As long as consumers and manufacturers alike direct collective focus on current automobile ideas, you’re absolutely correct, VDCdriver; however, escaping the myopia and venturing into fantasy land, if greater resources were poured into developing something other than the current engine technology, we stand a chance to change the landscape of things that’s today. Sadly, even in the rosiest of scenario, conservation will have to play a greater role than we’d like to accept.
Ooops, that should have read 250cc, 150hp and 27mpg. Ah yes, that age related memory gap! 
(it had dome head pistons of all things too!) I drove in Texas which meant all highway driving. I could drive nearly 600 miles on a tank (20 gal) of gas.
250 cc is only 15 cubic inches! Even F1 cars that rev 20,000 rpm don’t get 10 horsepower out of each cubic inch of displacement. Kawasaki’s smallest street bike has a 250 cc twin that makes about 27 horsepower by revving up to 14,000 rpm.
Are you sure that car didn’t have 2500 cc of displacement?
The manufacturers sell what people buy.
I believe it is actually the other way around. I often wonder how much marketing costs add to what one pays on the lots. Its likely that the marketing budget for many of the large auto makers would handle a retooling or two each year.
Define reasonable. The ZR1 Corvette costs over $100k, for the people that can afford it, an extra thousand bucks in tax won’t make a difference. Personally I think the Corvette in any trim is an exceptionally efficent car. 400 HP or better and better fuel economy that many family sedans.
Marketing is a NECESSARY cost to move the goods. Advertising, part of marketing, is mostly to boost cutomer awareness and increase sales. At last count that came to about $400+ per car. About the same as the value of the steel, and the BLUE CROSS health care package for working employees. You seem to blame the manufacturers for MAKING customers buy what they want to sell them. That’s like a drunk blaming Jack Daniels for his habit!
Sales of SUVs, pickups are down 50%, and Hummer sales are down 60%. So the customer is not dumb putty in the hands of marketers!
Right on! I foresee India and China build these motorized rickshaws getting close to 100 mpg from tiny engines. But Americans, Canadians, Australians and othe rich big country residents will want a modicum of comfort and will buy really small cars as second cars mostly. The Smart Car will have limited city driving appeal.
BarbieGee; this forum deals largely with factual information and opinions. It does not deal with wishful thinking, info from a poor memory, misplaced decimals or deliberate twisting of the truth.
My father owned an identical car; it displaced 250 cubic inches, used regular gas nad the outpu was about .6 horspower per cubic inch or 150 or so. My father said it used a little less gas than his pickup truck, or about 20 miles per gallon. He was a slow driver.
As Rod Knox remarks, a very special science project with long DOWNHILL RUN would have achieved the results you claim.
Progress in efficiency is usually evolutionary rather than revolutionary. However, considerable progress has been made in increased gasoline mileage. In 1965 I bought an almost new bottom of the line 1965 Rambler Classic. It had a manual transmission, no power steering or brakes, no air conditioning, and so on. I currently drive a 2006 Chevrolet Uplander minivan. It too, is the bottom of the line. However, I have an automatic transmission, power steering and brakes, air conditioning and a whole boatload of other useless features like headlights that figure out whether they should be on or off, a DVD player, etc. The mileage is 3-4 miles per gallon higher in both city and highway driving than the old Rambler. We have made progress, and I wouldn’t want a car without air conditioning. If I didn’t have to take people and musical instruments all over the place, I would have a car that would get much higher mileage and have at least as much room as the 1965 Rambler.
On the other hand, we have lost ground in the transportation department. When I graduated from college in 1962, I bought a 1947 Pontiac 6 to take me 350 miles away to graduate school. I think the Pontiac worked up to 15-16 miles per gallon at 55 miles per hour and consumed a quart of oil every 200 miles. I suppose if the engine hadn’t been almost worn out, I might have managed 17-18 miles per gallon and maybe driven 1000 miles on a quart of oil. I discovered, however, that I could make the trip in air conditioned comfort within 20 minutes of the time I took to drive the route by going by train. The cost wasn’t much more than driving and I could study as I traveled. This option isn’t available today.
The main reason that our fuel mileage has been largely stagnant is because gas prices have been low so there was little incentive for customers to seek high fuel economy and give up prestige or comfort. That has (predictably) changed.
Internal combustions engines are inherently inefficient and highly complex beasts. But you can get big mileage boosts by going on a diet. Amory Lovins at the Rocky Mountain institute promotes use of composites to cut weight by 40 or 50%, with a huge improvement in safety. Look at composite body race cars that are feather light and can protect the occupants in very high speed crashes.
So do as the Europeans have done - light weight cars with a small displacement common rail diesel. I have seen reports of 60 and 70 mpg cars with that formula that do not have complex and expensive hybrid systems.
Ultimately, we need to go electric and use biofuels if we must retain the hybrid. A Prius plug-in hybrid conversion burning E85 gets a theoretical mileage of 100 to 500 MPG of fossil fuel.
It takes the paradigm shift that real economic pain will produce. And its coming. Efficiency has to become a virtue. We can’t continue to export a Billion dollars per day to pay for imported oil.
Cheers
The past seems always more rosy; not just to "All in the Family"s Archie Bunker and Edith (“Gee, our old LaSalle ran great!”).
If we compare interior space, perfomance and fuel econmy, my 1965 Dodge Dart 273V8 2 barrel got 18 mpg in normal highway driving, it had a top speed of just umder 100 mph, and had space for 4 adults plus one child.
My 2007 Toyota Corolla has similar performance to the Dart, probably somewhat higher top speed, and gets 36 mpg in normal highway driving on the same regular gas. Trunk space is similar as well.
The Dart engine had more torque, so I could pull a small camper with it.
The Corolla’s engine runs 98% cleaner, and will have a longer life expectancy than the Dart’s 154,000 miles, at which time only the transmission was still good; everything else was ready for the scrap heap.
So, let’s stop whining about the “good old days”. Even Consumer Reports says that cars are substantially better than in the past.
" The manufacturers sell what people buy.
I believe it is actually the other way around. "
So you believe that people buy whatever the manufacturers throw at them? How do you explain Hummers and other sub-20 mpg cars? We have cars available that get pretty decent gas mileage. They sell just fine, but up until very recently cars that got horrible mileage sold very well too. Gasoline was cheap, so we used it freely. When gas prices shot up in the '70s we saw a rash of higher mileage / economy cars, but more recently we grew comfortable with gas prices. With that complacency came the high horsepower / big and heavy / gas guzzling cars.
And we bought them.
It looks like my memory is pretty good. I did drive a Biscayne like that at work, but I never owned one.
In my above post, I said:
" The actual hp of a Chevy six-cylinder engine of that era was approximately HALF of what she recalls. And, the best gas mileage that could be achieved on that car, even with the most careful, light-footed driving was in the range of 17-20 mpg."
It looks like I was right on target, based on what Docnick tells us.
Barbie–Have you spent too much time at Oktoberfest for too many years?
I will say this about Al Gore. He is a huckster who is making millions of dollars preaching about an issue of which he knows absolutely nothing about.
He showed up here last year at the University of Oklahoma with his traveling medicine show. After the presentation he collected 200 grand, had dinner with the powers that be, and then motored out in the same chaffuer driven gas guzzling SUVs he complains about before boarding his private jet. Nice work if you can get it.
He then returns home to his estate which uses a whopping 220,000 KWHs of electricty per year. Kind of hypocritical don’t you think?
As to SUVs, and their 1st cousin the pickup, they’re a necessity here in Oklahoma. Things are spread out and SUVs and pickups are a must for the farming and oil/gas industry. Next time you sit down to eat remember that the food and the gas used to cook it are provided by those SUVs and pickups.
Lastly, you say you have an open mind. Do some research on the alleged global warming issue and don’t form an opinion based on what you saw on TV or read in Time magazine. There IS no global warming. My son is a climatologist and we discuss this issue quite a bit. Keep the following in mind. Over the last 10 years the avearage global temps have dropped .5 a degree and even the head of the U.N. IPCC panel came out and admitted to it.
You want to know how the temps have been shown to go up? Some of the testing stations were placed near or above A/C units, near parked cars, on top of buildings, etc. Figure in these and the GISS temps go up; omit those stations and the GISS temps go down. Kind of a man-made temperature increase and as my son said; there are only 2 reasons for doing this. Its either gross incompetence (why believe it then) or it was done on purpose (yet another reason to not believe it).
And, as usual, it’s more cost effective to keep what you have than sell it for something better in mileage. My Civic is almost 10 years old, only reason I’m looking now is because I will eventually get rid of it, but I’m having conflicts of the brain and heart. Part of me wants a new car, but the other part says save your money until it dies. One day the first part will win, but not right now.
I think you answered your question with Posted by.
EOP
" … The very first new car I ever bought was a 1967 Chevy Biscayne straight six, 250hp. It had no emission controls and got 37mpg highway…"
Barbie, you got that kind of mileage because your parents were putting gas in the car when you weren’t.
Why do all you people remember the gas mileage of cars you owned 40 years ago?
Good question, I can barely remember what city I’m in at the moment or what I ate for lunch today (I think I had lunch today?). I think I checked the mileage of my current car once or twice when I first bought it to make sure they were reasonable, but I don’t recall the values. I don’t think I could even correctly name the model and year of every car I’ve owned.