Gas 2.0

Ford has made many improvements in bettering its fleet average fuel mileage in recent years. But lest we forget, it was the Ford Explorer that helped create the SUV craze. And it wasn’t long ago you could buy the monstrous Excursion from any nearby dealership, a road behemouth more suitable to Lord Humongous than suburban soccer moms.

Consumer Reports recently did its annual round of real-world gas mileage numbers. The 2010 Ford F-250 Lariat ranked as the vehicle with the worst tested gas mileage, getting on average just 10 mpg.

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Has the Hummer brand become too toxic to sell? After months of negotiations between General Motors and Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Co. Ltd, a Chinese company, it appears as though the deal has fallen through. Speculation points at the Chinese government regulators unwillingness to grant approval to the deal.

While GM has said it is considering two previous offers on the brand, it also said it was getting ready to wind the brand down. This news comes around the same time the military announced that it winding down its Humvee fleet and preparing for a modern replacement.

Is this really the end of the Hummer era? Or will GM and its suitors find salvation for Hummer like it did for the spunky Saab brand?

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This summer the popular Fiat 500 subcompact will have a new, tiny engine option… and it will be the smallest displacement gasoline engine available in any car in Europe—a 900cc, turbocharged 2-cylinder with 85 horsepower. By taking the current trend of engine downsizing, and then spitting on its tired carcass as it passes it on the first lap, Fiat is hoping to take fuel economy and CO2 emissions to new levels.

But—as is often muttered by Americans in the know after these sort of announcements—the engine will likely only be available in Europe, even with rumors of the 500 eventually making it to U.S. shores. I like to think of the vehicle fuel efficiency Europe-US divide like that “in bed” game we’ve all played with fortune cookies; but instead of adding “in bed” to the end of the sentence add “only in Europe.”

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I remain on the fence regarding the Chrysler-Fiat merger. On the one hand, Chrysler needed saving and Fiat was willing to lend a hand (though no cash). On the other hand, Fiat’s reputation for reliability both here and abroad remains shaky at best. Fiat also shed over a billion dollars in 2009, and says it won’t make it back into the black without the help of another Cash for Clunkers program. Of course, Fiat still managed to outsell any of Europe’s other big car makers, and actually saw its market share increase by almost 9%. See why I am on the fence?

But then there is the Fiat 500. While I may not care for small cars… there is something about the 500 that makes me want to give it a chance. It is cute and fuel efficient, but it also has the mean Abarth edition that looks like it could be a lot of  fun. And according to Ralph Giles, design chief of Chrysler, the Fiat 500 could go on sale earlier than expected, coming to US showrooms by the end of this year. What about the Abarth edition, Ralph?

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At the 2010 Chicago Auto Show today Ford revealed its 2011 Edge crossover. In addition to a facelift and some new interior technology, Ford’s next iteration of the popular Edge will get one green tweak that is beginning to spread across all of Ford’s lineup: an EcoBoost engine.

Ford only just started its rollout of EcoBoost engine technology last year on four vehicles—the Ford Taurus SHO, Ford Flex, Lincoln MKS, and Lincoln MKT—but that was just the beginning. The company has set its sights on making EcoBoost available in 90% of its vehicles by 2013.

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Last week I talked about how fast is fast enough, and that one of the easiest ways to save fuel was by simply going slower. Well rejoice! Apparently all of America heeded my advice, and American drivers, on average, drive below the posted speed limit.

Ok, obviously this has nothing to do with me. According to Tele Atlas, the mapping unit of GPS maker TomTom, anonymously collected data from millions of GPS devices shows that most Americans are driving under the speed limit. So why don’t I get that feeling when I am on the highway?

According to an Autocar UK story, Tele Atlas says that no state tops 70 mph as an average highway speed. The fastest highway in the country is the stretch of I-15 between Utah and Nevada, with average speeds of 77.67 mph, even though the speed limit is 80 mph. This baffles me. I-15 is a road that pretty much runs through mostly desert. Why wouldn’t you go the speed limit? Read the rest of this entry »

I love going fast, and I make no apologies for it.

Ok that’s a lie. Sometimes, I feel guilty about going fast, guzzling gas, drooling over 5 mile per gallon muscle cars. I know the world is in a bad way, mostly because of cars. Yet I still love them, especially fast ones, because in my opinion life is too short for a 0-60 mph time of 7 seconds or more.

Still though, the easiest way to increase fuel efficiency is to make everyone go a lot slower. Instead of pursuing billions of dollars in new technologies, if everyone would just let off the accelerator, we would save a lot of gas every year. One such way would be to (again) lower the interstate speed limit 55 mph. Yet that didn’t work too well the first time around. What if we went even further, what if new cars were capped at 200 horsepower, and had a top speed of only 60 mph?

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The compact pickup truck segment of the auto market has been in a weird place lately. It wasn’t so long ago that it seemed like every manufacturer was fighting over who had the most youthful, appealing, “cool” small pickup. Since the early 2000’s though, competition in the segment has dropped and stumbled, leaving only two real competitors for the small truck king; the very dated Ford Ranger, and the current sales king, the Toyota Tacoma.

Rumors have been swirling about the Ranger’s demise for years now, and perhaps Toyota smells blood. The Japanese brand is said to be considering a small pickup truck for its floundering Scion brand.

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I’m going to answer my own question and say both.

It’s true. According to Kelley Blue Book’s list of most searched cars, perennial favorites the Honda Civic and Accord topped the list. The Prius came in at #8, within spitting distance of the Camaro which came in at #12. In fact, if you look at the different lists from websites across the web, muscle cars are pretty consistently high on the search lists, as are hybrids and fuel efficient models like the Smart ForTwo.

So can America have its cake and eat it too?

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There were surprisingly few unveils at this year’s North American International Auto Show in Detroit, and even fewer thrills. The AWD turbocharged Buick GS concept and electric Fiat 500 not withstanding though, perhaps the best looking car to come out of Detroit is the 2012 Ford Focus.

Based on the Blue Oval’s “One Ford” global platform sharing idea, the 2012 Focus will share over 80% of its components with European models. Even better, an electric model of the Focus should hit showrooms sometime in 2011.

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Pretty much everything in America, at some point (and often multiple points) hitches a ride on a tractor trailer of some sort. It doesn’t matter if it is locally grown organic produce or the latest and greatest Chinese-built computer. By the time it has arrived at your home, it’s probably been on one of these big, smelly beasts.

Improving the fuel efficiency of tractor trailers would be a big deal not just for the environment, but for our wallets as well. So we can all celebrate the latest round of funding from the Department of Energy that is going towards improving the efficiency of Class 8 trucks by 50%.

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For 33 consecutive years, the Ford F-150 has been America’s best selling vehicle-car, truck, SUV, basically anything with a motor that movies. Moving more than 500,000 units in an average year, the F-150 is just a sales beast, and it is only getting better.

A report by PickupTrucks.com is saying that the F-150 will be getting the new Twin Independent Variable Camshaft Timing (Ti-VCT) 3.7 liter V6 in the near future. This is the same engine that delivers 305 horsepower and 30 MPG in the 2011 Mustang.

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Rack another one up for the Blue Oval.

After ending 2009 on a high note, and with their hybrid sales up 147% from the year before, the Blue Oval started 2010 off with a bang. Today, at the 2010 Detroit Auto Show, the Ford Fusion Hybrid was gifted with the Car of the Year award, and the Transit Connect, Ford’s new compact transport van walked away with Truck of the Year honors.

Ford beat out Chevy, Volkswagen, and Subaru to take home the awards. And why not? This is the strongest lineup Ford has had since the original Taurus debuted, and it only gets better from here.

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Back in high school, I had a friend who drove a 1972 Cadillac Eldorado. The thing was a literal land yacht powered by a 500 cubic inch engine with enough torque to burn the tires at 60 mph. 500 cubic inches = 8.1 liters. This thing could displace more volume than four bottles of Mountain Dew. And there was a time people thought engines would only get bigger.

Flash forward forty years, and everyone is running in the opposite direction. How small can we get an engine? Well Ford seems to think its EcoBoost technology can take engines to less than a liter, and plans to introduce a whole slow of low-volume engines during 2010 for Europe and North America.

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In one of Top Gear’s more infamous (and yet informative) vehicle tests, Jeremy Clarkson pitted a Toyota Prius against a BMW M3 to see which car could get better gas mileage. The catch was, the Prius had to drive as fast as it could, while all the M3 had to do was keep up with the hybrid. The end result was the Prius got 17.2 mpg, while the M3 got 19.4 mpg. The point, according to Clarkson, is that it isn’t what you drive, but how you drive.

Now we can debate the merits of the video (posted below) all we want. But the point is, you can get decent mileage if you drive, well, gingerly. It isn’t easy, but Garmin, maker of GPS devices, has come up with a device called the ecoRoute hd. This device plugs into your car and calculates just how green you are driving, no matter what you are driving. It’s pretty cool, in a green, Big Brother sort of way.

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