[jcp123]

Happy Birthday, EM!!! What a milestone

Originally Posted by MetroMPG

Discuss...

What stands out as the most notable efficiency-related changes in your automotive world in the last decade?

The biggest change in MY automotive world was going from a '67 Mustang convertible as a daily driver to the Echo. It instantly doubled and eventually nearly tripled my fuel economy (something I had already been keeping track of for a good while). It also taught me to more readily accept modern cars, and was a platform I used to start to understand diagnosis and maintenance of computerized vehicles.

Looking around the automotive landscape, man, has everything changed rapidly. Direct injection, small turbo engines, more gears and (finally) more properly tall highway gearing. They've done good work in terms of getting cars to put out great numbers, even as weight's increasing, etc. It's taken this long, it seems, to compete with the old titans of the 1980s which could effortlessly sling out big numbers. The downside of course is the complexity, etc. I never asked for an iPad on the dash, and I'm not that wild about all the power stuff I'll have to fork money out to fix when it's 15 years old and in my driveway. Also, what they've been able to do with automatic transmissions...I never thought they would kill off manuals as they seem to be, nor did I see a day when the automatic would be such a "no-brainer" choice for most people - BETTER FE numbers on the Monroney, AND in many cases a faster set of marketing numbers for 0-60, etc. Weird.