The mpg illusion

This is something I recently found. It deals with a different way to look at how exspencive it is to fill up your car.

A town maintains a fleet of vehicles for town employee use. It has two types of vehicles. Type A gets 15 miles per gallon. Type B gets 34 miles per gallon. The town has 100 Type A vehicles and 100 Type B vehicles. Each car in the fleet is driven 10,000 miles per year." The town wants to replace these vehicles with corresponding hybrid models in order to to reduce gas consumption of the fleet and thereby reduce harmful environmental consequences.

Should they (1) replace the 100 vehicles that get 15 mpg with vehicles that get 19 mpg , or (2) replace the 100 vehicles that get 34 mpg with vehicles that get 44 mpg?
sorce

The point of the article is that thinking GPM could be a better method then MPG. Which it could be in some situations. It is an interesting read. Please feel free to post what you think of it.

My question would be how much is it going to cost to replace those vehicles, and how long would it take for the fuel savings realized to make up the cost of the new vehicles? Penny wise pound foolish comes to mind.

I haven't read the article yet (I will though. It sounds interesting) and am posting solely on the title of the thread "The mpg illusion".

I don't know if anyone else has noticed it yet. I'm in a truck a lot and most of that time, the only company I have is the radio. Most times when a commercial comes on, I change the station. Today, for some reason I didn't and heard one for Honda. They made no reference at all to how many miles that particular car got per gallon. What they said was that it got around 475 miles per tank.

All I could think about was how big was the gas tank. Has anyone else noticed any other manufacturers doing this? Just wondering.

reply to post by Americantrucker


475 miles to the tank is quite a bit, but it also depends on the size of the car.
We have a chevy cobalt and it gets about 320~ or so miles between refills, and costs just under $40 to fill up at around $4.10/gallon..

So to hear that they can do 475 miles is probably stretching it but not necessarily untrue. Have you heard HOW they test miles per gallon?

They don't actually go out and drive them on a road. They plop the car on these rollers, same kind where you get your emissions done, so you can bring the car up to a certain speed and hold it there. That is your city MPG average. Then you bring it up to highway speed, about 55/65mph and there is your highway average mpg.

Everyone knows that you spend a lot of time at red lights and constantly stop, thats when the most fuel is wasted, during the acceleration from stops. These tests don't take that into account. You COULD get that mpg if you never went under 35mph and kept going straight at that speed to your destination but that just doesn't happen here.

Of course there are other people who will go out and do their own mpg tests and post them, and you can also get the average mpg that regular people submit to websites but I don't know if I would believe them.

What's funny is my friend mentioned how he's not at all impressed with any of these hybrid cars that came out. Honda Civic's back in the early 90's blow away the new hybrids for gas mileage, but they were pretty small and don't have all the accessories of today's hybrids.

Zebra