 1/2 to 1/3 the speed of my car, that's a pretty awful road network I have to use.

Ideally you would get this thing up to 30mph and then actually drive it for more than two minutes at a time.

So what?

[JSBiff]

I'm not that impressed. I mean, while the figure mentioned seems impressive, how is this 'research' helpful? I mean, we already have *known* for a very long time that if you made a super small, lightweight vehicle with excellent aerodynamics, very low top-speed, and very low torque/accelleration, you can get much more mileage than the typical car. But, nobody wants a vehicle like that. People want vehicles very much like what they already have. . . enough mass around them to provide protections in an accident, enough space and power to haul 4 - 8 people plus cargo/luggage, and decent speed and accelleration - I think most of us have had driving experiences where we really needed to accellerate *right now* in order to avoid getting run over by a truck or bus or whatever.

I honestly think these 'toy car' concepts, while they might be great learning exercises for engineering students, aren't very impressive. I'd be much more impressed by the 80-100 MPG 4-door sedan.

Re:So what?

[Brian Gordon]

Pushing the limits of engine efficiency is certainly productive research...

Re:So what?

[Sepodati]

I can see research like this being useful for autonomous individual-family cars that take the place of trains for cross country trips. You don't have to go that fast if you can continuously move and control traffic... Although faster than 30 mph would be good. Who knows if things like this will ever be built, though.

Re:So what?

[TheThiefMaster]

I think most of us have had driving experiences where we really needed to accellerate *right now* in order to avoid getting run over by a truck or bus or whatever

Most of us don't pull out in front of a truck or bus in the first place.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think they did anything as far as engine efficiency is concerned. They used a plain Honda engine.

Re:So what?

[Alwin Henseler]

(..) enough mass around them to provide protections in an accident, enough space and power to haul 4 - 8 people plus cargo/luggage, and decent speed and accelleration - I think most of us have had driving experiences where we really needed to accellerate *right now* in order to avoid getting run over by a truck or bus or whatever.

Mass doesn't protect you in an accident. Material (perferably light-weight) that can be deformed (around a strong inner cage), and converts energy in heat when deformed, does. As do seatbelts, airbags, and windshields that shatter into tiny pieces. More mass OTOH means more energy that must be absorbed, more stress on the brake system, more force that the tires need to transfer to the road, and more damage to the other car (which might just happen to be the one you're in). Less mass improves you power/acceleration ratio, and is easier to bring to a halt. Or, given the same constraints as a heavier vehicle, smaller/lighter breaks, engine, transmission system and tires to archieve the same effect.

People want vehicles very much like what they already have. . .

Not really... if you look at market developments it appears people want smaller, lighter, more energy-efficient & eco-friendly cars. What would really sell (a cheap, all-electric vehicle that goes to your holiday destination & back on a single charge) is totally unlike what most people have today.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, because that's the only way it can happen.

Ass.

Re:So what?

[zippthorne]

Of course, it's a lot easier to pull out in front of a truck when you're sitting in a recumbent position with your eyes no more than two and a half feet off the road.

Which brings me to a pet peeve of mine: poorly thought out landscaping on street-corner properties. I know you think your ugly bush looks cool and all, and the tree next to it really hides the street sign you placed them around, but street signs are there for a reason, and blocking drivers' view of oncoming traffic is just plain mean. Stop doing it.

Re:So what?

[KDR_11k]

Not only that, in the linked VW article someone brought up a concept car that did over 3000 MPG so it doesn't even hold the record in that regard. At first I thought this one might be slightly more practical but it seems to be a similarly tiny design.

Re:So what?

[91degrees]

What are the best aerodynamics? How can we make a vehicle smaller and lighter? Assuming we've optimised the aerodynamics and weight, how can we make the engine even more efficient? We'll get some useful research from this, a lot of which will scale up even to make a truck more fuel efficient.

Re:So what?

[Raptoer]

You're missing the point though, Cal Poly isn't a research university. This isn't research, and these student's didn't do it for some research grant and probably won't publish a paper about it or anything. They did it for the hell of it.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of us don't pull out in front of a truck or bus in the first place.

Obviously you've never had to merge onto a freeway then.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which brings me to a pet peeve of mine: poorly thought out landscaping on street-corner properties...

Here, Here!

I would add that particularly egregious properties adjacent to corner lots can be just as bad. If I need to pull past the limit line in order to see oncoming 25mph traffic... well, just don't be surprised when somebody eventually acts out their fantasy with a hedge trimmer. You're certainly training enough candidates. In connection with that, if I can't WALK on the sidewalk YOUR HEDGE IS TOO "FULL".

Re:So what?

[pengin9]

if you incorporated a hive draft you should be able to improve your average speed without hindering your MPG.

Re:So what?

[Skater]

Which brings me to a pet peeve of mine: poorly thought out landscaping on street-corner properties. I know you think your ugly bush looks cool and all, and the tree next to it really hides the street sign you placed them around, but street signs are there for a reason, and blocking drivers' view of oncoming traffic is just plain mean. Stop doing it.

I'll second that. I deal with that in several local parking lots. I don't know what these shopping centers are thinking - I guess they expect everyone will be driving SUVs.

Lately we've had snow piles that effectively do the same thing.

Re:So what?

[arbitraryaardvark]

there's a few billion people who a) dont have cars and b) can't afford what i spend on gas.
my car, btw, an 88 volvo, gets up to 2800 mpg. Up to.

Re:So what?

[Anubis IV]

A lot of cities have hotlines you can call to get those corners remedied since they're dangers to the public. Might be worth looking up.

Re:So what?

[Rei]

Current vehicles aren't anywhere near fully optimized, mass-wise or aerodynamics-wised. They're still largely built out of steel (composites can be as much as nearly an order of magnitude better in terms of passenger protection per unit mass -- plus, they can't pin you in). We *still* don't generally shroud the tires (and many cars have overly large wheel wells to boot). Most cars have a sharp kink between the windshield and the hood, as well as around the A-pillars. The hood is too long and the rear end too short. There's not *nearly* enough rear taper. We do all sorts of un-aerodynamic ridiculous grill styling, when most of the air for the engine of a modern car comes from underneath anyway. Most cars still don't have aero belly pans. Many include stupid things like fake (or even worse, real) spoilers. Most cars still use *way* overweight wiring harnesses, rather than an aircraft-style networked communication system. The rear wheels are spaced way too far apart (optimum is a single rear wheel). I could go on and on. Heck, only a small fraction of cars are even hybrids.

With current tech, we could make a reasonably affordable 5-person sedan that gets ~70mpg, four-person that gets ~90, three-person that gets ~110, two-person side-by-side that gets ~130, and two-person tandem that gets ~150+, with all of the normal car comfort and safety features. But it'd mean having to first redo our production infrastructure for composites and throw our conventions of what cars *should* look like out the window.

Re:So what?

[OrangeCatholic]

I bet people who live on the corners have high hedges on purpose, since their properties are more exposed than others.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called a train, but I digress. A car that traveled even at slow speeds, that hardly ever stopped except for fuel would be amazing for traveling. Only problem for the passengers to be comfortable enough it would have to be big enough to lay down in or stretch out and walk around in, so pretty much you are talking about something as tall as an RV and as big as a fuel sized conversion van.

Size wouldn't be an issue if it's speed was kept below 50mph for fuel economy. You could tuck your kids and yourself into bed and wake up in the morning at Grandma's house. It would require a whole new road system to keep keep traffic types seperated so that the vehicles could adjust their speeds so that they would arrive about the same time the passengers woke up.

 

Re:So what?

[kimvette]

By the time you federalize it so it can reach at least 65mph (80mph is a more realistic requirement), add in the wiring and lighting equipment, build up the body (or fairings) to hold head and tail lamps at the required height levels, not to mention make it crashworthy, you'll have easily increased the weight to well over 2000 lbs, unless you go all composite like the Consulier GTP (now the Mosler MT900).

Re:So what?

[mcrbids]

What... you think these cars are all about research? Really?

Cars like this are being built by students at schools and Universities. No matter how many times it's been done before, it's still a good idea to do it again to educate another crop of soon-to-be-highly-qualified engineering students. By developing projects such as this one, they get an intimate, first-hand understanding of engineering concepts like systemic efficiency, operational constraints, and the value of weighing costs/benefits.

Engineers who are successful at projects like this get to put this on their resume and then go on to develop cars that are a touch more pragmatic, such as the VW 1-liter.

This isn't a "pshaw" - IT'S THE POINT of exercises like this. And being able to drive from coast to coast on slightly more than 1 gallon of gasoline is pretty f***ing impressive, even if it is on a mylar-covered bicycle with a weed-eater engine on the back!

Re:So what?

[KDR_11k]

That thing's basically the shape of a coffin, not much room to move in and going cross-country at 30MPH would be supremely uncomfortable.

Re:So what?

[CalSolt]

This isn't research. It's just an engineering competition for engineering students. You know, getting out of the classroom and doing hands-on work and all that good stuff.

Re:So what?

[JSBiff]

I believe I did say, "they might be great learning exercises for engineering students". In that context, I say they are great. No problem with that. But, is it really worthy for such a learning exercise to be in the news, like it's some major breakthrough in automotive engineering?

Re:So what?

[CalSolt]

Good point. No, it is not newsworthy. This headline is the equivalent of "CS student learns how to use buffer overflow" or "biochemistry student learns how to replicate DNA."

But it makes perfect sense when you realize who is behind what is currently the biggest Super Mileage competition in North America: Shell. And last year the Shell Eco-Marathon was not 5 miles from Cal Poly Pomona. I believe 1st place is $10,000.

As you might expect Shell makes sure that media outlets hear about this kind of stuff. They actually send the teams registering for the competition questionnaires essentially asking them to say something interesting for a potential story.

Gullibility of the media aside, it's still a great project for students and hey, at least Shell *seems* to care about fuel efficiency.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

People want vehicles very much like what they already have
Well, some people want those.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Microcars

gewg_

Re:So what?

[DigiShaman]

The rear wheels are spaced way too far apart (optimum is a single rear wheel)

I'm not sure how you define optimum, but it sure as hell isn't safe. Given the amount of lateral G's one can experience in a 90 degree turn fly-over on a freeway, you risk the back-end breaking free and eating the concrete barrier. Especially on a wet pavement. Also side wind shears can cause a break in traction control. Simply put, the reverse trike configuration can be dangerous (and has been known to be in the cycle world).

Having four wheels has its downfalls with regards to fuel efficiency. Keeping all wheels aligned periodically and tires at their proper PSI-KPA to name a few. But safety isn't one of them, nor should that be sacrificed in favor or fuel efficiency.

Re:So what?

[Rei]

I'm not sure how you define optimum, but it sure as hell isn't safe.

False. Tadpole-configuration with the CG just behind the front wheels is just as safe as a conventional four-wheeled approach (unless you're driving backward at high speeds).

Re:So what?

[DigiShaman]

That's a fascinating article. Thanks for sharing that. Without question, Paul Van Valkenburgh is a well respected engineer in the auto racing world.

However. Being that I've taken my Mazda Miata out for a spin at local SCCA event, I'm still not entirely convinced that a reverse trike config is just as safe. I've pushed my car through just about every threshold that is possible (legal and illegal). I've even hydroplaned shortly after it started raining thanks to the oil patches breaking free soon after. If someone were to say "hey, lets turn your Miata into a reverse Trike", I would think they just went insane.

I want to make it perfectly clear that I'm not against reverse trikes so long as they're safe. I'm just not convinced they are as this report makes them out to be for all types of vehicles. A single or two seater? Sure, I suppose. How about a van seating eight? I seriously doubt it. What's really interesting about that article though is even today since 1982, we don't have any major automotive company creating cars with this configuration. Why is that? Is it cost, liability, laws or all of the above?

861 mph, eh?

[jimicus]

It originally clocked in at 861 MPH

So they're going for the world land speed record as well as the fuel economy record? Impressive stuff.

96 pounds

[Sarten-X]

Is the 96-pound figure without fuel? I wonder how much it weight fully loaded.

Re:96 pounds

[Anonymous Coward]

add 4 americans, their McDonalds meals, diet cokes and 50 pounds of garbage then you are over 2000 pounds

Re:96 pounds

[iammani]

Gasoline density is ~ 3.4 pounds/gallon. So assuming you want a full fuel range of 2752 Miles, you need a gallon of gas, which is 3.4 pounds. Now 100-pound figure doesnt seem any less impressive than 96 pounds, does it?

Now if were to count humans, they unfortunately on average weight 180 pounds/person.

Re:96 pounds

[addaon]

Gas density is around 6 lbs/gallon, not 3.4 lbs/gallon.

Re:96 pounds

[Sarten-X]

...Wow. That was a dumb question. Thanks for the answer, though.

Re:96 pounds

[iammani]

Ahh thanks for the correction. I guess i screwed up converting from metric :). In metric its 740 kg/cu.m

Re:96 pounds

[maxume]

The entertaining part was that you got a stupid answer.

(yes yes, the reasoning from the answer is fine)

That's some amazing speed!

[leroybrown]

"It originally clocked in at 861 MPH"

WOW!!! That's some seriously astonishing speed at 2,752 miles per gallon! My 30 minute commute just dropped to just under 2 minutes! Take the top off and I won't even have to bother drying my hair after I get out of the shower. The constant windburn would probably result in some ointments, but it's probably worth it. Even if it only holds one gallon of gas, I'd only have to fill up every 2 months! Take _that_ big oil, I'm sold!

not getting it here

[khallow]

Think claims of electric vehicles that get over 200 MPG are impressive?

How about infinite miles per gallon? Electric cars don't consume gas.

Re:not getting it here

[Black Gold Alchemist]

They're factoring in CO2 emissions from average grid power. That means you mostly get MPG figures greater than 100. However, if you have solar or wind charging, then it is virtually infinite (you have to take in to account EROEI). You also have to take into account the energy cost of the batteries, and the issue of battery wear-out. If you charge from nuclear, you get a million MPG or more - of uranium fuel.

Re:not getting it here

[Anonymous Coward]

If electric cars don't consume gas wouldn't it be 0 miles per gallon?

Re:not getting it here

[bwnunnally]

No, they go miles, but consume 0 gallons. So Miles/gallons = Some/0 hence infinity.

Re:not getting it here

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if you ignore how the electricity's generated in the first place.

Re:not getting it here

[Anonymous Coward]

Miles Per Gallon there is being used as a unit of energy consumption, not gas consumption. For an electric car it means "how much gasoline would you need to burn to produce this much energy?"

Re:not getting it here

[cvtan]

They consume coal.

Re:not getting it here

[jonbryce]

Electricity is generated using something. Depends where you are, but in England it is quite often generated using gas.

Re:not getting it here

[mano.m]

Thankfully, the electricity is provided by little fairies running in hamster wheels. That solves that.

Re:not getting it here

[Anonymous Coward]

The efficiency of electric cars are often measured by converting the cost of charging the battery to the number of gallons of gas you could have bought with that money.

Re:not getting it here

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially solarcars, which can do 3000+ km without a single recharge.

Re:not getting it here

[CAIMLAS]

Yeah, we'll get right on that. I'm currently working on a prototype which burns hippies. There are some kinks to work out (such as burning hippies requiring an initial dousing of burning oil), but I'm sure that'll all be worked out once we get the venture capital and hit the banks.

Re:not getting it here

[khallow]

What kind of gas? I could cripple these peoples' gas mileage by using as my standard, high octane gas from some out of the way tourist trap in the UK, say on the Isle of Man.

Re:not getting it here

[khallow]

This isn't a case of "if my energy doesn't come from gasoline, then it's free". Electric cars consume no gasoline, hence have infinite miles per gallon for gas mileage by definition. If you want to discuss miles traveled per unit of energy consumed or dollar spent, then use the appropriate units.

Re:not getting it here

[khallow]

Depends where you are, but in England it is quite often generated using gas.

That doesn't matter. The electric car still doesn't consume gasoline or diesel. It consumes electricity. So it doesn't make sense to discuss the car's performance in terms of gas mileage.

Re:not getting it here

[khallow]

The electric car consumes electricity. Coal is one of many ways to produce electricity. What a car ends up consuming depends on where the car is and what time of day it is. If you recharge the car at night, it is much more likely to be consuming base load power, which is generally coal or nuclear, possibly wind or geothermal in some locations. There are even a few places that have around-the-clock hydroelectric. If you recharge during peak power, you're more likely to be using peaking power like solar, most hydroelectric, or natural gas. So why measure the "gas consumption" when you don't know where the power is going to come from? It's too ill-defined to be any use.

Re:not getting it here

[khallow]

Miles Per Gallon there is being used as a unit of energy consumption, not gas consumption. For an electric car it means "how much gasoline would you need to burn to produce this much energy?"

Why should I accept such a measure? MPG has the wrong units for miles per unit of energy consumption. It has obvious rival interpretations (such as the one I mentioned) that are a much better fit. Further, there appears to me to be no obvious standard energy content for gasoline (maybe the ISO has settled this) and energy content of gasoline depends on how you burn it and the environmental conditions (like external temperature) which can change the mix of combustion byproducts.

Re:not getting it here

[khallow]

How is it being generated? Let's say in Oakland, California, on July 9 of this year at 1pm, local time?

Re:not getting it here

[khallow]

They're factoring in CO2 emissions from average grid power. That means you mostly get MPG figures greater than 100. However, if you have solar or wind charging, then it is virtually infinite (you have to take in to account EROEI). You also have to take into account the energy cost of the batteries, and the issue of battery wear-out. If you charge from nuclear, you get a million MPG or more - of uranium fuel.

Last I checked, I didn't have to do this to calculate MPG. I merely figured out distance traveled, gallons of some sort of standardized gasoline consumed, and made the appropriate division.

Re:not getting it here

[daver00]

What MPG (or L/100km as we have down here) does say though is something about *efficiency* at the same time as energy consumption, because we can quite easily relate the notion of gallons (or litres) to our wallet. We can then determine very easily the economic efficiency of our vehicle. This is what is more important to people than outright energy consumption, and this is the only way you can change their mind about consumption habits as well.

Oh and an electric vehicle still consumes resources, so making remarks about infinite MPG is kind of stupid given they are essentially running on stored energy from coal fired steam turbines. So how many miles per unit of coal do you get then?

Re:not getting it here

[Black Gold Alchemist]

Yes, that's true, but were talking about MPG equivalents here. There are at least four different types of "MPG":
1. cost MPG (cost per mile)
2. CO2/pollution MPG (kg emissions per mile)
3. energy MPG (joules per mile)
4. real MPG (miles per gallon of real gas consumed)

The pollution, energy, and real MPG of EV's are all significantly lower than equivalent gasoline cars. The problem is that the cost effect does not recover the initial added cost of the vehicle. This is because batteries are simply too expensive, especially when the issue of battery wear-out is figured in. So, we have to reduce the cost of batteries - cut out the middle-men, remove rare materials, automate manufacturing, and most importantly, decrease purity requirements.

Re:not getting it here

[khallow]

So how many miles per unit of coal do you get then?

There are many places and times where you get infinite miles per unit of coal. It remains a bad idea.

Re:not getting it here

[khallow]

So which MPG equivalent is the MPG equivalent? Telling me there are at least four possible interpretations for MPG (only one incidentally which actually uses miles per gallon as the units) doesn't incline me to accept MPG equivalence as a serious measure of vehicle performance.

Re:not getting it here

[Black Gold Alchemist]

It's a poor measure of performance. It has been picked because it's something people can relate to. For gas cars, all four variables are linear with each other (I.E., double the gas used per mile, double the CO2 production). Cost MPG, when used, is even worse - because the cost of gasoline varies. With electric cars, those parameters are not linear with each other, or vary randomly. For example, suppose we plug the electron guzzling hummer in to a solar panel, and plug the smartkart into a coal powerplant. What's better? Now the pollution MPG measure is completely broken.

People have been proposing a system where electric vehicles are rated in terms of kilowatt-hours per hundred miles. One thing good about this system is that it uses kilowatt-hours, so we can easily calculate the other figures (cost of electricity is known, emissions data can be found). The problem with this scheme is that it is the inverse of the current scheme, so bigger = worse. In the current scheme bigger = better. You could rate cars in terms of miles per kilowatt-hour, or MPK, but then you get really small values (Tesla Roadster = 4 MPK). When you add in plug-in hybrids, you just make the even worse.

hypermiling is useless.y v

[drinkypoo]

Hypermiling is interesting, but totally useless. It's not even that interesting from an engineering standpoint because it's the answer to a question that nobody has asked: "How do I get amazing mileage in a way that is completely and totally infeasible to actually implement?" Now, if they were doing aeronautic hypermiling, that would be interesting, because the vehicles in question need not interfere with other vehicles. But hypermiling techniques involve acceleration and coasting, and every vehicle would need its own road to take advantage of them without screwing up everyone else's mileage and decreasing everyone's safety. Even typical hybrid drivers create a road hazard by paying too much attention to their MPG readout; not due to their inattention to the road, but because they are slowing down excessively while going up hills, causing drivers behind them to have to leave their powerband and downshift to a less-efficient gear ratio to maintain it. Every time I see a Prius I pass it at the earliest opportunity so as not to be stuck behind it and have to suffer their inconsideration, often consuming additional fuel in the process. A hybrid might get better mileage, but as they are typically driven, they cause worse mileage; and they provably consume more energy over the course of their lifetime than a comparable vehicle with a small diesel engine and no batteries which gets the same or even superior mileage.

Re:hypermiling is useless.y v

[Quantumstate]

It makes no sense to drive a prius like that. The whole point of having a hybrid is that you can regenerate the energy usually lost in braking and driving inefficiently by putting the energy back into the batteries. The hybrid helps with higher efficiency on hills by allowing a constant speed which running the engine at optimum power by adding the extra power needed with the electric motor so the engine can run at its most efficient more of the time. Yes, you can get higher efficiency by driving differently but the differene is smaller in a hybrid than a normal car so the drivers shouldn't need to bother as much.

Re:hypermiling is useless.y v

[LoverOfJoy]

Maybe if the hypermiling could occur on a train track it could have a use...

Re:hypermiling is useless.y v

[BikeHelmet]

You're both correct. That's the problem. The drivers need to be taught - clearly some haven't been.

Re:hypermiling is useless.y v

[kaizokuace]

Well the other big factor to getting awesome gas mileage isnt just driving habits and technique. Aerodynamics play a large part that no one wants to accept in industry. Namely because cars with low CoD are ridiculous looking. If we wanna get easy mileage bumps aero is the way to go for now. Just gotta get it past the marketing departments.

Re:hypermiling is useless.y v

[bzipitidoo]

Troll!

There's plenty more to hypermiling than driving technique. Aerodynamics, weight reduction, use of lightweight oils, making sure tires aren't underinflated, and keeping the engined tuned and clean. Quite a few of those things increase safety as well as fuel economy.

You speak as if hypermiling is totally selfish. Some of the techniques are rude and dangerous-- drafting leaps to mind. But many driving techniques can save everyone gas. Coasting up to a red light definitely saves everyone gas, both for the coaster and those behind. Going as slow as the speed limit (imagine that!) saves gas compared to going 10 plus mph over. Funny how you pick on hypermilers for alleged inattentiveness while overlooking cell phone users. Bashing on hypermiling in general because you can't stand sharing the road with a few hybrid drivers who might not even be doing any real hypermiling makes about as much sense as hating all uses of cellphones.

But picking on drivers is too far down the food chain. Where's your outrage over bad road routing and design? Bad stoplight timing, too many stoplights, too many stop signs, too many intersections? Terrible urban planning and building location? I'll give you a few examples. A southbound street that was the shortest way out of an area with approximately 10000 people used to connect to an east-west highway until the highway was changed into a tollway. Now that street only connects to the westbound service road, and to go east, people have to drive 1 mile west to a U-turn. There is no shorter way. Those tollroad planners screwed a lot of people. Another is the typical street interchange. At regular intersections, the lights are set up so 2 opposing left turn lanes (assume driving on the right) can go at the same time. But at a stoplighted interchange, the opposite directions are separated by a highway, making it impossible to do that neat little left turn trick. So instead they often make the interchange a 4 cycler, allowing only one direction to go at a time. Or they double stop the left turners. Do we have to put up with this? No! The interchange could be better designed. For instance, if the position of the highway and the service roads was swapped, so the fast lane is the right lane and the slow lane with the exits is the left lane, then we could do the double left turn just like at an intersection of 2 streets. As for suburban sprawl, the typical strip mall and miscellaneous group of independent stores is so hostile to pedestrian travel that people actually drive from store to store within the same strip mall. Because, you know, who wants to cross 4 or 6 lanes of traffic to get to that coffee shop on the other side of the street even though it's less than 100 feet away?

And where's the outrage over the crap the automakers have done? They haven't hesitated to save themselves a few pennies though it costs fuel economy. They'll even waste gas for the sake of appearances, such as the useless grill opening that is much wider than the radiator and condenser. Sure scoops a lot more air into that giant forward facing steel drag chute known as the engine compartment. One of the biggest is the classic automatic tranny with torque converter. 20% hit to fuel economy so you don't have to shift gears. A top gear that isn't high enough, so that you can roar around slower cars without having to downshift. But you know what? We can have an automatic that doesn't need a torque converter. Another gigantic one is instant starting and stopping of engines so cars don't burn gas while sitting at a red light or in a drive through. We could have had that by now if anyone cared for it.

Re:hypermiling is useless.y v

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you not use roundabouts in the US? They seem to keep traffic moving much more freely than a 4 way stop/intersection with lights.

Re:hypermiling is useless.y v

[EinarTh]

Did I read that correctly? You burn additional fuel to pass a Prius in order to avoid burning additional fuel later in case you're behind it when/if you go up hill?

PS. I want to see that proof you speak of, as I've heard it mentioned several times but not produced.

Re:hypermiling is useless.y v

[BikeHelmet]

http://www.aptera.com/

I'd snap one of these up in a shot, if they ever become available and affordable.

Delays, delays, delays!

Re:hypermiling is useless.y v

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of things can be done to improve gas mileage _right now_. But they won't be for many reasons. I'd love to have a small, turbocharged, manual trans vehicle (rwd ideally), but the north american car culture considers it unpopular. People want either weakling 4cyl automatic hondas, gigantic V6 automatic sedans, or worse, giant SUVs with automatic transmissions and an AWD that doesn't work. Where's the logic in that? Well, it's the majority's logic. People want things that are cheap, convenient, easy to drive, and fell safe. My ideal car, a geek's car, is far from everyone else's ideal car, and probably would cost more than an equivalent in its class...

And, driving the speed limit? pah! Around 90km/h is the best fuel mileage an ICE can achieve (55mph). Driving around the city at 50km/h I can just feel the gas wasted on my idle RPMs. The speed limits need to be raised. They should not be a revenue stream for local governments...

Re:hypermiling is useless.y v

[kaizokuace]

delays or vapor? It's not coming out. The company failed I believe. My friend had put cash down to reserve one and they refunded him recently.

Re:hypermiling is useless.y v

[Anonymous Coward]

This is an idiotic argument. You could say the same thing about old people. Or overly conservative drivers... and WOW what a stereotype you have going for hybrid drivers. Is the rest of your world view as screwed up as this? I drive a prius, and i drive like i have somewhere to be, because I do. So your stereotype is lame and pointless.

Re:hypermiling is useless.y v

[Eskarel]

It's not really a marketing department issue. The marketing departments might be blocking them, but they're blocking them because they won't sell.

Cars which are incredibly aerodynamic are so at the expense of other more important factors. They are generally impractical because they don't have enough seating, the seating is uncomfortable, they have little to no storage space, and at least in the current road systems, they are ridiculously unsafe. Essentially you end up with a gasoline powered bicycle with all the disadvantages of a bicycle with very few of the advantages(cost, ease of parking, effect on fitness).

Aerodynamics is probably the easiest and cheapest way of increasing fuel efficiency, but you may as well tell everyone to throw away their cars and ride bikes(which would be even cheaper and more effective.

There are really only a few ways of practically reducing emissions from cars. The first and easiest is to pass an asshat tax. Drive an off road vehicle and never go off road(or worse one which couldn't actually go off road) you pay, got a truck and you don't put stuff in the back you pay, drive a hummer you pay quadruple. That'd get the ridiculous wastes of fuel off the road(or at least generate enough revenue that we can do something about the other solutions).

The other solutions involve redesigning cities to one degree or another. Making them more public transport friendly, adding infrastructure for full electric cars(or ones with petrol only as a backup), improving traffic flow, and creating cities where people can work outside the city center closer to their homes.

The problem with that is it's difficult and expensive.

Re:hypermiling is useless.y v

[Eskarel]

Manual transmission really does bugger all for fuel efficiency compared to a well tuned automatic transmission. That's not to say that automatic transmissions are always efficient, they aren't, but that's a separate problem.

As for the speed limit, 55 MPH far far far to fast to be driving anywhere other than highways. Smaller roads just have too much going on them to be driving at that speed.

Re:hypermiling is useless.y v

[kaizokuace]

Yea everything you propose there is expensive and takes huge legislation movements. Shaping a car to be more aerodynamic isn't that hard. Just most aero designs are butt ugly. I've seen a guy slap on some body parts on a honda civic bringing the CoD down to 0.17 which got him like 65-70 mpg. Thats a huge gain for little effort. The internals were all stock. The major parts to getting it that way are closed up from air dam, wheel skirts and a 'boat-tail' end. It doesn't have to look like an airplane the way the aptera design was. And it doesn't have to be light to be aerodynamic.

Re:hypermiling is useless.y v

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem isn't that they need to be taught. It's that they need to be taught by the right people. The people performing so-called hypermiling techniques drive the way they do because they read on the intarwebs somewhere that some guy got XXX miles per gallon in a car by doing X and got to hear a lovely opera of car horns and shouts the whole time he was doing it as he was essentially a log in the road as far as everybody around him was concerned, and so these idiots with more time than brain cells figure saving 5 cents a week on gas by driving like an ass is worth the extra 30 minutes it takes them to get to work. Of course, drivers ed didn't work for the majority of people in the first place as it was taught in a time when the majority of the lessons that stick are learned from your peers and then never learned again the right way to do things so long as they don't knock over too many orange cones, so the system as a whole is entirely deplorable. If people drove the right way, everybody would be able to drive 70+MPH as soon as we exited populated areas because there would be enough space to reliably change lanes, fewer people affected when Johnny Asshat decides he really meant to be 4 lanes over and does so without looking, and people (and the driving environment) would make their intentions clear so stopping-short would almost be a thing of the past (that asshat gene is unfortunately dominant, and you were born with 3 of them).

Re:hypermiling is useless.y v

[Dare nMc]

Not buying it, manual wins MPG for fast acceleration. All the automatics with torque converters still lose 1/3 of energy during acceleration, only that no one is taught to shift sooner in a manual, and everyone accelerates so slow with too big of engine anyway as to not keep the engine in a efficient operating range (manual or auto). Accelerate hard in a manual, and use neutral more and it is guaranteed to get better economy than a equal conventional auto. add in that the auto trans weighs 2* as much, takes more maintenance and trains people to not know how to operate their cars (hence why the most crash the Toyota rather than shift to neutral.) And causes worse air quality issues because people burn up the brakes, throwing that debris into the air rather than down shift. While it is a nice convenience it has a higher cost, don't fool yourself.

Re:hypermiling is useless.y v

[kimvette]

But, achieving higher average mileage doesn't raise the Prius driver's smug levels as much as peak mileage does. :)

Seriously though I hate that too. I've driven my Saab (it's a 2.0t, not an Aero) conservatively (read: not hypermiling, just keeping the boost gauge at the halfway point or lower) and achieved 43mpg driving from Cape Cod (Bourne) to Cambridge, which is about a 65 mile drive. I've achieved full tank averages of 36mpg, and I deal with quite a bit of city traffic. My typical full-tank average is a bit less than friends who also own Saabs - My usual full-tank average is 26mpg, because I like acceleration - most of my friends average 28-29. My worst tank to date in the Saab was 24mpg, which is pretty bad for a 2.0L four cylinder. You on the other hand can achieve very good fuel mileage in cars which are often thought of as "gas guzzlers" - I'd regularly achive 33mpg on long trips (mostly highway) in my ZR-1 Corvette, and full-tank averages of 26-27mpg (stock EPROM in the ECM), with my more typical average being 23mpg (stock EPROM in the ECM). With a custom-programmed performance EPROM I averaged 18mpg. My average drive in that car was 75% highway, if you want to call Route 128 and Route 93 during rush hour "highway driving" - it's more like a parking lot, and 25% city. My average driving in my Saab is about 33% city, 66% highway.

What's my point? You can have a "gas guzzler" and achieve excellent gas mileage. You can get a really economical car and get really "bad" (relatively speaking) economy. It all comes down to driving habits and proper maintenance. As far as peak efficiency is concerned - yeah, it's fun to watch the trip computer or ScanGauge and see 99mpg coasting down a hill, but is it worth it when you have to hit the gas when you get to the bottom of the hill, and having pissed off all the drivers behind you? When I drive I like to just stay away from the idiots who are texting, who can't talk on the phone and keep their cars straight, and the ones who are reading books while they drive. I don't want to become one of "those" drivers who can't maintain a decent steady traveling speed. When I am driving, my task is to get from point A to point B, not turn the drive into a video game by manipulating mpg readouts.

I'm not down on hybrids either - in fact I hope the next-generation Saab 9-3 xwd will include full hybrid options. But, I hope the hybrid option will be a system similar to the Highlander's, where it will increase performance when accelerating as well as improve economy around town. But, a hybrid isn't the be-all-end-all answer to fuel economy. Maintenance and driving habits are - and I admit that about 3/4 of the time my driving habits off the line are not for economy if the road in front of me is open, regardless of whether of which of my cars I'm driving. :)

Re:hypermiling is useless.y v

[Black Gold Alchemist]

There are really only a few ways of practically reducing emissions from cars. The first and easiest is to pass an asshat tax. Drive an off road vehicle and never go off road(or worse one which couldn't actually go off road) you pay, got a truck and you don't put stuff in the back you pay, drive a hummer you pay quadruple. That'd get the ridiculous wastes of fuel off the road(or at least generate enough revenue that we can do something about the other solutions).

Instead, let's put that unused carrying capacity to use - hauling tons of at first lead-acid and later nickel-iron batteries to power the vehicle. When people actually need the carrying capacity, they disconnect the wires, remove the batteries, and go back to the way those lovely SUV's and Pickups were before. These cars will get better MPG than Priuses, bicycles (huge energy cost in the food production and shipping), and be represent real change. I call this idea the "redneck hybrid". Keep in mind that to fuel the average driver's EV, you would need just $2500 worth of solar panels - fuel forever.

There are really only a few ways of practically reducing emissions from cars.

The easiest way would be to build some huge integral fast reactor powerplants, and use all the ultra-cheap electricity to electrolyse water to produce hydrogen, capture CO2, and combine the CO2 with the hydrogen to make oil. It would also eliminate CO2 from the powergrid, and solve all the world's energy problems in one shot. Maybe China, or Japan will do it and sell us all our fuel. That requires just as much public approval and legislative wrangling as all your ideas, and will actually solve and permanently eliminate the problem, instead of just reducing it by some (debatable) amount.

Re:hypermiling is useless.y v

[Anonymous Coward]

Would that it were so "cut and dry". You make a good point about messing with others safety, but you're actually incorrect about the lower gear ratio being more inefficient in all circumstances. The old economy tip to "drive at the slowest possible cruising speed in the highest possible gear" is correct. A lot is compressed into that statement.

Thanks to physics, the amount of energy you use is, to first order, related directly to the square of your speed. I don't know how to explain this to non-mathematical types, so the best I can do is this:

• Roughly, increasing your speed from 10mph to 11mph doesn't cost you 1 unit of fuel, it costs you 21 units of fuel.
• Similarly, increasing your speed from 11mph to 12mph doesn't cost you 21 units of fuel, it costs you 23 units of fuel.

You and I probably both realize the very rough nature of that statement, so I'll continue. It clearly depends on more than just speed. For example, there's the number of RPMs of your engine. Generally, the higher the RPMs, the less efficient. Generally, and certainly not always for things like speed of rotation of the piston joint vs the speed of fuel explosion in the cylinder: there's an operating range. Too low and you waste gas, and damage the engine to "laboring." Or there's your example of the hills. If you press down on the accelerator and don't speed up, for example, clearly you need to be in a lower gear, or you're just wasting gas, almost literally throwing it out your tail pipe.

Since we're on the hill example, the best ratio for climbing hills is different for every car, but usually boils down to the old economy driving tip. Try to hit the cruising RPMs of your engine, in the highest possible gear, with your foot the least depressed on the pedal.

For reasons I'd rather not get into right now, I can't log in, so I won't get much cred for this; I'll try anyway. Let me try the "trust me" tact, as I'm a PhD student in just this area: In terms of fuel economy, if you're like most Americans, then you are going too fast up hills. Toyota's on-board computer is surprisingly correct for about 4 out of 5 cars, prius or not.

-- Kevin

Re:hypermiling is useless.y v

[drinkypoo]

There's plenty more to hypermiling than driving technique. Aerodynamics, weight reduction, use of lightweight oils, making sure tires aren't underinflated, and keeping the engined tuned and clean. Quite a few of those things increase safety as well as fuel economy.

Aerodynamics, weight reduction, use of lightweight oils, keeping tires inflated, and keeping the engine in good order are not hypermiling techniques. They are basic design and maintenance. The techniques are also exploited by hypermilers, but they are all things either strived for or already recommended by manufacturers. The US gov't is the enemy of weight reduction and the average consumer is the enemy of aerodynamics; people won't buy cars which look like that, and the government keeps ratcheting up crash test standards rather than mandating stricter licensing for heavy vehicles. And have you seen the oil weights used in modern vehicles? ATF has gotten lighter, gearboxes which used to take gear oil take motor oil (much much lighter) and most modern engines specify 5W30 or lighter oil, where they used to specify 10W40 or heavier.

Going as slow as the speed limit (imagine that!) saves gas compared to going 10 plus mph over.

Not in my former 1989 240SX or my current 1982 300SD, both of which get their best mileage around 80 MPH.

Funny how you pick on hypermilers for alleged inattentiveness while overlooking cell phone users

Funny how you don't understand English. It's not inattentive behavior I am objecting to by hypermilers, but the inconsiderate kind. They'll save themselves a few MPG and harm everyone else's fuel economy, creating a net loss.

Bashing on hypermiling in general because you can't stand sharing the road with a few hybrid drivers who might not even be doing any real hypermiling makes about as much sense as hating all uses of cellphones.

My point was that the hypermilers do the same thing the hybrid drivers do, but moreso, and I can't even stand the hybrid drivers.

But picking on drivers is too far down the food chain. Where's your outrage over bad road routing and design?

Oh, that's pretty heinous as well. I have the most ire towards the car companies for buying and shutting down profitable public transportation systems, though. Everything else is a natural consequence of too many cars, which is a natural consequence of inadequate public transportation, a situation deliberately created by the big three automakers.

And where's the outrage over the crap the automakers have done? They haven't hesitated to save themselves a few pennies though it costs fuel economy. They'll even waste gas for the sake of appearances, such as the useless grill opening that is much wider than the radiator and condenser.

That's the consumer's fault. They buy cars more for appearance than for function. As long as they do that, the automakers will compete to sell them something they will buy.

One of the biggest is the classic automatic tranny with torque converter. 20% hit to fuel economy so you don't have to shift gears.

That is a bunch of shit. Every automatic trans since the 70s has had a lockup torque converter. The transmission is only responsible for a portion of the drivetrain loss, so 20% in the transmission department is less than 10% overall, and that only applies to crappy automatic transmissions. Meanwhile, CVTs produce superior mileage to manual transmissions, by permitting the engine to run in its powerband more often.

A top gear that isn't high enough, so that you can roar around slower cars without having to downshift.

Most cars have the same final gear ratio whether they have an automatic or a manual trans.

But you know what? We can have an automatic that doesn't need a torque co

Re:hypermiling is useless.y v

[drinkypoo]

Did I read that correctly? You burn additional fuel to pass a Prius in order to avoid burning additional fuel later in case you're behind it when/if you go up hill?

More or less. I also don't appreciate being stuck doing 45 up a hill in 65 where people are doing 80... or trying to.

PS. I want to see that proof you speak of, as I've heard it mentioned several times but not produced.

I didn't use the word "proof" at all, so I didn't speak of any proof. If you mean the small diesel vs. hybrid, it should be obvious to anyone with a brain and an interest in the subject that a hybrid with two power systems including batteries which are expensive to produce and burning gasoline which takes substantially more energy to produce than diesel fuel will have a higher lifetime energy cost than the diesel if they have comparable mileage.

Re:hypermiling is useless.y v

[drinkypoo]

All the automatics with torque converters still lose 1/3 of energy during acceleration,

Only during hard acceleration. During moderate acceleration, the TC is locked.

Accelerate hard in a manual, and use neutral more and it is guaranteed to get better economy than a equal conventional auto.

You don't accelerate hard, you accelerate efficiently. Don't floor it, which causes the car to fall back to the map and the knock sensor alone; accelerate moderately, so that the PCM can operate the engine in closed loop mode. You also operate the engine in its powerband. My 1989 240SX was most efficient at 80-85 MPH (30 mpg freeway; pretty good for a 2750lb car with a SOHC 2.4l L4, and with a distributor and no VVT) due to a combination of factors; it was gear limited to 124 mph as a result of running in the powerband at this speed in overdrive, and due to a 0.26cD (Honda Insight having 0.24.) My 1982 MBZ 300SD also gets the best mileage (again, 30 mpg) around that speed due to similar factors; it effectively tops out around 100 MPH due to the anemic powerplant, but it also weighs about 3475lb, making it even more impressive.) Of course, that's a turbo diesel... but it's not direct-injected, it's IDI and it's all-mechanical.

add in that the auto trans weighs 2* as much, takes more maintenance

No, and yes. But the auto trans also has the opportunity to shift more intelligently than the average driver. For instance, right now I'm in Panama. About two of the dozens of drivers I've ridden with (not counting bus drivers, who mostly seem to get it, but very much including taxi drivers) shift at about 3000 RPM with a typical 6000-6500 RPM redline. They never even get the engine into the powerband, so they never see anything like fuel efficiency. Consequently they're lugging their engine ALL the time, and actually damaging it, and I'm sure you know that a damaged engine is not an efficient engine.

and trains people to not know how to operate their cars (hence why the most crash the Toyota rather than shift to neutral.)

I was shifting my automatics before I ever bought a stick, which I did several years into my driving career. I also didn't ever actually drive a stick until I bought one, which luckily was a 280ZX, which has very good torque. I just had to drive a Toyota Yaris which has a tiny engine which revs up slowly, and a touchy clutch that doesn't engage until you press the pedal quite far. What a terrible piece of shit.

While it is a nice convenience it has a higher cost, don't fool yourself.

One answer is to give people a CVT and paddle shifters, like in the Skyline M8 (JDM only last I checked, but maybe this trans is here in something now? My current 'net access and machine are both kind of marginal so I'm not going to try to look it up.) It's a negative-toroidal CVT with a manual mode in which it emulates an eight-speed. That's got to be a blast to drive... which encourages shifting. When it's in automatic mode, the computer[s] manage the system to keep you in the powerband for efficiency. But really, CVTs are the answer. Designs now exist which can handle high-horsepower applications. There's also computer-controlled sequential transmissions, with computer-operated rev matching, like on various Ferraris. But SMTs are spendy...

Re:hypermiling is useless.y v

[Dare nMc]

I guess it depends on the car, what you say about flooring it is only true for turbo cars, or Variable displacement/Variable valve timing vehicles with electronic throttles. All other EFI, the throttle is just a air intake restriction, then it reads the air flow and trys to reach stoich air fuel mixture. Less restriction on the air inlet the more efficient at any engine speed. closer to peek torque, the better the efficiency of the engine. So peek acceleration is a bit wasteful, but at least 3/4 acceleration is most efficient (open throttle early shift.) This is easy to drive with a manual, it has been impossible to judge in every auto I have ever driven.
Same with torque converter, with electronic throttle they are just now starting to match revs and do lockup in middle gears during acceleration. But it is too much jerk for the test drive to sell cars, so only aftermarket programmers will give any lockup in most vehicles below freeway speeds. Then again the TC is designed for low loads in passenger cars, so not much gained at low load with lockup, still pumping the extra weight of fluids, etc regardless of lockup.
Of course most of your arguments are true, problem with autos is mostly drivers, problems with manuals is mostly drivers (both taught to drive with carburetors, or taught by those taught to drive with them). Autos can correct some of these actions by doing wide open engine throttle at 1/2 pedal, and the rest of the pedal is just shift position.
Regardless I am sure we know that a smaller engine at full accell would be more efficient than a over-sized engine at slow accel. So I think we agree it is more efficient to drive a smaller engine with a manual at all out, than a larger engine auto at some transmission waste minimizing small % needed to get the same desired performance.

Re:hypermiling is useless.y v

[drinkypoo]

Maybe if the hypermiling could occur on a train track it could have a use...

Agreed. But then, I'm of the mind that we should deprecate personal automobiles in favor of trains, and/or personal rapid transit (PRT). I do think that trains ought to be reimagined a bit, however; for instance, hybrid trains using flywheels could work well if instead of having all the motive force handled by a single car or even type of car (the engine) it were distributed throughout the train. Only the trucks need be replaced; engines would be replaced by power storage cars with flywheels or batteries. Preferably flywheels, however; trains are the perfect use case scenario for using flywheels in moving vehicles and batteries will have problems for the foreseeable future.

This sort of scenario not only potentially provides significant increases in efficiency at the powertrain level, it also opens up the potential for make-and-break trains that shuffle themselves, drop cars out of the middle, and the like, all automatically, enabling substantially more detailed routing models to address some of the failings of trains as we know them.

Re:hypermiling is useless.y v

[drinkypoo]

I guess it depends on the car, what you say about flooring it is only true for turbo cars, or Variable displacement/Variable valve timing vehicles with electronic throttles. All other EFI, the throttle is just a air intake restriction, then it reads the air flow and trys to reach stoich air fuel mixture.

What I say about flooring it applies to all vehicles with electronic control of fuel delivery, including vehicles with a carburetor and an O2 sensor. When you go to WOT, the car falls back to the map and the O2 sensor is used as a sanity check, if at all. Of course, this assumes you HAVE a throttle. Diesels are different and I'm honestly not as clear on how they actually work in spite of owning only diesels today. It usually takes me a while to grok the function of a different system. I do understand how my mechanical diesels work on a physical level, though, and why they are so much more efficient, yet require more engine to make the same amount of power; they run lean all the time.

So peek acceleration is a bit wasteful, but at least 3/4 acceleration is most efficient (open throttle early shift.) This is easy to drive with a manual, it has been impossible to judge in every auto I have ever driven.

"My" 1993 Impreza (It's half-sold; I need to figure out the california-only air injection connection after having a custom intake that didn't feed it) has a tach and a manual mode on the trans. When you engage it, it locks the center diff if you select 1st gear for 4WD, 2nd only uses 1st until RPMs get high enough to do otherwise even if that means an automatic upshift to going really slow, 3rd will NOT shift below 2nd for any reason, and 4th (D) basically acts like normal. It also does automatic rev matching. In a system like this you have excellent control... and you need it with a 110hp/110ft-lb 1.8 liter.

Same with torque converter, with electronic throttle they are just now starting to match revs and do lockup in middle gears during acceleration. But it is too much jerk for the test drive to sell cars, so only aftermarket programmers will give any lockup in most vehicles below freeway speeds.

I get the feeling they lock the TC more on trucks, where people expect jerkiness. That, or my C6 is just whack, but from what I hear it's behaving pretty normally. I intend to install a TC light on my dash so I can see just what is going on. I occasionally fantasize about replacing the transfer case in my F250 with an electronically-locking center differential, but I'd lose 4-low AND all 2WD modes at the same time. If I did that, though, I'd probably replace the whole shift mechanism with a manual valve body in the trans, and a vacuum-solenoid-driven actuator system, and a bit of electronic intelligence (plus some front-wheel ABS sensors; the truck only has RABS) to determine what needs to be locked when. It certainly seems to keep the TC locked during MOST acceleration, aside from the foot-way-up-in-it type. Perhaps that's due to the pairing with the 7.3 liter diesel. I'm always amazed when I get to accelerate up a hill from like 1500 rpm and it doesn't downshift... and furthermore, doesn't feel like it's slipping.

Regardless I am sure we know that a smaller engine at full accell would be more efficient than a over-sized engine at slow accel.

Absolutely. I am a big fan of small engines with variable-pressure turbos. Combine this with throttle-by-wire, a sequential transmission, and auto-rev-matching, and you'd have an amazingly efficient vehicle. I have fantasies of building a proof-of-concept with a motorcycle engine, since you get the SMT in the bargain by default. Or since I love AWD, perhaps I should start with the powertrain from a 4WD quad...

Re:hypermiling is useless.y v

[EnglishDude]

Don't know about that.... there was this Vauxhall Calibra used to be one of the most aerodynamic cars in the UK with a Cd of 0.26 and not a bad looking one too, to boot - after all, it was marketed as a sports car in the 80's. The Vauxhall Astra gets 0.31 Cd, however, Vauxhall made a modified version of the Astra which gets a Cd of 0.28, which I have (gets 80MPGuk/67MPGus). Yes, it's not brilliant looking, considering that it's a 90s car, but the Astra is the 2nd most common car in the UK after the Ford Focus, and if a cheap company like Vauxhall achieves a Cd of 0.28 on an common-as-muck car without any obvious changes, that's pretty impressive in my book, and entirely do-able. Also keep in mind, GM also achieved 0.195 with the EV1.

Wow!

[93 Escort Wagon]

A top speed of 30mph, yet able to reach 861mph - there's some seriously exotic quantum behaviors they've managed to induce!

Re:Wow!

[f0dder]

They're claiming to have a 12 inch cock but it only fucks 1 inch at a time.

They say others did better

[mukund]

Not to steal their thunder (and this mpg result is old news), but according to their own blog, Universite Laval got 2757 mpg in that race. And Mater Dei High School hold the record with 2,843.4 mpg.

Re:They say others did better

[phantomfive]

Not to mention on the very same page as TFA there is a link to a French car that got 8923 miles per gallon. But this team managed to get a front page story for their car. Kudos to them and their superior story submission skills.

Re:They say others did better

[Alwin Henseler]

At the gas station-

"Fill 'r up, please!"
"1/10 of a gallon, as usual, ma'am?"
"Yes, thank you."

Re:They say others did better

[hherb]

Well, how about thisone? http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/03/18/transportation-tuesday-8923-miles-per-gallon/
Makes that CalPoly car look like the traditional US gas guzzler, not?

Re:They say others did better

[Anonymous Coward]

That's almost as good a mileage as Voyager 1 (about 20,000 miles per "gallon" by my crude calculations). In the end, Voyager's going to win since it's piling on the miles at over 10 miles per second. Hey, they say hypermiling is all about coasting, and they were right!

Re:They say others did better

[Anonymous Coward]

Thisone? That's an interesting brand name. (Proof-read people. Come on, you can do it. Really.)

Re:They say others did better

[skastrik]

Surely such a French car would use SI mileage, roughly 0.000264 litres per kilometer (friendly google calculator)

Re:They say others did better

[Anonymous Coward]

.... Kudos to them and their superior story submission skills.

Ahhh, they're blowhard Americans. What do you expect?

All drunk on Jack Daniels and Pinoqachole!

 

AMAZING!! 2752.3 MPG at 861 MPH

[Anonymous Coward]

A modified 3 horsepower Honda 50cc four-stroke engine that can do 2752.3 MPG at 861 MPH would be damn impressive if it were true.

practical application?

[Anonymous Coward]

How does this technology scale?

What would the mileage be if it would be scaled up to a small family car with 100MPH top speed?

Miles per useless

[Kenoli]

Maybe someone would care if the vehicle had some practical applications.

Prior art

[gmuslera]

This car used to do even more mpg, but wasnt very fast.

2752 MPG ?

[Tiger4]

The gas would evaporate from the tank faster than that! I think someone needs to check their figures. Unit conversion FTW??

Re:2752 MPG ?

[Anonymous Coward]

My analysis indicates that it is theoretically infeasible.

The Calorific value of Gasoline is 45 MJ / kg.

Burning a gallon of Gas would yield us 45 MJ/kg * 0.77 kg/l * 3.76 liters = 118 MJ

Assuming an 4 Stroke Engine efficiency of 25% [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_efficiency] , the total useful mechanical work that can be created is 29.5 MJ

Neglecting Drag, work done = Frictional Force * Distance. Using 29.5 MJ as the work done, we can calculate the frictional force to be 6.7 N.

For a 96lb car, the coefficient of rolling friction required to achieve 6.7N of frictional force is 0.015.

For the whole thing to hang together, the surface coefficient of rolling friction needs to be smaller than 0.015.

The coefficient of rolling friction for concrete roads 1.0!!!

Re:2752 MPG ?

[mosb1000]

Rolling friction is dependent on wheels first and foremost (based on their size, shape, thickness, how inelastic they are, how efficient the bearing is), not so much the road surface. It certainly is possible to achieve a very low rolling friction, especially in a lightweight vehicle.

Re:2752 MPG ?

[icydog]

Coefficient of rolling friction on concrete is 1.0? I think you mean sliding friction. There's a reason wheels were invented in the first place...

Looks better than I thought.

[Hurricane78]

You know. Most of those things look really, REALLY uncool. This one, with a bit of work, comes close to a batmobile. Not bad at all.

Of course, let’s see how it does as a 4-person+dog car going at 80 mph in a crash situation.
It’s always much easier do do all this at low speeds and loads.
My guess: 2752 mpg / 5 seats / (80 mph / 30 mph) = 206.4 mpg. ^^

Re:Looks better than I thought.

[zippthorne]

It's always easier to do at low speeds because F_drag = c*A*v^2 Cut the speed in half, and you cut the {work/mile} by three quarters. Of course, at some point you have to start cutting switchbacks and tunnels everywhere because your (properly sized for the desired speed) power plant can't climb moderate inclines, but you'd be really efficient!

Re:Looks better than I thought.

[mosb1000]

Drag increases with the square of speed, so your equation should be:

2752 mpg / 5 seats / (80 mph / 30 mph) * (80 mph / 30 mph) = 77.4 mpg

Re:Looks better than I thought.

[nacturation]

I obviously need to get out more, but that low-angle front view looks like a woman reclining with her knees spread apart.

Re:Looks better than I thought.

[cvtan]

Sorry, should be more like the cube of speed.

Re:Looks better than I thought.

[selven]

Why would 80mph take up 80/30 times as much gas per mile? I understand that air resistance goes up with velocity squared but at these low speeds I would imagine that friction with the ground is the dominant factor.

Re:Looks better than I thought.

[drinkypoo]

Losses due to drag seem to start to add up around 60 or 65 mph. But since that's very much related to the cD, I suspect it's a bit higher for this vehicle. However, using cookie-cutter wheels with high pressure reduces rolling friction very effectively, and spinning the wheel rapidly helps too, which is part of the reason why we have small wheels on most econoboxes. Of course, it's going to make you go through wheel bearings faster; they have small hubs, too.

Amazing stats!

[Anonymous Coward]

> have developed a vehicle that can get up to 2752.3 MPG
> It originally clocked in at 861 MPH

Then the LSD wore off ...

seattle to vegas

[Anonymous Coward]

So, Seattle to Las Vegas is about 1200 miles. If it can go 861 MPH, that's a little less than 3 hours travel time. All without even using a full gallon of gas! That's pretty damn impressive!

Re:seattle to vegas

[Anonymous Coward]

Should've mentioned, that's Seattle to Vegas and back.

yeah but?

[stokessd]

Can it haul my giant bass boat?

Bubba

Not impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not impressed. My university has a student association called Remmi-team that does hypermiling . They have been active since 1976. Their current vehicle Remmi 7 has a record 3306 km/l (~7776 mpg).

Re:Not impressive

[mosb1000]

But this car is one that the driver sits in, the other cars have the driver laying on their back. This car seems a little more practical to me for that reason.

Mail carriers

[carbuck]

This might be useful for mail carriers, meter maids, farm vehicles, etc. Might also be useful for someone exploring a remote area where a gas pump might not be readily available

Re:Mail carriers

[Stephen Samuel]

..... Might also be useful for someone exploring a remote area where a gas pump might not be readily available

Remote areas without gas pumps probably won't have roads that a vehicle like this can use, either.

Can this even hold 1 Gal of fuel?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Or is it so optimized that they use an eye dropper to feed this thing seven drops of gasoline and extrapolate how far it would have traveled if it really had a gallon of fuel? I mean if you have to stop every mile to refuel, they might easily build a rubber band powered vehicle that gives infinite miles per gallon.

Re:Can this even hold 1 Gal of fuel?

[Anonymous Coward]

This has already been answered in the above discussion. RTFC

You can go faster using pedal power

[Colin Smith]

I find it ironic that you can get a fairly standard HPV (http://www.recumbents.com/home/) that'll let you go faster than 30mph just using pedal power.

 

Lost the goal

[__aagmrb7289]

The goal is to have a street capable car that people would gladly purchase and drive, not produce a bicycle that gets good gas mileage that bike riders wouldn't use. Does this proof of concept even get us closer to the real goal? It doesn't seem like it does.

But whats it get for

[rossdee]

city driving?

Re:But whats it get for

[Drathos]

Run over?

Electric Vehicles?

[Rockoon]

Think claims of electric vehicles that get over 200 MPG are impressive?

The last thing that I am, is impressed, by someone who doesnt know that electric vehicles dont use a liquid fuel of any kind.

Re:Electric Vehicles?

[KahabutDieDrake]

One must begin to wonder about the absolutely awe inspiring ability of some people to miss the point.

Re:Electric Vehicles?

[Rockoon]

I got the point. They get insane gas efficiency with a toy vehicle. What I dont get is how they get away with such an incredible misunderstanding of the basics within their "look at us" article.

Next up, the Moyes Litespeed 4-S gets over 1 trillion miles per gallon.

Re:Electric Vehicles?

[Anonymous Coward]

I got the point.

No. No, you didn't.

Dumbass.

and

[fireylord]

is this a good time to say whooshas? :)

scooter

[Faux_Pseudo]

3 horse power 50cc honda build with a top speed of about 30 MPH? That sounds like the engin they use on their scooters. I have 4 of them and they run for ever. Without any modifications or hypermileing they will get between 70 and 100 mpg.

Rather pointless

[Solandri]

MPG is backwards. It tells you how much further you can go on a single gallon, not how much less fuel it'll take to cover a fixed distance. In practical terms, the latter is much more relevant to how people drive. If you buy a car which gets twice the MPG, you do not suddenly start driving twice as far every day. Your miles driven each day will probably remain fixed, so fuel saved is based on the inverse of MPG.

A consequence of this is that MPG exaggerates the benefit of highly fuel-efficient vehicles. 2752 MPG sounds like a lot. But switching from a 25 MPG vehicle to a 50 MPG vehicle saves you more gas than switching from a 50 MPG vehicle to a 2752 MPG vehicle. To cover a distance of 50 miles, the 25 MPG vehicle would consume 2 gallons. The 50 MPG vehicle would consume 1 gallon, for a savings of 1 gallon. The 2752 MPG vehicle would consume 0.018 gallons, for a savings of 0.982 gallons. This is less improvement than the switch from 25 MPG to 50 MPG. Because MPG is inverted, a 10 MPG improvement on a 25 MPG vehicle saves a lot more fuel than a 10 MPG improvement on a 2000 MPG vehicle.

Consequently, the most important thing for reducing overall fuel consumption is to get people out of gas guzzlers and into more fuel efficient vehicles. Stuff like hypermiling vehicles getting >2000 MPG are interesting from an engineering and design standpoint, but they serve little practical use. Even if you could develop a real car which got 2000 MPG, getting a single SUV driver to switch to a Prius would save 3.5x as much fuel as getting a single Prius driver to switch to this new ultra-high MPG vehicle.

This is why most of the rest of the world measures fuel efficiency in liters/100 km. It makes the amount of fuel your car will use for a typical drive pretty obvious, and makes it dirt simple to compare how much fuel you'll save switching to a different vehicle (just subtract the two numbers):
SUV = 16 liters/100 km
sedan = 9.4 liters/100 km
Prius = 4.7 liters/100 km
vehicle in article = 0.085 liters/100 km

Re:Rather pointless

[Anonymous Coward]

This post is riddled with logical error, if you can complete ~3k miles on one gallon of fuel vs 50 miles, you've increased your mileage by 60x, ie you'd need 60 gallons to do the same thing in a 50mpg car. Going from a 25 mpg car to a 50 mpg car allows you to travel 2x the distance per gallon. Give up on the dramatic illogical arguments.

Re:Rather pointless

[Gaffod]

Hey there partner, have I got a function for you!

Re:Rather pointless

[Dausha]

A consequence of this is that MPG exaggerates the benefit of highly fuel-efficient vehicles. 2752 MPG sounds like a lot. But switching from a 25 MPG vehicle to a 50 MPG vehicle saves you more gas than switching from a 50 MPG vehicle to a 2752 MPG vehicle. To cover a distance of 50 miles, the 25 MPG vehicle would consume 2 gallons. The 50 MPG vehicle would consume 1 gallon, for a savings of 1 gallon. The 2752 MPG vehicle would consume 0.018 gallons, for a savings of 0.982 gallons. This is less improvement than the switch from 25 MPG to 50 MPG. Because MPG is inverted, a 10 MPG improvement on a 25 MPG vehicle saves a lot more fuel than a 10 MPG improvement on a 2000 MPG vehicle.

But, you're missing a big point, methinks, in your shell game. Switching from 25 MPG to 50 MPG incurs a fuels savings of 1 gal. Switching from a 25 MPG car to the 2752 MPG car saves 1.98 gallons. Let's use a slightly different unit of measure. A 25 MPG car consumes 32 cups of fuel. A 2752 MPG vehicle consumes 1/3d of a cup of fuel. I use more butter to make a batch of cookies than this car would to drive 50 miles.

Or to look at this in terms of cost. The average price per gallon in the US is USD 2.65. The 25 MPG car would spend USD 5.30. The 50 MPG car would spend USD 2.65. The 2752 MPG car would spend a nickel. Or in "Cents per Mile" (CPM), the 25 MPG is 10 CPM, the 50 MPG is 5 CPM, and the 2752 MPG care is 1 cent per ten miles.

Re:Rather pointless

[cortesoft]

I am a bit confused by your argument. Your 'alternative' measure that you seem to think provides more information is the EXACT same measurement; it is simply the inverse of the ratio. You can simply put a 1 over your MPG if you would prefer to use gallons per mile. Also, your point about a 10 mpg improvement mattering more to a 25mpg vehicle than a 2000 mpg vehicle is merely pointing out that in RATIO measures (which both MPGs and your alternative 'liters per 100kms' are examples of) it is important to measure the PERCENTAGE change rather than the absolute change. Your example would have the exact same result using your alternative measure (only in the reverse case); going from 1000 liters/100km to 990 liters/100km is less of a percentage improvement than going from 12liters/100kms to 2liters/100 kms.

However, this doesn't seem to be the main point you are trying to make. The main point I read is that we should focus on the 'low hanging fruit'; the (correct) notion that we should start by trying to improve the least efficient users of energy first, because each percentage point of improvement in them will save more fuel overall due to their higher initial fuel use age.

It also may be true that it would be helpful to consumers to show them how much money and fuel they would save with each car choice given their driving habits; however, this is done by using on of our ratio measurements to calculate the actual fuel usage given a fixed distance (either multiplying by your liters/km ratio or dividing by MPG). I will grant that your ratio might make it more obvious what this calculation will result in (given that you chose a denominator that you hope is close to the actual number of kms driven), but your measure is still just a ratio.

The last point I would like to make is that MPG is just as good as your liters/100km in determining how much money you will save by switching to a more fuel efficient vehicle. If you double your gas mileage, you will cut your fuel bill in half... it is that simple. This is true no matter how many times you double your MPGs..... although it is also true that the absolute dollar amount of those savings gets smaller and smaller as you move up the fuel efficiency chart.

Re:Rather pointless

[welcher]

The point is to use less fuel. The gallons per mile measure makes it clearer how much fuel will be saved for an average trip, or how much fuel will be saved by by getting the more efficient vehicle. The GP is obviously aware that the ratio is simply inverted but most people wouldn't recognize this.

A similar situation exists with sunblock cream, where effectiveness is currently advertised as sun protection factor, or SPF. This is just the inverse of the amount of UV the gets through the cream - so SPF 50 means 98% of the UV is blocked. A doubling of SPF in this case would mean a very slightly more effective suncream. SImilarly, a doubling of MPG for a very efficient car means a very small amount of fuel is saved.

Re:Rather pointless

[Anonymous Coward]

MPG is perfectly fine. So is GPMile...

At the end of the day, ratios being what they are: half the MPG = double the GPMile = you go twice as far with the same gas = you consume half the fuel to drive the same distance as you did before.

So - if you're an optimist - look at MPG, bigger is better! If you're a pessimist, then look at your vehicle in Gallons per Mile - less is more!

If you want an ass backwards unit: Liters per 100 km... THAT one irks me.

Re:Rather pointless

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a pseudo-fallacy. People use it to pat themselves on the back for switching from an 7mpg pickup to a 15mpg SUV and mock people who switched from a 30mpg car to a 40mpg hybrid... when we should be asking why they didn't switch from the 7mpg pickup directly the 30mpg car or the 40mpg hybrid. It's a similar game as a company bragging about it's incredible 3000% increase in quarterly profits (when last quarter's profits were $1); the company with a .1% gain (over last quarter's $millions profit) is still better than the other one!

Or in other words, the 15mpg SUV is still wasteful, no matter what your previous vehicle was. Especially if there is a less wasteful vehicle out there that costs about the same and will meet your needs.

Re:Rather pointless

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh? You just proved his point that mpg isn't an easily digestible number as it's not linear with efficieny or savings. The real number we should be looking at is gallons/mile or if comparing fuels $/mile.

As an example, figure someone commuting 300 miles a week:
15 mpg = 20 gallons
20 mpg = 15 gallons
30 mpg = 10 gallons

Re:Rather pointless

[Anonymous Coward]

You're analysis is wrong. Gas is a finite resource and cost $$$. Imagine you have a jug of 10 gallons of gas and each of these three cars. Which one are you gonna drive? You'll drive the most efficient one.

Re:Rather pointless

[Above]

Because the 30mpg car and the 40 mpg hybrid can't carry a ton of much home from the home improvement center, tow the boat to the lake, or haul your looser buddy's furniture from his ex's place to his new efficiency.

People who get upset about a single person in an SUV or Pickup commuting to work are ignoring the larger picture. That same vehicle may be used for towing or hauling in the evening or on the weekend. Getting a little less gas milage on the weekend is far cheaper than buying a second car (e.g. that 40 mpg hybrid) just for the commute, and far more environmentally responsible than the energy and raw materials to build a second car.

Re:Rather pointless

[Anonymous Coward]

Or in other words, the 15mpg SUV is still wasteful, no matter what your previous vehicle was. Especially if there is a less wasteful vehicle out there that costs about the same and will meet your needs.

There you have it. ....and will meet your needs. A little tiny soda can of a car, will not meet my needs, especially so if I make over $50,000 a year and can afford the gas.

Making it just from A to B is only one of many needs that are filled by a car. Not looking like a self-riteous prat in a sub-compact is one of the needs most of us desire to have filled.

I get very tired of the 500% improvement or nothing crowd of tree huggers. It betrays either your younger age (temporary stupidity) or the fact that your are an older idiot (permanent stupidity). Could you imagine where we would be today if they were adding that 1mpg improvement, that you would scoff at, every 2-3 years since the 1979 fuel crisis. Hell even 1 mpg more every 5 years would still put us way ahead.

Why not be grateful that even trucks and suvs are showing fuel millage improvements.

Re:Rather pointless

[pclminion]

Wow. You've discovered... the reciprocal. Bravo.

Re:Rather pointless

[spydabyte]

Agreed. If you buy any car (even electric) you're still using energy, as that electric car is probably burning some coal in a plant far away. Want to save the planet? Two options: 1. stop living. 2. move into the backwoods and get off the grid.

Re:Rather pointless

[daver00]

I think you have the Prius figure a little off, all literature I've read, and accounts from people as well, put it fairly solidy in the 7L/100k range (in realistic terms). To put that into perspective, my 1992 carburettor powered honda civic gets about 7.5L/100k at its peak efficiency.

Re:Rather pointless

[skastrik]

Hello my friend, have I got an international system for you!

And while you get accustomed to it, you can use this friendly calculator in the meantime.

Re:Rather pointless

[ColaMan]

vehicle in article = 0.085 liters/100 km

Just to highlight this little fact, that's just under three shot glasses of fuel. To travel 100km. Not too shabby, even at 30mph.

Re:Rather pointless

[stubob]

And I'd counter by saying that the number of days per year you need to haul mulch, tow the boat, or move furniture would easily be met by renting a larger vehicle when you need it, and driving a smaller car the rest of the time.

Instead of paying $500 a month to finance your SUV, you could pay $250 a month for a smaller car and rent the SUV for 2 days every month and still be ahead.

In addition, your fuel costs per year would be (15,000 miles / 30 mpg * $3 per gallon) = $1,500 instead of (15,000 / 15 * 3) = $3000, so that should add into the equation as well.

But, people don't want to be rational about their vehicle choices, they just all want to drive Escalades. Just another tragedy of the commons

Re:Rather pointless

[AVee]

American SUV = 16 liters/100 km
American sedan = 9.4 liters/100 km
Prius = 4.7 liters/100 km
vehicle in article = 0.085 liters/100 km

Fixed...
Hell, I own a 11 years old European overpowered turbo-charged estate car, I only drive short stretches and I've got a really, really heavy right foot. But I do average better then 9.4 liters/100 km. The fuel consumption numbers on American cars amaze me every time, here's a hint: Bigger is not always better.

Re:Rather pointless

[bdabautcb]

you are either autistic, retarded, or black.

861 MPH!

[athlon02]

I think I like the 861 MPH better... "If my calculations are correct, when this baby gets up to 861 MPH, you're going to see some serious stuff" ... CRASH! KABOOM!

engineering: the practical application of science

[Anonymous Coward]

Hypermilling is for kids...get a bicycle if you're concerned about your mpg...

2009 tour de france:
2100+ miles, 25 mph average without hypermilling and no fossil/electric fuel source + you get your heart healthy exercise! WOW!!!

Not record-worthy

[Anonymous Coward]

In 1986 engineering students at the University of Saskatchewan built a vehicle which went 4724 MPG. Amazing how in 24 years we have managed to get 80% less efficient.

UC Davis got 3313 mpg in 1992

[techmuse]

In 1992, UC Davis students working under Professor Andy Frank achieved 3313 mpg with its SideFX and Shamu. The school later developed some of the first hybrid car technology, among other things.

http://books.google.com/books?id=OeMDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA10&lpg=PA10&dq=uc+davis+side+fx&source=bl&ots=yNnL_bcwLY&sig=hhexAD2-JnRF_cp2YeJRXn20AVI&hl=en&ei=DVCAS-GrI4zgswOL7-SHBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9&ved=0CB8Q6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=uc%20davis%20side%20fx&f=false

Re:UC Davis got 3313 mpg in 1992

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not impressed. My university has a student association called Remmi-team that does hypermiling . They have been active since 1976. Their current vehicle Remmi 7 has a record 3306 km/l (~7776 mpg).

Re:engineering: the practical application of scien

[Anonymous Coward]

But then you get the cancer in your balls.

I'd rather bicycle.

[nrlightfoot]

These things average about 15 mph and top out at 30. I have better performance than that on my bike (at least when I'm in shape) I would be willing to bet I could very easily out accelerate this thing on my bike as well.

Re:I'd rather bicycle.

[Jedi Alec]

Good luck maintaining those speeds over any significant distance and still arriving in a presentable fashion though ;-)

I can out-accelerate a lot of scooters and mopeds on my bike as well. Only downside is that as a bonus you get to outstink your colleagues unless you hit the showers after arriving at work.

Re:I'd rather bicycle.

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet you consume a lot of water during your cycling though.

On a 10 mile bike ride I generally consume 1/4 gallon of water. Add in the food it takes to get the energy and I bet you'll find it's much cheaper to drive.

Re:I'd rather bicycle.

[evilviper]

These things average about 15 mph and top out at 30. I have better performance than that on my bike (at least when I'm in shape) I would be willing to bet I could very easily out accelerate this thing on my bike as well.

This has a 3HP engine. Humans manage about 0.25HP on a bike, with the exceptions of world-class athletes, who can maybe double that. So...

* Stick this engine on a bike, and it'll accelerate 12X faster, and have 12X the top speed you could possibly manage.

* You're going to be spending a LOT more money on food if you're riding 3,000 miles on a bike.

* It's rather cold when I go to work, and sometimes raining. I haven't seen many bikes with enclosed cockpits.

* If you DO find an enclosed bike, I can guarantee you won't get a fraction the speed of this thing, even in the best shape.

* This is an extreme example. Why does everyone complain that some concept car isn't EXACTLY what they would want? I'm ecstatic to see people working on what is clearly going to be the real future of automobiles, rather than squandering many hundreds of millions of dollars on idiocy like hydrogen/ethanol subsidies. i.e. Making equivalent-performing cars at half or 1/4th the weight is reasonably achievable, and about the only reasonable way forward in a world of energy shortages.

Re:I'd rather bicycle.

[Eskarel]

Somehow I think that after being stuffed in a tiny tube with no air conditioner you wouldn't be an awful lot better.

Re:I'd rather bicycle.

[nrlightfoot]

Ok, I looked up their website rather than the article, and they have had the thing up to 43 mph, which is faster than I can go unless I draft a car, and they say it could go faster if it were geared differently (at a lower MPG of course).

I did actually calculate out the CO2 output equivalency of riding a bike is actually about 90 MPG for the average American on the average diet. I doubt that much of what they do to get this kind of mileage can ever have practical use though. I'd be more interested in a practical vehicle that got 100 mpg.

Plus I think I'm a little annoyed that this article made Slashdot because vehicles and numbers like this have been around for years, and I find nothing particularly impressive about this particular one.

Re:I'd rather bicycle.

[evilviper]

they have had the thing up to 43 mph, which is faster than I can go unless I draft a car,

...or get dragged by one. Either is good.

I did actually calculate out the CO2 output equivalency of riding a bike is actually about 90 MPG for the average American on the average diet.

That's certainly interesting to know, but I'm sure you'll find the cost of that food energy is quite a bit higher than gasoline at it's worst...

I'd be more interested in a practical vehicle that got 100 mpg.

I'd be more interested in an electric car. Internal combustion engines just aren't ever going to get the kind of efficiency we need to progress much. 100 mpg is certainly minimally doable, with a light car, and poor acceleration (and I might well buy one) but much more than that, and even in theory, the efficiency just isn't there. Even small turbines can't do any better...

The only way to get petrochemical fuels to notably exceed what we're getting now is fuel cells which operate on unleaded gasoline, and the like. The D.O.E.'s website has some details on these, and they approach 70% of the maximum energy conversion efficiency for the fuel, compared to 30% for the best ICEs.

Batteries, OTOH, can manage 70% efficiency pretty inexpensively, and can do better with a bit of work. Inverters/controllers and electric motors also exceed 90% efficiency. And what's more, they do so with less weight than a conventional vehicle requires (engine, transmission, axle, mounts, firewall, etc.)

shell marathon

[ekasperc]

Shell's got quite an impressive challenge running for many years, achieving way more than 2750 mpg on a regular basis : http://www.shell.com/home/content/ecomarathon/about/current_records/

Mass

[gd2shoe]

Mass doesn't protect you in an accident.

You're other points aside, it kinda does. Put a ping-pong ball on a pool table. Roll it briskly at the cue ball. What happens? Now do the reverse. Roll the cue ball at the ping pong ball. Now get a friend to help. Roll the two into each other. What happens? Imagine little people living in each ball. What kind of forces are the subject to?

One of the things keeping light weight vehicles from becoming popular are the heavy weight vehicles on the roads. (No, I'm not referring to professionally driven working vehicles.) In the event of a collision, a heavier vehicle isn't likely to change direction as suddenly or as sharply (and has more "material" that can be designed as cushion to boot). Yes, it may lead to greater injuries outside the heavy vehicle, but it still provides more protection to the person inside. My mom, for one, absolutely refuses to consider buying any car lighter than the average sedan for exactly this reason.

(It feels weird making a non-car analogy for a vehicular scenario - as opposed to the reciprocal.)

Re:Mass

[Rei]

To further the debate, however, there are several key issues running counter to what you say.

1) There are *always* heavier things than you on the road. You think your Hummer is tough? Try running into a school bus. Of course, if you think your school bus is tough, try running into an embankment.

2) The results of an uneven-weight crash can be counter-intuitive. For example, picture 6,000lb SUV A running into 3,000lb Car B head-on, each going 30mph, in an inelastic collision (I.e., assuming that they fuse on impact). What's the result of the collision? The mass A-B moving along at 10mph in the direction A was moving. Now picture 6,000lb SUV A hitting 1,500lb ultralight C under the same conditions. The result is the mass A-C moving along in the direction A was moving at 18mph. So B decelerated by 40mph, and C decelerated by 48mph -- only a 12% difference in deceleration, despite C being half the weight of B.

3) Many factors are as important or more important than mass, including but not limited to: deceleration length (how far is the safety cell from the impact point?), safety cell integrity, quality of the crumple zone, and internal safety features like airbags.

4) Vehicle crash statistics bear this all out; there is a *lot* more difference in safety within a class of vehicles than between classes.

Re:Mass

[OrangeCatholic]

Yes, but an ultralight, ultra stiff frame would accomplish a lot. Imagine a 500lb car that gets slammed by an SUV and doesn't deform at all.

Sure, it would get thrown a hell of a distance, and the G forces might be severe, but I bet you could find a happy medium assuming you had access to ultra stiff materials in the first place.

Re:Mass

[KDR_11k]

Also weight doesn't mean hardness, a Smart car is designed to be extremely rigid and if you run that into an SUV it basically turns the SUV into its crumple zone.

Re:Mass

[f0dder]

Extreme rigidity is meaningless if the occupants become scrambled eggs. I am not advocating for SUVs but the physics is what it is. You want crumplezones (ie a hood & trunk), the deformation is energy that is dissipated, less energy being transmitted to the passengers.

Re:Mass

[KDR_11k]

Yes, the Smart is designed to use the other car's crumple zones in a crash.

Are auto makers and oil companies in cahoots?

[markdueck]

I have heard of several instances where someone bought a brand new vehicle and they got very good mileage. I full size truck doing around 40 mpg. The owner gets a call from the manufacturer and they say there's a problem with his truck and he needs to bring it in. He brings it in, and since then the truck does normal mileage - around 17-19. Has anyone else heard of this, or experienced it?

Roundabouts

[gd2shoe]

Because city planners in the US are clueless about where and how to use them. Additionally, drivers here can't wrap their heads around the concept. We have a few roundabouts where I live, and they're nightmarish. I really wish they'd left the stop signs there.

I'm only generally against roundabouts. I could come up with places and ways to use them, but I've yet to see a good, safe, efficient roundabout in actual use. Besides, I doubt most city planners know what a roundabout is. I can only imagine the turmoil that would ensue if that changed.

Yeah, about that...

[Anonymous Coward]

Severed heads showed up in Stuttgart shortly after the first public demos.

There's nothing to see here, move along.

Say, did you hear about VW's great new minivan? Based on tested Chrysler platform, grandfather of segment!

You should shift your attention this direction, please.

Average, meet Economy of Scale...

[itomato]

Your car that gets 2000MPG at 30MPH just became the new carbon offset target wet dream.

The numbers this car introduces skew everything everyone knew about efficiencies derivatives, which is little.

Imagine the dark twisty passages of the Excel spreadsheets forcing action in D.C. and the monkeywrench this could introduce. Hooray.

Not very useful

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell you what instead of building me a vehicle out of tissue paper and sticks that gets 2k+ miles to the gallon. What can you build me that can get 50 miles to the gallon and can off-road and haul as well as my little 1998 Toyota Tacoma 4x4 (It's not a monster with it's 4 cylinder, but it can billy goat up trails I can barely walk up and hauls all my gear just fine).

    I'd be much more interested in that.

Can't slashdot be readable outside the little feud

[alexandre_ganso]

Using imperial units on the headline? Well, ok.

But NOT using it on the news? Oh fuck.

I still have not the faintest idea of what they've accomplished.

Re:Can't slashdot be readable outside the little f

[skelterjohn]

Commie.

Not very useful for YOU, maybe

[justinlee37]

Useful for what? Not all of us have to "haul gear" or traverse "goat trails." Some of us just need to get from point A to point B on flat, paved city streets. I bet there are lots of folks out there right now who walk or ride bicycles instead of owning cars who would love this thing.

Shell Eco marathon

[barath_s]

The shell Eco Marathon is pertinent and answers many of the questions I had when reading this

. http://www.shell.com/home/content/ecomarathon/about/current_records/ [shell.com] http://www-static.shell.com/static/deu/downloads/aboutshell/media/news/shell_eco_marathon_press_kit_2009.pdf [shell.com]

a) The CalPoly is an IC Prototype (futuristic) entry; as some noted, the record is held by the Microjoule, St Joseph La Joliverie, 3,771km/l (8870mpg per wolfram Alpha) b) There are categories for Urban Course - realistic quasi street legal modifications, with significant economy wins by the Norwegian and danish teams (fuel cell and ic engine

Oh, wow.

[Khyber]

Something I kept talking about years ago finally made it onto slashdot.

BUT YOU FOOLS ARE FOCUSING ON THE WRONG CAR.

Considering we've got THREE THOUSAND MPG a few years ago from another group - a bunch of HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS.

Try again, slashdot. Next time you rip off one of my leads, from YEARS AGO, at least focus on the prior cars that BEAT THE SHIT out of this current car.

bam

[Quiet_Desperation]

And then they sent it to NTSHA crash testing.

Services for the crash test dummies will be held Friday. It will be closed casket.

Re:Can't slashdot be readable outside the little f

[kimvette]

They have accomplished in making a wonderfully efficient go-cart that has no hope of meeting crash tests, emission tests, nor lighting or other safety requirements. Once they add that 2,000lbs worth of equipment and the 60 or so hp it needs to make it to minimum speeds allowed on the interstate highways, they'll be down to 20-40mpg.

Let me show you in simple term

[aepervius]

MPG only show you in a very abstract way HOW to save money. Going from 70 MPG to 80 MPG very obviously tell me for the same quantity of fuel I am getting further away. But if you have a fixed distance you travel in average per week (commuter) does it tell you how much you will spare with a simple glance ? No it does not. You either calculate your distance per week you travel and divide by the MPG to get the number of gallon, or you have to do exactly what the GP did or what we have in the EU for along time, you get the consumption for a FIX DISTANCE. Knowing that I am going from 16 liter per 100 to 4 liter per 100 km immediately shows me that NO MATTER the average distance I have per week, I will space 75% fuel. Knowing my fuel budget is then a simple matter to calculate how much I spare, without EVER knowing how many kilometers I *really* do.

In otehr word if my Fuel Budget is X euro(or dollar), and my new vehicule consumption for a FIX distance is -z% , then my fuel budget in the month will get -z% in average. On the other hand MPG figure are actually a tad misleading because of the inverse ratio as shown, the biggest number will tend to be grouped together. So going from 25 to 50 MPG (25 difference) is actually much MUCH better than going from 200 to 240 MPG (40 MPG difference). So for the consumer it is MUCH MUCH better toknow how many gallon per 100 miles (how many liter per 100 km) they will consume , rather than how many miles 1 gallon bring them.

Call me unimpressed

[RogueWarrior65]

I'll be impressed when a 36-foot motorhome gets 50 MPG.

Just how long...

[YankDownUnder]

...do you think it's going to take the Petrol companies to shut this one up and keep it from the public? (On that same token, hydrogren? Where'd that go? Or Steam? Where'd that go? And why are we still "so far behind" in development of electric vehicles?)

meh

[Anonymous Coward]

These competitions have been gone on for quite awhile. I used to attend a 2 year college in upstate NY where we built a car that got 640 mpg using a Briggs & Stratton engine. Looked pretty much like this. The winning car got 1300+ mpg. Oh and by the way, this was in 1983.