376.59 MPG Car Found In Museum (It Was Built In 1959)
Think you need a hybrid to get great mileage? Try a souped-down 1959 Opel T-1.
In another tribute to high-mileage car hacks, a man named Evan McMullen rediscovered a 1975 Guiness-World Record-Setting car that got 376.59 MPG.
It was wasting away in a museum in Florida:
That number doesn’t come from some manta ray-shaped, wind tunnel-vetted carbon fiber space car. No, it’s from a chop-top, steel-frame 1959 Opel T-1 (think melting jelly bean, but uglier). And the record was set in 1973 in a contest sponsored by Shell Oil Co.
Unfortunately, that contest-winning mileage number occurred on a closed track at a steady 30 mph. Not exactly highway speeds. Nonetheless, it makes you wonder about the evolution of automobile manufacturing in the last 50 years:
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But McMullen’s biggest question is why? Why didn’t this technology find its way into the mainstream? Why did the car sit unremarked, unremembered for so long?
“If this is something they could do back in the 1970s, what happened?” he asked, poring over paperwork, including patents, for the car.
“Certainly in 34 years we could do something to make this work.”
In reality, it’s not that hard to get better mileage: drive slower, reduce weight, and increase aerodynamics. None of this seems to particularly interest Detroit, since better mileage tends to increase the amount of time people own their cars before upgrading.
But next time you shop for a new car, instead of upgrading, you might consider downgrading.
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Ecoscraps: “376 MPG in 1973!”
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SeattlePi.com (Feb. 20, 2008): Hybrids, meet your rival — it gets 376.59 mpg
Is it just me or do the lights and grill on that car look just like Totoro when he is surprised.
Given that the oil companies are obviously in cahoots with the US car companies and since at least half of Americans want high mpg cars…
The solution is simply to read what we can and implement what we find…then use the internet to distribute the information at low per unit cost.
There is a good profit to be made from the “squeeze more money from the dumb turnips” mentality.
I know that the Peugeot Partner minivan I drove in EU this last summer (w 200,000 km on the clock) got 50 mpg with it’s diesel engine, so there is no way I’ll believe either that the US cannot get double the mileage of current production or that we want gas hogs powermonger cars.
These are just lies foisted on us by “big advertizing” and their representatives who have just checked in on this web site saying that Americans don’t want high mpg. LIES and coverups for 20x-50x profits are now normal for both big oil, big medicine, and “terrorist” protection wars.
Food biz still lives on 10% markup or less,
while oil companies actual gasoline cost is still about 14c/gal.=2000% markup
Medicine in the EU and Asia costs only 5-10% of US costs=1000-2000% markup. I was in both places just this summer, so I know the costs.