dlovell, Tue, July 8th, 2008
In the past few days, I've been seeing more and more about the quest for better gas mileage, and the ridiculous lengths some people will go to eek out a couple extra miles for each gallon they pour into their tanks.
It's all pretty pathetic, really. Here we are, scraping to get 22 mpg instead of 21, driving slower, braking less, coasting more. Why pathetic? Well, because I think we're smarter than that.
You may have heard of the X-Prize before. The organizers are offering $10 million to the best design of a car that can go more than 100 miles on a single tank of gas. But we can do better than that.
How do I know? In 1975, a contest sponsored (I'm not kidding) by Shell Oil featured a 1959 Opel T-1 that set a world record by traveling 376.59 miles on a single gallon of gas. 376.59. And that's more than 30 years ago.
This car is not your new-fangled, hyper-aerodynamic hybrid either. It's a full-on gas-powered piece of rolling iron. It was heavy and ugly as sin.
In the interest of full disclosure, I'll admit that the record was set when the car was traveling 30 mph on a closed track, but one must assume that even at today's highway speeds, the car would do better than 150 mpg, right?
The issue with today's automobiles is not the fuel they run on, nor the weight. It isn't the aerodynamics or the paint (which VW claims causes wind drag). The problem is with the inefficiency of our engines. Did you know that your car's engine operates at about 8 percent effiency? That means that your car is, quite literally, a machine made primarily for burning fuel. It's secondary purpose is getting you from one place to another. More than 90 percent of the energy it uses is wasted entirely.
This is the land of invention. All around us are symbols of American ingenuity: the computer, the automobile, the telephone, television, radio, airplane. We've cured disease, invented killer weapons and modes of manufacturing that are near flawless. And we can't build a more efficient automobile?
I don't believe that.
America can do better. The next time you feel good about cramming yourself into the Prius you paid way too much for, consider the Opel T-1, and realize the last 30 years of automobile manufacturing hasn't even come close to bringing us what we should have had already.
