A 230 MPG car that ... looks nice ...



http://apteramotors.com/

yep, but clearly the object would be to mass produce something like that. i just heard an interview with the director of Automotive X Prize who want to press the auto industry to make a product we can all afford that gets (the equivilant to) 100+mpg.

The Smart FORTWO Turbo diesel already reaches an average 75 mpg...

well, i just noticed your on the intelligent side of the pond!

the level of conspicuous consumption in america is stunning, that's why i doubt anything good will come from a competition like this. i also think that poor little FORTWO would resemble coin flattened by a freight train if it came up against jim-bob in his hum-vee.

...maybe someday we'll/i'll wise up.

When I was at UCDavis, the SAE Supermileage team built a car that got 3300 mpg (yes, three thousand three hundred miles per gallon). Road and Track did an article on the car. This was about 15 years ago.

Demick

When I was at Sac State, they were getting about 3700 mpg in their SAE car, which was about a year ago.

I think my dad has it correct when he says until the Oil/Gas companies figure out a way to profit from hydrogen/fuel cell/etc. cars they will never allow them to become the norm. Just look at hybrids, they still run on gas and just look how long they took to just start cracking the market!

I wouldn't drive that death trap if you gave it to me. My dad's Escort was already little and a bit of a death trap - my dad had a 1984 Ford Escort wagon with a Mazda 4cyl diesel engine that got 55mpg in town and 57mpg hwy. So how the F with all the current technology (like TDI and such) do we have diesels that only get 40-45mpg when that old-tech simple diesel Escort got 57mpg?? Or why do we have to get some small little 2-seat motorcycle in car clothing?

I tend to view waving the conspiracy flag as a bit of a joke but sometimes you have to wonder (tho' I doubt the car companies and oil companies are really organized enough to pull off said conspiracy). They offered that car one year - essentially I think Americans didn't care to have a sluggish diesel when gas was $1/gal, but when you consider Europe, I can't begin to imagine how we have gone backwards on mileage with better technology. It was a bit gutless pulling hills, but a turbo and new f.i. and so forth should now pull hills and still get 55mpg.

And the argument that there is added weight with the newer safety standards in no way will account for 10-15mpg - that is always the excuse that seems to be used but a few hundred extra pounds won't drop 10-15mpg at cruising speeds (hwy mileage), especially considering the cars are more aero than a squared up 1984 Escort I would expect even more mpg.

We have them here and they have a good safety record. One of our members owns one. Many government cars are the smart.
They have a roll cage type design and bounce like a beach ball in a mishap. We have your standards as far as auto safety goes...so I don't know why you don't have them.
They look too high, but you sit on the engine so it has a low center of gravity. Head on against a humvee you're dead in any car.

They don't have the smart for four here or I would consider it. $25 a week for a 100mile per/day commute sounds good.

Your dad's escort probably had 70hp on a good day. Todays 'equivalent' cars are several hundred pounds heavier, and if they don't have at least double the old escort's horsepower - they are laughed out of the market. That's the difference.

the issue I see is there is nowhere to put a crumple zone in that car, so I am sure it does bounce like a beachball, which implies your body will take all the g-loads due to an impact. That car should come with a HANS device as standard equip

Against a hummer is a somewhat bad example as I consider center dividers at 75mph highway speeds just as bad. Even if we all had really small cars the threat still exists of a mishap involving and inanimate object like a tree or something. So the crumple zone I see in that little car is my leg bone in the front and neck bone to the rear... even if you are surrounded by airbags something has to give in a sudden-stop accident situation.

One of the first purchases I made after getting my racecar all done was an R3 device because I know that as stiff as my car is, I am taking all the blow in an accident. The car will ricochet off everything but my neck has to bear the impulse.

My beef is automakers can't build a nice, "Jetta-size" car (tho' you couldn't give me a VW either as the repair bills after about 70K miles start to equal a car payment) that gets 55-75mpg with modern technology. I sincerely would expect a Jetta diesel sedan with TDI and so forth to at least get the same 57mpg my dad's 84 Escort did on the highway. Those cars are reasonably safe (safer than the escort for sure), have crumple zones, and have room to carry more than a couple suitcases.

I hear you on that to an effect - here with gas just now starting to hurt tho' remain cheaper than Europe, people opt for power over economy. But I don't get it in terms of markets that equate to $7/gal for fuel. I think most people searching for economy aren't expecting to lay rubber for a block either and would choose a little sluggishness for economy, especially commuters.

BTW, you may be right on the HP (I don't know the number) but in terms of torque, I would take my friends out and we would laugh while I dumped the clutch and spun the tires thru first gear then yanked/chirped second It wasn't going to win any races per se, but I would put it up against a stock 914 for comparison. And I liked my little 1.7L in my 72 when I used to daily drive it.

But I do agree - market demand is what drives car designs, not oil companies (hence my joke on conspiracy), so I don't expect to see any killer diesel cars here in the US any time soon... just surprised Europe hasn't produced anything reasonable.

What is a SAE car and how is that possible?

I wonder if we took a WRX motor and lopped off two cyl and retained the turbo, what kind of HP and MPG we would see. If tuner can get over 100 HP per cyl, we should be able to get a 2 cyl motor that would produce 150+HP and get pretty good milage out of it. Granted, it wouldn't have much torque, but, the whole 9 yards would fit under the hood with plenty of room. We could use the 8 speed auto with it to take care of the multipule gear shifts needed to make it scoot up a hill..... thoughts? Also, i read here that their testing a diesel version of the boxer motor.
I agree. none of this will happen ( except in back yards and garages) until the Oil Cartel figures how to make a bunch of money on it.

SAE is Soceity of Automotive Engineers. They have a supermileage contest for colleges to compete in.

http://students.sae.org/competitions/supermileage/

The way incredible mileage like that is attained is not practical for an everyday vehicle. The vehicles are small, streamlined, and lightweight. Maybe a couple hundred pounds. They only hold one person - usually laying down one way or the other, and they have very small motors which have been tweaked for minimum fuel consumption. They use what's called 'burn and coast' to get high mileage. Since a normally asperated motor runs at peak efficiency at full throttle, the driver will start the motor, accelerate at full throttle up to a certain speed, then cut the motor and coast as far as possible before starting the motor again and accelerating. The contest has an average speed that must be maintained (in the 30 mph range I think), so there is a lot of technique of when to burn, and when to coast.

Using these same techniques, a stock Honda civic or something similar can probably get 200-300 miles per gallon. But like I said, not practical for everyday driving techniques.

youtube smart car video

Imagine how much more efficient your car could be if it shut off instead of idling. That's a LOT of gas.

I like this smart car MUCH better

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSXhCN3kdUQ

BJH

Instead of lopping two cylinders off a Subaru engine, why not consider starting with a BMW motorcycle engine? Omigosh! (as Mickey Mouse used to say in comic books) We could reinvent the Isetta.

That is pretty cool ...

If you feel like saying screw the oil and gas companies you could always convert your 914 to electric. There is a kit readily available. If you want power then you are looking @ 13K for an AC motor kit and 10K for a DC motor kit.

I plan on doing it once the Lithium Ion batteries get cheaper. The big negatives right now are that with lead acid batteries the range is 150 miles and the weight of the car goes up to 3200 pounds. With Lithium Ion batteries you can go 4X the distance and they weigh half as much.

Then there are the obvious trade offs of performance vs range ala tesla
http://www.teslamotors.com/index.php?js_enabled=1
0 - 60 in 4 sec
250 miles per charge
1 cent per mile

Once the aforementioned batteries become cheaper I bet there will be a bunch of EV 914's

Can you say Hayabusa Super 7? ..as long as you could keep your foot out of this car it would get great milage. Then drag it to the track and kick Porsche butt!

http://super7cars.com/Videos/Super7Jolyon.mp4

I've done some calculations, and figure closer to 5 cents per mile for electric.

Anyone charging an electric car at home will be way over baseline quantities and the price goes way up (at least where I live). I know that for 130% to 200% of baseline quantities, I pay 22 cents per KWH. I don't know if the price continues to increase above 200%, but you would certainly find out if you dump 20KWH into your car every day. So unless you spend $20K on a solar array on top of your home, electric isn't as cheap as you might think. But if you can afford a $100K Tesla car, then you ought to have no problem with the solar array too.

Also, don't forget that your battery replacement cost on the Tesla is about 30 cents per mile ($30,000 per 100,000 miles)

A fuel efficient car can be in the 7 or 8 cents per mile range for fuel.

P.S. Don't get me wrong. I would REALLY like to build an electric car to commute in, and I've looked into the costs in a pretty detailed way, and have come to the conclusion that an electric car costs several times as much to run as a fuel efficient gas car. But the time will come.

Granted I was hiting the highlights as posted on the Tesla sight... However, one thing I would like to point out is that the batteries will no way cost 30K per 100K miles. I can provide you with tons of documentation on this. There is only a 1% loss of capacity per 1000 charges. So in theory the battery pack could really last your life time. At least that is what the new Lithiom Ion Phosphate batteries are achieving.

From the Tesla site:

Li-Ion batteries are good for 500 complete charge/discharge cycles. One cycle consists of discharging the pack from 100% state of charge (SOC) to 0% SOC. Realistically, drivers will not completely discharge their pack. More likely, drivers will drive the car for 50 or 100 miles then plug it back in to charge it up to 100% SOC. Driving only 50 miles is only a partial discharge, roughly using 20% of the charge. If a driver continues to drive 50 miles every day and recharges every night, then after 5 days they would complete the equivalent of one charge/discharge cycle.

In estimating the life of our batteries, you can multiply the number of cycles by the range. Thus, 500 cycles times 250 miles/charge works out to 125,000 miles, but our estimate is a more conservative 100,000 miles. However the cycle life of 500 cycles is based upon performance that is more challenging to the battery cells than our application. We believe that our pampered batteries will achieve more cycles due to temperature control of the batteries and minimizing the maximum charge voltage.

I was actually looking at the saphion lithiom ion phosphate batteries... unfortunately each 12v battery is currently 1K per battery and you need about 18 or more dependening on the app:

http://www.valence.com/ucharge.asp

thanks for finding and posting that - as I stated, leg bone crumple zone Just a little more front space on that other little POS helps (and really that vid is a testament to how amazing the safety technology is today!) but I would like to see a new Jetta sedan at that speed and slight angle on the concrete. I bet there would be virtually no intrusion.

I will agree that the passengers would probably die due to G-loads from instantaneous deceleration but one can extrapolate how much safer a larger car is in said situations, so a not so instantaneous decel might still leave you crippled in the smart and you open the door and walk away in a Jetta.

And they noted the higher Gs the passengers feel due to such a rigid structure - a lot of people overlook that. Still should come with a head and neck restraint hahah.

I will take my gas guzzling F150 anyday over that because I ain't takin' a knife to a gunfight if you catch my drift. Simple physics, big M v. little m and considering how poor our standards are in the US for handing out driver licenses I won't take my chances...

Because there is an idiot on the cell phone babbling instead of driving, not signaling cuz his hand is too busy holding that goddamn phone, and changing lanes out there somewhere as we speak looking to hit me or run me off the road into a barrier. Until that changes you won't find me in a little sh!tbox car anytime soon.

Midsize car with good crumple zones (Jetta, Fusion size), high-efficiency turbo diesel burning clean diesel fuels and hybrid with electric motor... now there is an idea that would generate good acceleration, very good mileage, etc and with better diesel fuels and emissions equip a very clean burn too. Figure out how to make that car for around $40K and I would buy that... and that combo should be around 100mpg easily and no extra electricity bill as the car charges itself.