How about we start our own Eco-Decatholon or whatever its called.

[bgd73]

oe based can't go far.

lean condition on stronger parts..wow. what a concept.That leaves everybody with nothing.

1 in 1100 million autos actually get something that strong. Sometimes by accidental self tempering into a forging radiating rainbows through the rust.



and there is no such thing as ecomodding with fuel injection.

its like adding a capacitor for the capacitor to throttle the throttle to wait for the timer timing the timer to respond for a simple action: atomization for a given throttle curve...and then there is the actual material of the "dynamical" injector flunking us all...

realtime or no time.

[user removed]

When you boil it right down to essentials, it's all predictable.

Take vehicle A, apply a specific set of hypermiling techniques, at a specific average speed and you can basically predict the results.

As Robert stated, the problem is when you choose a specific type of improvement, like a percentage over EPA.

This choice penalizes those who drive the most efficient cars available, in much the same way it would not be fair to use the best mileage achieved.

Sadly in every choice you could make their are inequities and compromises which only add to the confusion.

Maybe the best way would be passenger MPG. This would measure the fuel consumption of the vehicle divided by the number of passengers. This would make a 15 passenger diesel van that got 16 MPG the mileage champ, since it could multiply its 16 MPG by 15 passengers to get 240 MPG per passenger.

My VX with 5 passengers would be at about the same amount with 5 people and 50 MPG for 250 passenger MPG.

Maybe a family average MPG would demonstrate to people what is really possible.


regards
Mech

[Piwoslaw]

What would we be rewarding: driving style or ecomodding skills? There are too many parameters when everyone drives their own heavily ecomodded car.

If we want to reward hypermiling skills only, then everyone should drive the same car. Two identical Metros or Hondas or Hummers, same model, same engine, same trim, and see who gets the best milage in a circuit run. Then the drivers switch cars and again. The final score is the average from from both runs. Both cars would already be partially modded to ease hypermiling, for example rear wheel skirts, partial Kammback, smooth wheel covers, battery fully charged, rear seats removed, tires pumped and engines heated.
Contestants start in pairs, the winner advances to the next round. Each round is a different route.

Originally Posted by bgd73

and there is no such thing as ecomodding with fuel injection.

What about a 3 main boxer?

[AeroModder]

The car with the best improvement of L/100km over stock wins. Not percent, but raw numbers.

[Big Dave]

The EPA does not physically test cars. They get parameters from the manufacturers and run them through a sim to get MPG figures.

They do have contractors occasionally run actual tests to validate their sims.

[elhigh]

Originally Posted by bgd73

oe based can't go far.
<big slice of randomness snipped>
and there is no such thing as ecomodding with fuel injection.

So you've been ignoring all those bits where folks are tweaking their programs, adding HAI, etc?

[gone-ot]

...here's some "background" information about Shell's Eco-marathon:

Eco-marathon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Piwoslaw]

From that Wikipedia article:

A world record was set by a French team in 2003 called Microjoule with a performance of 10705 mpg-imp (0.026388 L/100 km; 8,914 mpg-US). The current record is 12665 mpg-US (0.018572 L/100 km; 15,210 mpg-imp), set in 2005 by the PAC-Car II. In contrast, the most efficient diesel passenger cars achieve 60 mpg-US (4 L/100 km; 72 mpg-imp), and some high-powered sportscars achieve as little as 8 mpg-US (29 L/100 km; 10 mpg-imp).

I think that comparing the multi-thousand mpg figures of specialized vehicles and the EPA ratings of street-legal production cars is not fair. Production cars would also get multidigit figures if they their sole purpose was to go 15mph around a race track. On the other hand, the race vehicles wouldn't even know how to sign up for EPA testing.
The Shell Eco-marathon had a nice start, but the article didn't say when the transition from production-based cars to prototypes happened. That's when it stopped having much to do with real life:/

[cfguy2000]

The decatholon should definitely have aeromodded cars. It would be boring without them and plus if we actually do this, it would be an excellent networking event to find people like us. Personally, I'd love to meet someone who can Aeromod my Corolla.

It needs to be cars on the road that are starting to wear out and pollute more, like what my old Corolla with 194,000 miles on it would be doing if I didn't take care of it so much, O2 sensors and such. I would like to show people that even old cars can be great vehicles, just need to put some work into them.

I like the idea about Passenger MPG.
I agree that carberated cars should have certain restrictions. They emit so much more Nitrogen and Sulfur gases than Fuel Injection. They are not really environmentally friendly.

There could be trophies for 10 different categories of vehicle:
1) Best passenger mpg
2) Best overall mpg
3) Best aeromodded car mpg improvement %
4) Best non-aeromodded car mpg improvement %
5) Truck
6) SUV
7) Diesel
8) Electric
9) Hybrid
10) Other

[jkp1187]

^ Why not make a sporty car category, too?