Pardon me, but who around here spends 98% of their time zipping along a highway without a stoplight in sight? Conventional cars ads, TDI's, new compact sedan ad's ... 40 MPG hwy, 42 MPG hwy ... etc... rubbish! They'll net you below 35 at the pump. My '11 Accord is rated at 33 hwy / 22 city / 26 combined. Know what I get at the pump? 26 MPG most of the time. that's 7 off the hwy figure. Also, selling cars on their higher highway figures seems to suggest - get out and drive farther, take more highway trips, take that job with longer commute, go on vacation more ... basically, burn more gas to get the higher fuel economy. Have you seen in the paper how they suggest not to idle your car too much? Are they suggesting to pretend being a hybrid? what a joke. Who is going to restart their car 40 times a day? Lot of hype to sell conventional cars. A 50 MPG combined conventional car would be about half the size of a Smart Car. Conventionals just need to go away in a few years.
I remember when new age diesels just got very popular in Europe, people kept measuring how little it can spend on the highway at our normal speeds of 50mph.... you could get 2004 Avensis to over 60 MPG, easily.... But thats of course just steady 50mph driving, as soon as you have to stop and accelerate again, it goes down. At the end, you could not possibly get that 60 MPG, but you average still excellent 30-40 MPG, so people evened out and measure full tanks these days, which is only reasonable thing to do. So I think it is rather crazy that advertisers are allowed to advertise HWY mileage only, because general public might not understand that average Elantra is getting 30 MPG, not 40.
For many years, with a very different commute route than now, 90% of my miles were highway. Sure I used it in the city too, but total mileage there was very short. Thus, my '86 Accord, rated 30 hiway on the old EPA system, 24 combined on the new EPA system, averaged 35 in summer, 32 in winter. If the three EPA numbers were collapsed to just one, the public would become even more clueless about how variable fuel consumption really is.
I do 6 to 8, not counting when I start the drive, and I've backed off now that the battery is getting long in the tooth.
Even Americans realize that fuel economy in the city and highway are different. The adverts playing up highway fuel economy are there to help consumers rationalize the purchase. When fuel is expensive enough the current adverts will not work.
Yep... as we've harped on stupid advertising where the highest number is the only number mentioned out loud or prominently, the news media also helps perpetuate this crap. With gas nearing $4, Americans opt for small cars - Yahoo! Finance Not once was city nor combined mileage mentioned nor the word highway used. It's also goofy that the above article refers to the Jeep Grand Cherokee as being a small SUV. Right... That's pretty sad that sales have supposedly tripled from last April. The most efficient of these (2WD V6 version) is EPA rated 16 city/23 highway, 18 mpg combined.
What's funny is I've seen newspaper ads where Prius city mileage only is quoted, 51 MPG. haha. Take that, gas hogs!
It should be huge and bolded and say "You know, that thing you live or work in and spend 80% of your time driving in?"
I wasn't sure which of cycledrum's threads to resurrect, but this annoyed me last night and even more so once I looked up the figures... Take a look at Compare Side-by-Side. The "40 mpg" Fiat 500 only gets 40 mpg on the highway test w/the manual transmission. Its combined mileage is 34 mpg. If you go w/the auto, its highway mileage falls to 34 and its combined falls to 30. That Fiat would sure look a lot less attractive vs. a 50 mpg combined Prius if they had to advertise it as 30 mpg combined or 34 mpg combined...
