My buddy and I were arguing about this and I thought we should put it to a more informed audience:
What would get better mpgs - a viper driven by the proverbial grandmother or a civic driven by your stereotypical teenage male?
Does a larger capacity engine automatically get worse mileage or is it how you use it?
Thanks and I’ll take my answer off the air
I don’t know what the Viper or Civic do for mpg. Certainly driving conservatively will help either.
Larger capacity usually reduces mileage, but not always. There are many factors.
On average, I think the teenager in the Civic would do substantially better than granny in a Viper. If you want to go to extremes, compare the Civic going as fast as possible on a race track to the Viper at a steady 50 mph on the interstate. Under racing conditions the Civic might get 15 mpg while the Viper on the interstate is supposed to get something in the low 20s.
I take exception to the example. The Viper may do 20 mpg under those conditions, but the Honda flat out as fast as it will go will still get 23 mpg. I know. I had a Honda Prelude in my youth, and ran from Atlanta to Tampa in just over 5 hours (480 miles) and still was getting 26 mpg. A 1.8L engine can only swallow so much fuel. But a 7.0L Viper engine can really gulp it down.
You might be able to find an extreme set of circumstances under which a Viper would, for a short time. get better mileage than a Civic, but 99.9% of the time the Civic will top the Viper, regardless of how it’s being driven.
It takes more fuel to run a V10 than an I4, there’s just no way around it.
Let’s test it! Anyone have a Viper I can borrow? ;^)