Thanks. I think an inaccurate claim, either too low or too high, is not a slight on a car manufacturer but the test setup. Good to see these ones appeared to do better, though!
Nonsensical tripe. If PM has a reproducible test, then it becomes by definition peculiar. There is no such thing as 'real world,' if that is supposed to imply driver and climate and terrain and road and traffic homogeneity. How much time are we going to waste trying to educate Merkins to the obvious ?
I agree. FWIW, one could argue driving the cars on a real road and actually measuring fuel consumption is more 'real world' than driving it on a dyno and measuring tailpipe emissions instead of actual fuel consumption. The problem w/Merkins is that many never even cared about or tracked their mileage on their older, less efficient vehicles and now are unfairly expecting their mileage to meet or exceed EPA estimates when they don't even know what goes into the test, esp. if their conditions aren't ideal for meeting EPA #s (short drives, lots of useless idling, underinflated tires, driving too fast on the highway, poor driving habits such as accelerating to red lights, etc.)
I admit to my patience being frayed by SoCal'ers who think the EPA should test at 80 mph and 5 seconds 0-60, because they drive that way and refuse to consider that it is wasteful and dangerous.
Good article and some good data. The FORD MPG dropped from 47.5 MPG@55 Miles per hour all the way down to 33.5 MPG@70 Miles per hour. Lots of highways these days everyone is going 75 Miles per hour or more, so even worse efficiency. Interesting that the Hyundai had less drop-off at 70 MPH. Hopefully the proposed CAFE MPG increases actually show a benefit at 75 MPH.
