Quote:
Originally Posted by racprops
From what I have read right here on this very site AREO is only worth a few MPG even in the extreme, as in [...]
And after all that you might gain 5 MPG.
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Is this statement
in general, or for that specific Top Gear scenerio?
Because all that Top Gear proved was that less efficient cars have larger tanks, so that different cars have similar ranges. Or actually, it just proved that 3 people, driving 3 cars, were able to drive between 2 cities without refuelling.
In general, aero is very important, even in city driving. My results with short Kammback (not a long boattail) gave ~7% improvement. Measured not with a butt-o-meter, but by A-B-A testing in the best controlled conditions as possible. I used a mere fraction of the fuel the Top Gear team used (wasted - if you count in the cost of transporting the cars before/after the test, the vehicles of the camera teams, etc.) but received more tangible results.
But the bare numbers of aero only do not show the whole picture. Again, from my experience - Hypermiling alone would give me maybe 20%, aero alone 7-8%, but together I saw around 40% improvement. Why? Because the improved aero allowed me to not only get more out of the hypermiling tricks I already used with the car before aero, but also allowed to use certain tricks which were not worth while in the stock car.
And a lot of this was in city driving, with traffic and speeds rarely exceeding 50 km/h. The very first benefits I observed with the new Kammback was not on the highway, but was the extended coasting between intersections. This really surprised me and showed me the importance of aero at low speeds.