Quote:
Originally Posted by redpoint5
Excellent points.
I will add the caveat that it generally is difficult to accurately account for everything. The price of fuel is extremely volatile, for instance, so assumptions about price have to be made. Then it's hard to estimate how long a given mod might take. Often I spend a lot of time just thinking or reading about it first, followed by an initial attempt, and later refined. This is even for the extremely simple mods (the only I've tried) like using pipe insulation as a grill block. Finally, accounting for the benefit requires careful measurement prior to the mod, and after the mod. It isn't enough to look at the average MPG prior to the mod, and then observe it after the mod because the other variables aren't held constant.
So, I'm absolutely in favor of your approach to modding, but quantifying the benefits requires rigorous testing methodologies.
As an aside, you might appreciate my attempt at calculating vehicle cost of ownership linked in my signature. Always appreciate feedback on how to improve or clarify it.
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Hmmm... I agree with you that price volatility of gas (especially now with the war in the Ukraine) makes it difficult to precisely quantify real ROI. BUT, if we kept track of and published how much each mod cost and how much time it took, we could easily make the decision
what order to do them in. That's independent of the price of gas, and the more relevant information to an ecomodder, especially a beginning one.
By the way, we of course also need to know how much fuel economy improvement we get from each ecomod. So the figure of merit we want is something like:
+% FE / ($ Cost) * (Hr Complete)
and we'd want to do them in order of larger merit first.
The 65+ Vehicle Mods is already sensitive to this data. With a little extra legwork we could
quantitatively order that page by which mods to focus on first, vs. which can be defrayed until later. All we'd need to do is add a Rating on it which was the figure of merit above, normalized from 0 to 10 or somesuch.
I was actually just talking with about Total Cost of Ownership with a friend of mine who was about to buy a car! I'll direct them to your calculator and take a gander at it myself. Thanks!