The other day I was going to work and I remembered I didn’t have much gas in my car. The little low-gas warning light was already on when I started the car.<\/p>\n
It’s got one of those little computer things that tells you how much gas mileage you’re getting and how many miles it thinks you have left in the tank.<\/p>\n
It said I had 57 miles left, the drive to work is 35 miles, I figured I could make it. New car there should be no sludge at the bottom of the gas tank….<\/p>\n
So I figured I should drive nicely. Now the little computer thing has to go by how much gas is in the tank and your driving pattern to determine how many miles you have left. I don’t know how far back in my driving history it goes to gauge but it’s more than today’s trip.<\/p>\n
When I first got the car, I drove it nicely (since it was still in its\u00a0 break-in period) and I got it to say I could get 400 miles to the tank when I just filled it up. I figured that was pretty good. But obviously that was pretty non-fun driving, especially for z4.<\/p>\n
So I drove to work, got gas, reset all my computer settings, and went to the office.
\nStarting to drive home I noticed that it said I had 472 miles left in my tank. Not bad I thought, it must have remembered my driving style on my drive to work. Let’s see if I could get it to 500.<\/p>\n
Well, as the miles clicked by the number went up, and I eventually got it as high as 512, and that was after having driven 20 miles or so, so I should be able to get at least 530+ miles out of\u00a0 a newly full tank.
\nThe mpg computer said I was getting 41.5 mpg.<\/p>\n
A BMW z4.<\/p>\n
Now of course this isn’t entirely fair. I had the windows open, the A\/C off, it was all highway, manual transmission, and I think the trip from work to home is, on average, downhill (though there are plenty of up hills on the way.)<\/p>\n
So my question is, if BMW can make a sports car that can put out 250 hp, that can still (if you try very very hard) get 41 mpg, why does EVERY OTHER CAR suck by comparison?<\/p>\n
And it seems to me with a smaller engine and a lot of tweaking to force you to drive like I was driving, LOTS of cars should be able to get in the 30 mpg range, not just the mini.<\/p>\n
So what gives?\u00a0 How hard is it to make a car 10-20mpg more efficient than the going rate now?<\/p>\n
You can forget all the hybrid stuff, and spend your money better on tweaking a known good platform.<\/p>\n
I just don’t get it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The other day I was going to work and I remembered I didn’t have much gas in my car. The little low-gas warning light was already on when I started the car. It’s got one of those little computer things that tells you how much gas mileage you’re getting and how many miles it thinks […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thought-for-the-day"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=183"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":186,"href":"https:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183\/revisions\/186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deadpelican.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}