50 most Fuel Efficient cars in Europe

[Old Tele man]

...50 most economical diesel and petrol european cars:

The most fuel efficient vehicles - Spritmonitor.de

...and, here's their "search" function to look for other vehicles:

http://www.spritmonitor.de/en/search.html

[pete c]

How many are available here?

The fact that they aren't is criminal.

[Aveomiler]

Thanks a lot. Now I'm sad that I can't get most of them here. I want that Toyota Auris hybrid soooo bad. It gets better fuel economy on the European test cycle than the Prius, and I think it looks way better.

[tinduck]

Do not feel too sorry for yourselves :-) I had a real eye opener some weeks ago. Had a lesson for some statistics software we use on the job, and the guy had some car data (weight, country of manufacture, engine size, fuel consumption etc.) to fiddle around with.

To make a long story short: american cars looked gruesome concerning fuel efficiency. BUT when we started to do different correlations, you could clearly see that FE correlated best with weight; groupings could be seen due to engine size and fuel type, but that was minor compared with the weight correlation.

Europeans (and japanese) car makers were always building low-weight cars (at least compared to US street cruisers). That is the whole difference.

Nuances will be added by heavy-duty AC, sluggish 3-speed auto trannys etc., but this is all chicken feed compared to the weight which must be accelerated.

So just go and look for the lowest weight american-made car, and you will have a winner... well, at least a reasonable competetive car concerning FE.

so long,

tinduck

[Old Tele man]

tinduck -- do you still have that data available? Would love to see those MPG vs. WT plots and correlations.

[pete c]

Originally Posted by tinduck

Do not feel too sorry for yourselves :-) I had a real eye opener some weeks ago. Had a lesson for some statistics software we use on the job, and the guy had some car data (weight, country of manufacture, engine size, fuel consumption etc.) to fiddle around with.

To make a long story short: american cars looked gruesome concerning fuel efficiency. BUT when we started to do different correlations, you could clearly see that FE correlated best with weight; groupings could be seen due to engine size and fuel type, but that was minor compared with the weight correlation.

Europeans (and japanese) car makers were always building low-weight cars (at least compared to US street cruisers). That is the whole difference.

Nuances will be added by heavy-duty AC, sluggish 3-speed auto trannys etc., but this is all chicken feed compared to the weight which must be accelerated.

So just go and look for the lowest weight american-made car, and you will have a winner... well, at least a reasonable competetive car concerning FE.

so long,

tinduck

so, we should be happy that our smallest cars have power everything and AC whether we want it or not? and, of course it costs a lot more and gets 40% lower FE?

yeah, i'm thrilled to death.

[Diesel_Dave]

Originally Posted by pete c

How many are available here?

The fact that they aren't is criminal.

Actually, to highlight the stupidity of the regulations, it actually would be criminal TO make many of them available here (at least the diesels).

But, to be fair, a large part of it is that the consumer demand isn't here like it is in Europe. That's probably a bigger obstacle than the regs.

[duffremle]

What pisses me off is that even if you, as an individual, were to import one of these vehicles for your own personal use, you can't get it licensed. I can legally drive a VW trike or a Jeep with 12" of lift or some ridiculous donk running on 32's, but a bone stock keijidosha? No way, that's obviously out of the question.

[euromodder]

Spritmonitor's HP to fuel efficiency graphs show it all.
More horses use more hay.

Power vs. mileage - Spritmonitor.de

This is in Liter/100 km, so higher is worse here !

[duffremle]

Originally Posted by euromodder

Spritmonitor's HP to fuel efficiency graphs show it all.
More horses use more hay.

Power vs. mileage - Spritmonitor.de

This is in Liter/100 km, so higher is worse here !

How much of a correlation is there though? I notice that according to your graph, a vehicle with a 60 kW engine uses approximately half the fuel of a vehicle with a 300 kW engine. Presumably however, these are radically different vehicles. I would imagine that most cars with 300 kW motors are luxury cars, sports cars or trucks while most of the ones sporting 60 kW motors are economy cars. Put the same motor in the same car and I'll bet the difference would be much less significant.