Agree; Roger Penske has big plans for becoming a car distribution company. He will take over the Saturn product line and brand, and could sell other econoboxes in addition to the Smart car. Smart cars sold by Mercedes in Canada are called Smart Cars, and have no Mercedes brand or three star emblem.
Markets are peculiar; in Europe Honda sells the Acura Legend as the Honda Legend with a Honda badge!
Ah come on-15-18 lbs per HP,cars achieve this mileage now,with this power to weight ratio(unfortunatly,anything I own cant seem to do this well-ah shucks)-Kevin
It’s very possible, but it involves taking the next step in controls. That would be computer controlled valve timing. The best way would be to do away with camshafts and use solenoids to open and close the valves.
With solenoids, it would be possible to switch between Miller cycle, dieseling on gas, 2/4/6 cycles or what ever is optimum for the current driving conditions and demands.
Multiple plugs would also help by increasing the speed of the flame front when needed.
That sounds promising, but the problem is the constraint regarding emissions. Seems hard to vary the operating conditions drastically and still produce legal emissions in all regimes.
At some point, hard decisions will have to be made regarding emissions and safety vs. efficiency.
“Ah come on-15-18 lbs per HP,cars achieve this mileage now”
On the highway yes. But city/highway average? Only tiny cars.
I think a lot can still be done with car aerodynamics. When going down the highway, the car has to push hundreds of pounds of air out of its way every second. (a cubic yard of air weighs about two pounds)
Getting rid of external rear view mirrors would greatly reduce drag as would having covered wheel wells and having the bottom of the car covered with a smooth panel. Some of the experimental designs that get over 100 mpg are using rear view tv cameras instead of mirrors.
Look at all the boxy car body designs on the road and it seems that we aren’t even trying to make aerodynamically efficient cars.
should also be mentioned that cars with larger engines are taxes more heavily in the UK (along with just about anything else you can imagine.) Through ridiculous taxation, the UK government has effectively legislated high powered cars out of the reach of the average citizen, only the wealthy can afford a V8 sports car in the UK. That is not something that I want to see happen in the U.S.
"If I were going to by a family sedan, I’d be looking at the Taurus SHO or perhaps a BMW 335i. Because I know that if I bought a 4 cylinder Camary or Fusion or Accord, I’d never be happy with the performance.
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If I bought a Taurus SHO or a BMW 335i, I would never be happy with the gas mileage, besides, the speed limit is still the same and the lights stay red just as long for these cars as they do for four cylinder cars.
Many years ago, a friend of mine who lived in NYC was adamant that I did not need a car to commute to my teaching job approximately 8 miles from my apartment in suburban NJ. He insisted that I could easily take buses to work.
What he said would have been at least partially true if there was actual coordination between two different bus lines. I could indeed have caught the first bus at the end of my street, and taken it approximately 5 miles south, to a corner where I could catch a west-bound bus. However, total lack of coordination between the two lines meant that I would have a wait anywhere from 20 minutes to one hour for the second bus.
And then, the second problem arose, namely that the second bus would drop me about 1 mile from the school, a distance that would have to be covered by walking in a traffic lane, due to a lack of sidewalks for much of that 1 mile. I estimated that I would have to allow something like 1.5 hours for my trip to work via this method, versus about 15 minutes by car.
Many advocates of using only public transportation have a good idea in theory, but in practice their ideas frequently tend to be impractical at best.
My Saab 9-3 gets 34 to 35 mpg on the highway. More like 25-27 overall. First car I’ve ever owned that beats the EPA estimates. If this zippy little car can do that well, I wold expect that the new standard would be possible.
If not, we can just change the definition of “mile” to be a shorter distance…
Obviously, a Taurus SHO will suit you better than that particular Mondeo. But for the 80% of the people out there who buy midsize sedans, they don’t care if there is a 2.5L or a 2.3L inline 4 under the hood. Or is it actually a V4? They might look at a car with the mileage and no expensive battery replacement.
It seems to me that from a power Vs. fuel mileage perspective the SHO and 335i are more efficent than the 4 cylinder Accord or 4 cylinder Camary.
The SHO has 365 HP and is rated at 20 MPG overall
The 335i has 300 HP and is also rated at 20 MPG overall
The I4 Accord has 177 HP and is rated for 24 MPG overall
The I4 Camary has 169 HP and is rated at 25 MPG overall
The SHO has more than double the horsepower of the 4 cylinders yet only gives up about 19% in fuel economy.
I agree, most of the people in the UK pretty much have to take the style over substance stance. Because the average Brit can’t afford to have a petrol V8 sports car due to the obscene taxation and insurance rates they have to deal with.
How true,so the case for hybrids anyway I’m waiting for the Volt, hope GM is serious about it-Kevin
You have a good handle on it Mike-cars are pretty darn good now-now what I would like to see is the Goverment getting realistic on Nox emissions,does anybody realize how much Nox a coal fired powerplant produces?-Kevin
Yes, but factor in the need for premium gas and the more complex maintainance and I’ll still opt for the four cylinder engines.
No matter how fast something is, there is always something still faster and even a Geo Metro beats walking. In fact, I recommend keeping an old Geo Metro in the garage and driving it once a week, that way, when you switch back to the Camry or Accord, you’ll think it’s a rocket ship.
True, there is always something faster, but there is a point of diminishing returns. The Bugatti Veyron for example has over 1000 HP and gets about 10 MPG. But it also costs a couple million dollars, so even though it ranks highly on Performance Vs. MPG scale, but you take cost into the equation, it’s doesn’t off much bang for the buck.
A couple of million for a car?
I have a simple checklist to see if a vehicle is worth more than 50K
Will it earn you money? (18 wheeler) if no, then…
Does the instrument panel have an altimeter, rate of climb indicator, air speed indicator, artificial horizon etc.
I moved to Poland about five years ago. Last year, my wife and I bought a Citro?n C4 (1.6 liter turbo diesel, 4 cyl, 110 HP, semi-automatic (electronic) transmission and clutch) that gets - over the last 7500 miles, from new - about 46 miles to the US gallon (best run was about 60.5 MPG). We run the a/c all the time, lights on all the time. It’s not a huge car but it’s big enough for four people to sit comfortably and to haul a bunch of luggage.
The C4 is definitely billed as a fairly “green” car and while we do not get the manufacturer’s combined claimed average of 52 MPG - though we don’t do as much highway driving (~60%) as the formulas say a normal driver would. On the other hand, as I said earlier, we never run without the a/c off. The car’s roof is entirely out of glass, we have 17" rims on regular, not-really-skinny tires, GPS, charging the iPhone and listening to music, etc. So the 46 MPG that we’re getting is pretty reasonable.
So, yes, 35.5 MPG is completely reasonable. But not if you want to drive a 200 HP V6 full-size family car in stop-and-go traffic. Get a small diesel car or get a small gasoline engine car and drive either in a reasonable manner - 35 MPG will be easy.
“Markets are peculiar; in Europe Honda sells the Acura Legend as the Honda Legend with a Honda badge!”
And until 2005, the only Lexus cars in Japan were the ones they built for us.