Posted on 05/14/2007 11:59:24 AM PDT by antiRepublicrat
Proper driving conserves gas for any vehicle. I’m glad you are happy with yours.
Speaking of wind resistance and aerodynamic drag : some 90% of your gas-energy becomes waste heat thru the tail pipe/radiator, only some 10% goes to compressing air on the front and rarifying it on the back. Essentially the vehicle is a FISH or BIRD moving thru a fluid. And yet here you see the collective stupidity of car/truck designers : square backs = low pressure from explosive decompression on the BACK(= SUCTION), vs tapered fish/bird tails that allows gentle, laminar recollapse of the rearward-going air/fluid.
A box has 14 times the wave drag as a torpedo shape, thus over the years you’ve seen more and more aeroshells on semitruck cabs as the fish head; but where is the TAPERED TAIL? Thus the rear suction = dust/dirt on the flat rear doors = energy loss due to wave drag.
Google NASA, the tapered tail on the shuttle for its piggyback ride on a 747; and DYMAXION CAR. You see, in the 1930s they designed streamlined cars with TAPERED TAILS; then collective stupidity set in. About the only intelligent design still on the road is the VW bug.
So, look in the mirror for vehicle energy efficiency : who’s the smarter one, the “genius” looking back at you, or “dumb” fish/birds that have been around a lot longer than car/truck designers...
We better hurry up and buy one of these cars before they lower the mileage... [/sarcasm]
For every car in every situation, there's a sweet-spot speed at which below or above that you're actually getting less efficient.
My wife purchased a Toyota Highlander Hybrid.
She only gets about 22 mpg.
BUT...
The none hybrid version got less than 18 - and probably a lot less because my wife likes to GO when she goes...
The simple truth is, she got the hybrid because it has a lot of get up and go with okay mileage. It has substantially more get up and go than the V6 non hybrid version that has significantly worse gas mileage all other things being equal.
Sounds good, but is not correct. A car moving at a moderate walking speed is already past the limits of lamillar flow. Wind-tunnel experiments show than sometimes a sharply truncated back end works better than a taper, unless the taper is very long — too long for a car.
Cars on a highway are going much faster than birds.
Our 1996 VW Passat TDI (diesel) gets better mileage than most of these hybrids. Better diesels are on the way. It looks like European diesels will be up against Japanese hybrids in the mileage contest. I suspect that the diesels will win with superior muscle, leaving the hybrids for the crunchy crowd.
From an environmental standpoint, tghere are many problems with the hybrids when one considers the entire life-cycle from naufacturing to disposal. Think of the huge quantity of old batteries to be discarded somehow.
Much higher than just about anything other than some sports cars.
If you are looking for a safe family vehical, the F250 isn’t it. If I remember correctly your odds of dying in it are about 3 times that of a Toyota Camry.
Diesel has about 11% more energy per unit quantity than gasoline. So yes, they should get better mileage with all other things being equal.
A barrel of crude oil produces about twice as much gasoline as it does diesel. Therefore as crude oil becomes more expensive gasoline will be less expensive per mile traveled than diesel.
I average 49 mpg overrall in my Prius. This tank has 181 miles on it, with a 52.5 mpg average. This was highway driving today, with A/C on, but low. The car has 85,000 miles on it, and hasn’t given me a single problem.
Wired is Tired
My wife’s 2006 FWD Ford Freestyle averages about 22.5 mpg given her non-freeway commute, but we clocked it at 32.165 mpg (measuring actual gas consumed vs. milage) on a roundtrip from Turlock in Stanislaus, County, California, to the San Jose airport and back. That was about 99% freeway milage using cruise-control at 65 mph under close to ideal conditions.
So if you use cruise-control on the freeway and stay within the “sweet spot” mph for your vehicle, you will get close to the maximum mpg for your vehicle.
That’s just gorgeous.
Tell NASA that their curved pyramid tail over the rear engines of the shuttle doesn’t do any good. No, you’re WRONG, the suction on the square, flat back of a semitruck is aerodrag, no 2 ways about it. Next you’ll be saying that the aeroshells over cabs don’t do any good either.
I get better than that with my 2001 Civic.
Barack Hussein Obama quoted Japanese fuel-efficiency standards for go-carts and motorbikes but insinuated that they applied to regular cars, vans, and pickup trucks. Toyota doesn’t manufacture the former vehicles (and market them as ordinary family cars), so it doesn’t conform to those standards on its real cars.
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