100+mpg car
By Karina | September 1, 2010
Have you all heard about this? The Avion is a car which was prototyped in the 80s, and which is super efficient and designed to get over 100 miles per gallon. And there’s a guy who is driving one from Mexico to California! As they say:
“In our testing the car we were able to achieve 80 mpg At 70 mph and an astonishing 114 mpg at 55 mph driving from Eugene OR. To Portland OR.”
Wow! that’s great! There’s a news story here, they started driving down this weekend.
Now, I look at this car and think a few things: 1. what a geat commuter! 2. with a lightweight vehicle like this, I wonder how difficult it would be to make this an electric car?and of course there’s 3.: Jiminy Christmas, those are some awesome doors.
Because I’m so dorky, and also so committed to my own high-efficiency automobile (which gets around 60 mpg if I’m driving at 55 miles per hour), I wanted to make a comparison – the problem being, of course, that the Avion is a diesel engine and my Insight is gasoline. Everyone talks about how great the gas mileage is with diesel, but it’s actually an unfair comparison because (due to the nature of the different hydrocarbon chains that make up diesel and gasoline) there is more embodied energy in diesel than there is in gas, so part of the reason that diesel cars get better mileage than gas is just that the fuel is inherently more powerful. Using the excellent explanation and embodied energy here, I figure that gasoline is about 85% the efficiency of diesel. So really, to compare apples to apples, need to calculate the gasoline-equivalent mileage of the Avion by multiplying 114 mpg by 85%… which still gives us 96 mpg! that’s darn amazing, and tops my 60s-70s mpg in the Insight.
Would you buy this car if it were in production?
Topics: Transportation | 2 Comments »
This is awsome.. and the doors, yes they are super cool in a car geek kind of way! Deisel also has the issue with more particulate release in the air (in many EU countries they tax these cars heavily for this). This is not good from a healthy lung prospective.
I like the idea of electirc but I do wonder how that would work if I live in an apartment with only street parking. It is an issue that had us wondering when they showed them and just said the user could plug it in at night to re-charge. Works when you have a house, or designated parking but really doesn’t work if all I have is random street parking.
It’s a nice looking car! If it came in a wagon or minivan style I would buy it. And then convert t to run on veggie oil :D