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My family loves Chevys. My brother just got his rebuilt 350 running yesterday!
Regardless, to me a car designed in the 1930's that gets nearly 35mpg with no modification or eco-driving and can get over 40mpg with some jetting and being easy on the throttle is impressive to me. Of course that's a matter of opinion. If my brother could get 18mpg out of his Chevy truck with the newly rebuilt 350 that would impress him.
I'm not saying this is the best car and engine out there or that everyone should like them. But I think they're a neat concept and are very affordable and easy to work on.
Yes 30mpg in a Suburban would be impressive. Kind of like me getting over 50mpg in my Golf Diesel yet only 24mpg in my Chevy Astro yet I can haul twice as many people and things in the Astro for less than double the price to fuel the Golf.
Back to the original topic. I see that with the unequal intake runners it would be optimal to have different spark curves for each cylinder (or eliminate the inequality and go with fuel injection.) interestingly VW actually had made different cylinders run at different timing on the single port engines, namely, the #3 cylinder being different than the rest. This was in part to the 3/4 head being behind an oil cooler inside the fan shroud. Therefore, the air reaching those heads was pre-heated, so they lacked the cooling the 1/2 head received. But only the #3 cylinder actually ran retarded. You the might ask yourself why both cylinders weren't retarded being that both were put on the hot side. But again, the unequal intake obviously would fill the #3 more than the #4 making it run hotter for that reason too.
Later VW repositioned the oil cooler when the dual port engine came out. Now the 3/4 head receives as much cool air as the 1/2 head and the intake is now more even with the dual port.
As of now I have a programmable spark map distributor (21x21) that I want to play with to see what kind of fuel mileage I can get from this antiquity. But my dream would be to figure out how to use an Adrino with perhaps a Ford TFI module and a crank trigger in order to adjust specific cylinder timing.
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