Quote:
Originally Posted by oldtamiyaphile
What I note from the Spritmonitor figures is that the best Civic beats the best Insight by over half a litre. There are also 6 Civic's beating your own Insight. Of the Insights, there are only three cars beating your Insight.
This is what I said right at the start, hybrids make less sense to hypermilers as ICEs leave more on the table. Hybrids make more sense to regular joe's who only know how to mash one pedal or the other. Personally, my T5 TDI beats the NEDC city cycle by 35% even with a commute that can be as slow as 14km/h. This is without turning off the engine at all, no EOC, no mods, unless you count a cracked cylinder head (the cracked head looses about 1/2 litre of diesel per tank). I have no doubt that most of us would beat the official numbers of the Civic by some margin.
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There are lots of reasons why the comparison is warped.
1. You cannot really compare diesel to gas by volume as diesel is 20% heavier than gas.
2. You cannot really compare a diesel engine to a gas engine as the theoretical maximal efficiency of a diesel engine is significantly higher.
3. The top seed of that diesel list IS a hypermiler, I happen to know he has a long commute that starts with some 12 miles of 35 mph rural road so he can keep going all the time. He also has a very long commute.
See
his garage. He gets very good FE on his other cars too.
He got 4.1 l/100 km from the Civic hybrid, so he beats me with that too - even while the civic is less economical than my Insight.
It is the man, not the car doing that.
4. My commute is less long and I had to do the school run and stuff on top of it.
I try to hypermile but I generally start every day with a big loss.
Anyone who beats me is either trying harder or has better conditions. commute.
5. Diesels are typically bought by long distance drivers, and long distance drives get better economy than short distance drivers.
6. Hybrids typically have good FE in town, so they are typically bougght by people who do a lot of that. But lots of town driving hurts FE.
7. When you do a statistical analysis, you cannot draw conclusions on cases put up after the data is known.
If you look at the extremes you are doing just that.
And they are extremes - look how far they deviate from the average.
And about your point of hypermiling a hybrid:
Wayne Gerdes can beat my economy in an old Accord, we've seem that.
He may even be able to beat my economy in an Accord if he has to drive along with me on my commute (though I doubt he would).
But he sure beat his Accord economy more than twofold in the first gen Insight.
I have pointed out before that our own Ecomodder garage confirms that hybrids can be hypermiled.
Yes, some of the 350 gas cars in that beat their EPA by more than 100%
The top of the list of 26 hybrids is not that spectacular, if we first remove Planetaires car and maybe some first gens.
(but as I said before you should nnot look at the extremes)
If the ecomodder hybrid garage had anywhere near as many cars as the gasoline car garage has, there would definitely be a few that come close to 100% over EPA.
The average economy of the ecomodder garage is hugely in favor of the hybrids.
That is a hypermilers average.
People buy hybrids for a purpose.
To have a smooth and responsive auto tranny (like my dad).
To get good economy in the city.
To get good economy on a middle sized commute, where the diesel road tax is still probihitive but ordinary gas cars waste too much (like me)
To save the earth (those people cause a severe drop in average FE for the car type).
Any comparison willalways be thwarted in one way or another.
If you are bent to find data that confirms your beliefs you will find it.
I have no trouble finding data that confirms mine.
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. The Insight was marked up 100%, after you allow for taxes etc. For that we have no explanation. It was twice as expensive as the Japanese built Civic, for that we have no explanation.
