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

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.

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?

[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?

[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.

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

[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.

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: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."

Prior art

[gmuslera]

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

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.

 

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

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

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.