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>get an EPA-estimated 36 mpg highway, Highly commendable, but still lower than est hwy MPG for certain compact vehicles under production way back in 19 freakin
by damnesian 3y ago
>get an EPA-estimated 36 mpg highway,
Highly commendable, but still lower than est hwy MPG for certain compact vehicles under production way back in 19 freaking 76.
Also, here we are 50 years later and the 100mpg carburetor is still apparenrtly under lock and key in a secret high-security vault somewhere.
- PaulHoule 3y agoThe Toyota Corolla and Honda Civic are in a class by themselves in terms of fuel efficiency, there are an awful lot of other small cars, some even smaller than those two, but nothing that comes close in fuel efficiency. I think getting that efficiency requires careful end-to-end tuning out everything that other manufacturers haven’t done. Also superficially both vehicles look kinda expensive for what you seem to get but they are well built so when/if they quit making them I think you’ll see used vehicles with 100,000 miles selling at “new” prices.
- shortcake27 3y agoI love my Corolla. 22 years old, 200k miles, runs perfectly fine. Never broken down on me. Even the interior is pristine, no rips in the drivers seat upholstery - something I’ve seen happen in a matter of years in other cars. I felt bad when that story came out about Toyota engineers pulling the panels off a Tesla and being in shock. Sure, Tesla has done some amazingly innovative engineering. But the interior of a brand new Tesla is more rickety than my clapped out Corolla. Toyota engineers shouldn’t feel bad, they build cars that last, and that really matters to a lot of people.
- sokoloff 3y agoWith any remotely reasonable assumption about the (opportunity or actual) cost of funds, that Corolla has cost more for someone to buy than it has to fill with fuel for that 22 years and 200K miles. Building durable, reliable cars is more economically beneficial to owners than squeezing out another mile per gallon. (If you wanted to change that, you'd need to dramatically increase the tax on fuel.)
- antisthenes 3y agoWe had a 2003 Toyota that only lasted ~125,000 miles, with multiple major repairs needed before then, head gaskets, transmission issues, etc. Finally, the catalytic converter bit the dust around 120k miles, the car was driven for a little bit more and then traded in, since the cost of repairs exceeded the value of the vehicle. The first 12-13 years of the car were great, but the last 5-6 were terrible. Maybe we got extremely unlucky, but I just don't see where the legendary reliability stories come from. Seems like they are survivorship bias in the other direction.
- AniseAbyss 3y ago[dead]
- jacquesm 3y agoDaihatsu Charade 3 cylinder diesel was the best fuel economy of any car I've ever owned including relatively modern hybrids. That thing more than once made me doubt if the fuel meter wasn't simply broken.
- awiesenhofer 3y ago> the 100mpg carburetor is still apparenrtly under lock and key I always hoped these or similar fables like the 1-litre car would suddenly surface when Tesla and electric cars in general started to be a thing. Especially from car companies more "set in their ways" like GM or german car makers. But all this talk about efuels now makes me think they maybe dont have anything up their sleeves after all.
- 404mm 3y ago1L compact cars were not uncommon in Europe 10-15 years ago. Consumption was about 5L/100km (about 47mpg). Now they are being replaced with hybrids and electric versions. Example: (German) Opel Corsa 1.0 3-cyl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opel_Corsa#Corsa_D_(S07;_2006) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opel_Corsa#Corsa_D_(S07;_2006) Sure it was a rather small car, but it gets you to work just as well as F-150. Oh and carburetor was definitely not part of the design lol.
- kstrauser 3y agoMy counter to all those conspiracy theories: China. They have smart engineers, too. If a 100mpg carburetor were possible, they'd be building the thing so they could cut their oil imports. (Well, that and physics. We know how much energy we can extract from a gallon of gasoline, and no amount of cleverness can get around that.)
- ericbarrett 3y agoI have a 4000 lb 4-door sedan that gets 38 mpg highway, real world, not a hybrid. So this is really table stakes.
- AtlasBarfed 3y agoBy point of reference, the Prius and the Honda insight came onto the market in 1997 It is a tragedy of humanity and the environment that the world regulatory bodies did not look at the design of those two vehicles in mandate that was in 10 years. All consumer vehicles should have a hybrid drivetrain. Modern table stakes for a car should be a plug-in range of 50 miles, 40 mpg+ highway, and 40+ mpg city. The fact remains the vast majority of ICE vehicles are still sold without a hybrid drivetrain. So is they toot around cities in stop and go traffic they're wasting all of their kinetic energy in brake/friction heat and not reusing it for the most energetically expensive thing it does: acceleration. Most people don't even think about the sheer waste involved with a stop sign. The amount of mechanical work we waste with brake friction and the amount of energy to reaccelerate. If any were reading the discussion about repurposing ICE engines for home generators, you can see that the design right there. You basically can't use an ICU as a generator for anything but like 10% of its output sustained because all it's cooling is designed around intermittent high power acceleration to get the car up to speed. Think of all that wasted weight in the engine in the ICE drivetrain to do all that acceleration when much more compact hybrid drive trains can produce better torque and acceleration for most of that use case in consumer transportation. If in one of those decades the US since the Prius was introduced, it's simply mandated the industry go over to hybrid drivetrains especially plug in ones, we would have been so much more resistant to fluctuations and petroleum costs. And I don't even want to think about how long ago we actually could have done some sort of hybrid drivetrain in cars. This 1997 the formative arrival of the battery sufficient to be used in hybrid drivetrains? Perhaps it was with notebook batteries in lithium ion, but could nickel-cadmium or lead acid also done the job?
- dublinben 3y agoThe mythical General Motors EV1 also came out in 1997. It used lead acid batteries to achieve 55-78 miles of range. Some models with better NiMH batteries like in the Prius increased that range to 105-142 miles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1
- lttlrck 3y agoCars have gotten heavier and heavier, which explains some of it but not all of it. My 10 year old 4000lbs 3.5L sedan gets better mpg than lighter 2024 cars with less powerful, smaller engines... I think aero probably plays a part (sleek sedan vs tall modern designs). In terms of conserving fossil fuels it feels like we've gone nowhere. Tailpipe emission are clearly lower, which is great, but that's just part of the battle.
- scheme271 3y agoModern cars weigh a lot more due to safety features like crumple zones and better protection around the cabin. We could probably get that 100mpg car if we aggressively dropped all the safety features but then we'd go back to the fatality rates of 1976.
- j-wags 3y agoI strongly suspect that we could make equally protective, lighter weight crumple zones if we were designing for collisions with lighter weight cars. Excessive cabin protection is largely needed because bumpers on light trucks are at head level for passengers in normal cars. Weight is a safety factor independent of crumple zones and cabin protection because in a crash m1a1=m2a2, and you don't want to get caught with the smaller m. I'm concerned that we're currently cranking out a generation of uniquely heavy and dangerous vehicles which future vehicles will have to share the road with for decades, perpetuating these dangerous design factors. If we designed a new 5-seat sedan that could easily reach 90 mph, but which only needed to share the road with other copies of itself, I bet we could do it in 1000 pounds and it would be far safer.
- coredog64 3y agoFrontal impact testing only tests for a collision with a similar sized vehicle. I’m not aware of any testing standard that applies to how a vehicle does with an outsized collision “partner” (e.g. Mini vs. F-150)
- hackermatic 3y agoI like that you call out that this is mediocre even by compact car standards. We've lost so much fleet fuel efficiency because of SUVs and trucks, but there's no reason why a compact shouldn't be at least 50mpg. I was really interested in the Chevrolet Spark until I realized it only gets 29 city/38 highway. I really don't understand how it's that bad.
- supportengineer 3y agoThere were 50 MPG Honda's in the 1990s.
- mixmastamyk 3y agoYes, but measurement has changed in the meantime, so numbers not directly comparable.
- nickff 3y agoSafety equipment is heavy, and crash standards make cars bigger; “compact” cars are now much heavier and larger than they used to be.
- coredog64 3y agoModern catalytic converters require that the engine run much richer than efficiency dictates. We could improve fleet economy for small vehicles by trading off cold start emissions for highway emissions. Or allowing cat bypass once the engine has come to operating temperature.
- bluGill 3y agoThere isn't enough energy in a gallon of gas to get the typical car to 100mpg. You can get some special designed tiny cars to more than that, but the compromises on size mean that it won't be popular because of how small it must be. While they work for 90% of driving (one person), that other 10% means another car which is expensive.