The Illusion of MPG: Is It Really A True Measure of Your Car’s Mileage?
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.
Can somebody explain to me, in plain English, what these guys are saying?
When is a MPG not a MPG? When people talk in riddles! Dodgy salesmen, fortune-tellers, gamblers.
MPG calculating goes like this, fellas: you fills up your car, you presses the trip counter to zero, you drives a while, you fills up again and you does your arithmetic.
Or else you talk like you guys, example:
Man gets home says to wife,
“I saved a dollar by running home behind the bus!
“You idiot! she replies. You should have saved $20 and run home behind a taxi!”
Those guys are morons ! Nothing was learned. These are just math guys who don’t like the term MPG.
Saying you saved 100 gallons in a year looks bigger that saving 1 gallon a day.
Time to stop going to university and get a real job.
You do know that in Europe and Canada, they do it the “right” way as proposed in this video.
They use Liters/100km … which flips the conversation from “mileage” to “gas used” as proposed.
At that point, you’re trying to score low.
Norman Pallas you took the words straight out of my mouth! Thats exactly what I was going to say. I’d really like to see use measuring efficiency in BTU per time unit measured against several different loads on the vehicle. Basically BTU per Newton or something like that. And then take those efficiency curves and put them against the curves of other cars.
And over all I think this video is the biggest turd of academic discussion. If I were in charge I’d cut all funding to your research products. I can’t believe you wasted time arguing about a simple set of units.
The sad fact is that cars are just made to be run as inefficiently as possible. The so call efficient car are made unnecessarily complex and look like something Mr. Jetson would be proud of. We need real solutions and playing with numbers just seem to add to the confusion.
Hello
I totally agree with them.
In Europe we use Liter/Km of consumption.
As an example my car as an average of 6.4L each 100km
while my wife’s car is 5.2L each 100km.
That means that see is saving 1.2L each 100km, 12L each 1000km, 120L each 10.000km
But not only that, but by expressing consumtion in this way is easier to calculate the money saved if I would drive my wife’s car.
I do around 20.000km per year, that means that driving my wife’s car I would have saved 240L at 0.89€ per liter means 213.6€ saved in a year.
(last year gas rised to 1.32€/L 316.8€ saved)
But not only that, at the moment of the purchase, if I’m going to have the car during 10years, this allows me to known that I’m going to save 2136€ (2904.96 usd) during my car’s life. (in only 1.2L of difference)
If prices of mine and my wife’s car would have been the same, my wife would have made a more intelligent purchase.