Video: the famous Mythbusters "tailgate up vs. tailgate down" fuel economy episode

[MetroMPG]

Identical Ford F-150s.

Tailgate up wins.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...05931519184533

Covers the road test & water flow tank.

[H4MM3R]

Great I always wanted to see this show on the tailgates. Looks like "up" wins.

[SVOboy]

Don't you mean infamous by now?

[DifferentPointofView]

once again, they didn't say anything about tonneau covers or aero-caps did they toyota nation???

I sometimes question their results though... With all the technology they have, it seems as though they always go the easier and more DIY way to do it.

[trebuchet03]

Originally Posted by DifferentPointofView

once again, they didn't say anything about tonneau covers or aero-caps did they toyota nation???

I sometimes question their results though... With all the technology they have, it seems as though they always go the easier and more DIY way to do it.

Full scale wind tunnels are freaking expensive to operate... It would be cool to use one, but not very practical... I'm not saying the results are any more or less valid because of that....

[DifferentPointofView]

Just to clear things up, I wasn't talking about the tailgate myth, I was talking about some of them. Tailgate one is a easy tester. I've just noticed though that some of their stuff is easy to do stuff, when it could so easily be 100 times more accurate with a little more effort.

[Stan]

I'm not going to download 18 hours of video...since I have both MB episodes on DVD (the power of a DVR! ).

Why all the complaints about their methodology when you applaud the similarly derived results folks report here? They did real-world, repeatable testing using good technology and technique. The gate up won hands down. That's over gate down, fiberglass tonneau cap and the tailgate mesh. The one thing they didn't test was the sloping aero cap, which is not yet in production. So give 'em a break! Unless you have a sloping aero cap, leave your tailgate up and motor on.

[MetroMPG]

Hi Stan -

This vid doesn't address the tonneau or mesh. It's just tailgate up or down.

And it shouldn't take 18 hours to download - it's flash embedded & will play instantly in your browser (assuming you're not on dial-up).

[Stan]

Ah...fooled by the video title!

The video clip you post is the first test MB did. As predicted my Adam at the end of the video, they got lots of email about that episode, and so did a second, more inclusive test which was televised a year or so later. In the second episode they did two-way, back-to-back testing in a Scangauge-equipped pickup on a 5 mile stretch of Highway 101 that is straight and flat. The test repeated the gate up/gate down test, then added a tonneau and a mesh gate. The results were the same...gate up is the most efficient 'conventional' configuration for a pickup.

[DifferentPointofView]

no I totally agree with the results they have there. I'm just saying^_^" I used to watch the show all the time and watched every episode. Some I can totally agree on, others... not so much. they're right about 80% of the time I think. The others are questionable... although I can't remember which ones i said "hmm... that just doesn't look, or sound right to me.."

I have total respect for the mythbuster team, but I'm always wondering if there was a different way to do it if it'd work, and I remember at least one episode where someone else found a different result. I don't know if they revisited it or not, but then that makes me think just a little more about it.

I wonder if enough of us, or if maybe MetroMPG or SVOboy wrote mythbusters a letter about sloped aero bed caps vs. everything else, and said that the letter was from the whole ecomodder community, I'd be fun to show people how aero really matters at high speeds. Just a thought though.