Green Options

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You Might Be Very Surprised

A few days back I posted a You Tube presentation about two professors from Duke University who came up with a different, and in their minds, more accurate way to determine the efficiency of the engine in your vehicle.

It’s nice to know how many miles per gallon (MPG), or as the profs say, gallons per mile (GPM) your vehicle will get, but there’s more, much more to that equation.

First of all, you’re paying a premium for regular gasoline, $4 maybe in excess of $5 a gallon, and you decide to fill it up.  Sticker shock will settle in quickly, but how about this, how many hours will you have to work in order to pay for that fuel?

Revetec, a little known company from the Gold Coast region of Australia, may be on to something huge: they’ve created an engine that is 50% smaller, 50% lighter, has 50% lower emissions and is cheaper to manufacture than a conventional internal combustion engine of the same horsepower. Oh yeah, did I mention that it doubles the fuel economy too.

What that means is a car like the 2007 Toyota Yaris, which is rated at 40 mpg on the highway, would get 80 mpg with a Revetec engine.

This isn’t some hoax… They have a prototype which has been attached to an actual vehicle and independently tested to substantiate their claims.

Editors Note: This guest post was contributed by Charley Territo, spokesperson for the Alliance of Auto Manufacturers, in an effort encourage better dialogue between the auto industry and the environmental movement. Charley also contributed a guest post on Grist on May 20. I asked him to weigh in on a question I’ve had for a long time: How can automakers like GM complain that consumers only want to buy big cars when they spend hundreds of thousands advertising brands like Hummer? Here is his response. Feel free to weigh in with your own comments below.

For years it’s been assumed that, using their superior marketing skills, automakers have the ability to trick consumers into buying SUVs and pickup trucks…when, in reality, the consumers really only
wanted to buy compact cars.  While that’s probably quite flattering to the marketing departments, it doesn’t have the important benefit of actually being correct.

Current events are now allowing people to see more clearly the greater force at work driving consumer demand: Gas prices.

Those trendy Californians…

Recent jumps in gas prices have seemingly driven them [sic] to adopt a new chic habit: letting their cars run out of fuel on the highway.

Allstate has announced that the number of Californians running out of gas on the highway jumped 17% in the first 5 months of 2008 compared to the same time period in 2007. Additionally, AAA of Northern California saw a 6.5% increase in stranded “empty-tankers” in April.

Phil Telgenhoff, Allstate assistant field vice president for California had this to say about it:

“We can’t directly correlate this rise in the number of people running out of gas to the rise in prices at the pump, but anecdotally we know that consumers are trying hard to stretch their dollar and sometimes that means stretching fuel into fumes.

In California, the highway patrol hands out free gas to stranded motorists and AAA will do the same. There has been speculation that this is one of the reasons people choose to let their tanks go empty.

All these years, I’ve been doing the simple math of dividing the number of gallons used over a given number of miles driven, to determine how my car is doing on gas mileage.

Now come two professors from Duke University who say that may not be the accurate way to determine how efficient your car really is.

2009 Jetta TDI Clean Diesel Sedan

VW announced the pricing of the 2009 Jetta and SportWagen yesterday, along with a new fuel economy certification from the third-party certifier AMCI. It seems that VW wasn’t particularly impressed with the EPA’s 29 mpg city / 40 mpg hwy estimation, and wanted a second opinion.

There has been some general confusion circulating about fuel economy estimates for the new Jetta (which will be available in August) ever since VW’s Director of Powertrain Development announced the car could get up to 60 mpg.

I’m eagerly awaiting the 4-door, family-sized EV sedan rumored to be in the pipeline from the Canadian-based ZENN Motor Company (they already make a great 2-door model that’s even affordable to us non-celebrity types, picture above). I’d like to avoid going to the gas station at all when going to an Energy Fair or Green Festival. While our VW Jetta TDI gets more than 40 mpg, these days the cost for diesel (and biodiesel when I can get it) is quite a bit more than gasoline, and rising faster than gas.

For now, we’re moving around locally in a funky-looking, all-electric CitiCar, made in 1974. Our CitiCar is restored to roughly original condition (except for the wear and tear on the body itself) with the expert help of our neighbor who found two more after we found ours. It’s hard to go anywhere without people cutting me off — not out of rage — but curiosity or with a smile on their face. Sometimes getting a “head turner” doesn’t need to come at a huge price.

How would you like to drive an all-electric Mini? An EV Smart Car? A PT Cruiser? With the help of Hybrid Technologies, you can. They’ve taken many familiar vehicles, ripped out their engines, and replaced them with lithium batteries and electric motors.

On the surface it makes great sense and it seems there would be a huge demand for this sort of thing. Electric cars are nearly maintenance free. They don’t need oil changes and they have 90% fewer parts than gas cars. Plus, these EVs look like the normal cars that are already popular with many folks.

Cars.com has announced that for the first time ever, the Toyota Prius has become the most searched for new vehicle on the popular vehicle classifieds site — surpassing long time favorites such as the Accord and Camry.

Not only that, their top ten list for new car searches (see below) now contains mostly fuel-sippers including the Honda Civic, Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic Hybrid, Toyota Yaris and Honda Fit.

The Prius first appeared in the top 10 most searched vehicles list last summer.

Patrick Olsen, Cars.com editor in chief, had this to say about it:

“It’s not surprising that the Prius became the No. 1 most searched vehicle on Cars.com at the same time gas reached a $4 national average. Surveys have shown $4 to be the tipping point in consumer purchase behavior, and we are seeing that ring true in shopping patterns on Cars.com.”

Editor’s note: There’s no doubt about it: high gas prices are changing the ways Americans drive (and even causing them choose alternatives to driving). Our friends at Low Impact Living take a look today at the most extreme practices of driving with fuel economy in mind: hypermiling. As writer Jason Pelletier points out, some of these tactics involve safety risks… so be very careful with some of the more aggressive methods. This post was originally published on Thursday, June 5, 2008.

You may have heard about folks out there who describe themselves as “hypermilers”. What is that, you might ask? Well, it’s basically just someone who gets more out of a gallon of gas than the rest of us. Not a little more, though, but A LOT more - hypermilers can often nearly double the EPA listed mileage for a given car. One of the leaders in the hypermiler movement, Wayne Gerdes, can get nearly 60 mpg out of his 2005 Honda Accord (EPA est 34 mpg), and once got 127 mpg out of a Prius (EPA est 42 mpg)!

We all can learn from what they do, for their tips range from things we all should be doing anyway all the way up to the downright crazy / illegal things that it takes to get up into the mileage stratosphere.

A 45 year old mechanic from Dorset, England, always wanted a Hummer, but not the cost of maintenance and keeping it filled with gas.

So, Andy Saunders took a 1998 Suzuki Wagon, which he called an “old people carrier”, added custom steel panels and other parts to get that special Hummer look.

Now he drives a pint-sized version of the army’s Humvee personal troop transporter at a savings. Instead of 12mpg, he says the “credit crunch Hummer” gets 60mpg.