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Billybones- I hear ya on the whole old car vs. new car gas mileage gig. I've always wondered the same thing myself.
My first car was a 1972 Cadillac Sedan DeVille. Totally empty, it weighed almost 5,000 pounds... the same as most mid-to-large SUVs. It had a 7.7-liter engine (472 ci) which thumped out enough power to smoke tires and cruise over 100 mph easily. It got 10-11 mpg in the city and 13-15 on the highway. Look at gas mileage figures for vehicles of comparable weight and engine power today. If that's all the improvement they can make in 38 years, after adding a whole ton of computerized crap to the engines which will only fail and cause enormous repair bills eventually, I say more can be done.
We're all going nuts about "active fuel management systems" today... well, I owned the very first car with such a system. That would be the 1981 Cadillac Coupe DeVille... another >4,000lb car with a huge powerful V8. That beast would get 21 mpg on the highway easily... and if I were nice to it, I'd get 23-24. These days, car companies brag about those figures. I don't get it.
I have a 1982 Dodge Ram full-size, long bed pickup truck with a 6-cylinder engine and a stick shift. It gets up to 18 mpg on the highway. I've been looking at new trucks... the EPA estimate for gas mileage on the new full-size, long bed pickup trucks with a 6-cylinder and a stick shift is... you guessed it... 18 mpg.
I have a 1994 Mercury Sable station wagon... it gets 27-29 mpg on the highway, and 23-25 in regular driving. (It has the LARGER V6 offered that year, by the way. Ford offered a 3.0-litre and a 3.8-liter V6 in the Taurus / Sable.) My wife has a 2000 Taurus with the 3.0-litre engine and it gets 27-31 mpg on the highway. We've looked at new Tauruses. (Tauri? :-P) They are EPA-estimated at 27 mpg highway. I'm still awaiting the improvement.
Honestly, I think that the problem is twofold. First of all, cars are getting heavier and heavier after a long period where they got lighter. Everyone equates the 1960s and 1970s with "big American iron"... huge heavy cars that chugged gas... well, today's cars are of comparable and sometimes heavier weights. My mom had a 1987 Buick Regal T-type... it was a midsized family hauler with a rocket under the hood... and it weighed 3,300 pounds. I read recently that the Subaru WRX, a "compact" car, weighs around 3,400 pounds. The culprit? Government-mandated safety equipment... sometimes accented by dealer-installed options. Let's face it... air conditioning will raise the weight of your car by quite a bit. You ever tried lifting one of those automobile A/C compressors? As for the government-mandated safety equipment... I'm all for safety, but check this out... my 1972 Cadillac had NO safety features whatsoever, except for seat belts, a padded dash, and an energy-absorbing steering column. There were no airbags, no crumple zones, no break-away engine mounts, no impact-sensing fuel pump shutoff, no nothing. Actually, my Cadillac followed the American safety rules of the day... a tougher car with more iron would maul a car that wasn't as tough... and its driver would be less likely to get hurt. One would think that modern cars, with all of those gizmos, would be safer than older cars. But seriously... let's say that you had your choice of being in my 1972 Cadillac, or a brand-new midsize American family hauler like a Toyota Camry, in a head-on collision at considerable speed. Which car would you pick? (Even if you wanted to level the playing field and go Cadillac against Cadillac, I say neither one is necessarily preferable in terms of safety... and the older Cadillac would sure be cheaper to fix.)
The second problem with today's fuel economy ratings is that people generally want cars to be fast and big. When American cars downsized in the late 1970s into the 1980s, their engines downsized too. You had midsize cars being pushed by four-cylinder engines. Some of those huge Cadillacs had 6-cylinder engines under the hood. Have none of you ever driven an older car that just didn't accelerate very quickly? I own one right now. My pickup truck, when last I tested it, took 28 seconds to go from 0 to 60. That's slow by anyone's standards... but hey, it can still get to 60 mph... and beyond. I've had it up to 85 on the highway (shhh... don't tell the police). My dad had a 1982 Chevette which I never saw go faster than 69 mph. I'm not saying that all cars should be that slow... what I am saying is that a lot of the cars which have 6-cylinder engines today could easily be pushed by 4-cylinder engines if their owners could deal with 15-second 0-60 times. The same goes for 8-cylinder cars which could have 6-cylinder engines. People want cars that are big and fast... I can see big, due to the safety factor, but you really don't need fast. My Cadillac could go 0-60 in ten seconds, which is still "slow" by today's standards... but it had all the power it needed. I rarely even had to push the accelerator down far enough to open up the secondary jets in the carburetor. Besides, does any car actually NEED to go faster than 80 mph (the current highest known speed limit in America)? I like high speed too, but it is only "necessary" in extremely rare emergency circumstances. So rare, I think, that car manufacturers could offer relatively weak but very efficient engine options in their vehicles and find plenty of willing buyers.
I think that American engine technology has the capacity to produce awesome gas mileage numbers. However, would the Toyota Prius sell if there was another non-hybrid and less expensive car which got the same or better gas mileage? (Hint: The Prius gets around 44 mpg on the highway. Remember the Geo Metro? 49 mpg highway. Remember the Volkswagen diesel cars? All of them got around 45 mpg highway... and that's as far back as the 1970s. The 2007 Toyota Corolla got 41 mpg highway, and if it had a smaller engine, it surely could've turned a better number. But then, you see, nobody would buy the more expensive Prius. I don't like to throw around conspiracy accusations, but I can't help wondering.)
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04-16-2008, 06:45 PM
what will happen when gas hits 4.00$
.LOL
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