Gadgetory

I will never get over that do you recall what it was impossible to put 75 dollars in your tank today it's commonplace and the worst part is of that 75 bucks maybe 10 to 20 it burned on actually moving your car the rest of it goes out as heat and exhaust the innate inefficiency of combustion engines that's why EPA mpg numbers as imperfect as they are are an obsession with motorists today and that's why there are car tech 101 now the dirty little secret about the numbers you see here on the window sticker that tell you the mpg those are not done by the EPA not in most cases only about 15% of cars are actually gathered by the government and tested by the Environmental Protection Agency the other 85% they were tested by the car maker themselves on an honor system the EPA will pull in the other 15% on a random test basis to keep everybody honest or when there's been a lot of complaints by consumers like recently on Hyundai and Kia cars and we've also heard quite a bit about Ford Fusion and c-max hybrids when they hear about a big discrepancy then they'll haul one in and when they do that they don't take cars out on the road and drive them they put them on a dynamometer and hook up to a computer which does the driving on a treadmill basic one of several clearly specified cycles there's the la4 or city test that simulates a seven and a half mile trip that's real choppy like stop and go traffic it takes almost 23 minutes to complete averaging 20 miles an hour and there's a number of times when the vehicle idles it's done with both a cold start and a hot start and the MPG results are rounded down 10% there's also a cold version of the city test which is the exact same test but it's done in an ambient temperature in the test room of 20 degrees Fahrenheit then there's the highway fuel economy test that's 10 miles in duration averaging 48 miles an hour no stops and takes about 13 minutes the car has only started once at the beginning and the results are reduced 22% to be safe now you may have heard about the new way the EPA's testing mileage to new tests were added in 2008 there's us o6 what I call the Jackrabbit test it's high speed quick acceleration 10 minutes long covers eight miles averaging 48 like the highway tests but hits a top speed of 80 miles an hour it has a number of hard starts at a rate of 8 miles per hour per second that's similar to zero to sixty and seven seconds by the way the air conditioning is not on for this or most other tests which brings us to SCO three another one of the new tests but this one's done with the AC turned on like you often have it it's done in an ambient temperature of 95 degrees it's about 10 minutes long and very city like 3.6 miles averaging 22 miles an hour not freeway oriented there are five times when the vehicle stops and 20% of the time when it's idling one more interesting carve out the EPA does not change its MPG rating based on electrical load of the vehicle and this can be important think about all those outlets you've got what you're plugging in things to charge or are your headlights on are they on high beams are they high intensity headlights or have you plugged in laptops and other things into those 110 outlets you find on SUVs for every 200 watts of additional electric draw when you take roughly one mpg off your car's fuel economy what's being discussed now by the EPA are new or amended cycles that better test the electrified vehicles especially plug-in hybrids and range extenders and also doing so under very different ambient temperature conditions because there's a lot of concern that electric and highly electrified vehicles have much different performance in very cold weather oh by the way check out my mpg at the government's fuel economy gov website it lets you look at real drivers submitted mpg for all kinds of cars so you can take their word instead of the actual tests and you can also add your data they've also got a mobile webpage that makes it easy to add your gasoline information each time you're sitting there filling up