...and why any truck owner who wants to increase their mpg is a friend of mine!
Disclaimer: I drive a small car, I love my compact, and I always encourage everyone to do with the least they need (when it's feasible I much prefer my bike to my car). This is not about slamming people for buying a Civic Hybrid or a Civic VX for better economy; this is about contextualizing the issue and understanding why it is so important for the ecomodding community to embrace people with all sorts of vehicles.
Take a look at this picture:
From the thread inspiring article found
here.
Just from this image, you can see that the MPG is a bad mark of measuring fuel consumption. Numbers like 60MPG and 70MPG sounds impressive (and they are), but their distance from, say, 30MPG is
much less important than something like 18MPG.
Because of the steep slope of the graph in the lower MPG range, each MPG is "worth" a lot more than the MPGs on the higher end of the graph.
The original article demonstrates this point thusly:
Quote:
I'll use some rough numbers to illustrate. You trade in your Civic, which averages about 32 miles per gallon, and buy a Prius, which gets a whopping 47 mpg. You've bumped up by 15 miles per gallon -- a big deal, right?
Sort of. Over the next 15,000 miles of driving, you'll have reduced your fuel consumption by 150 gallons. That's fine. But consider what happens when you upgrade your SUV. That's where the real action is.
You swap out your Dodge Durango (16 mpg on average) for a Toyota Tacoma (23 mpg). It's an upgrade of just 7 miles per gallon. It seems tiny. But consider that over the next 15,000 miles, you will have saved 285 gallons of fuel
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Keeping this in mind, it becomes clear that the European L/100KM system is much more useful for direct comparisons. However, as long as most of us are using the US system (I wouldn't forget our members in other parts of the world), please do keep in mind that the improvements people with "guzzlers" make are
very important to moving away from an oil based society.
And perhaps, just perhaps, if we're always remember to wear our kind and helpful hats, those SUV drivers may end up in a compact one day, taking an even bigger step away from fuel consumption!
