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Old 11-11-2014, 09:54 PM   #22 (permalink)
woodstock74
EcoModding Apprentice
 
Join Date: Apr 2012
Location: Charlotte, NC
Posts: 134

TBD - '17 Toyota Corolla LE
90 day: 40.79 mpg (US)

Starship - '08 Toyota Prius
90 day: 41.57 mpg (US)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Sven7 View Post
What I'm saying is, improving on that stuff could well give you better improvements than filling holes underneath. I get the new car thing, but maybe that could just be a challenge to design a "better" grille block or sedan boat tail.

Anyway, rock on. If you do wheel covers, I've been wondering how it would look to do what we often do in my field, and just paste a photoshop image of a wheel over a flat disc. Like this, but full size-



I have too much fun with spinning, abstract shapes to try it myself.

I tend to tackle projects that are favorable on the cost to time to mpg improvement ratio. I only have about $15 into these underfloor panels, that's $7.50 each. Pretty happy about that. Plus they're low hanging fruit so to speak and lessons learned here will certainly lend themselves to helping out with potentially more ambitious ideas later on. But there are certainly lots of gains to be made on the underfloor. As for wheel covers, they'll be similar to what I've done before, rather workmanlike in execution, but simple and utilizing what's at hand:



Lots has been said about making a flat wheel cover, however I feel it's more important to limit the flow transfer from the wheel to the airflow moving down the side of the car. The above achieved a 2.5% increase in MPG on my Nissan Versa (the largest single gain I ever saw with one change) and they certainly aren't flat perse.
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