I’ve been telling anyone who will listen, “No one should buy any passenger car that gets less than 100 miles per gallon.” Most people look at me like I am nuts. I am not. I am serious.
Vehicle efficiency in terms of miles per gallon (mpg) as desirable if not essential in choosing a car was instilled in me at an early age. My parents lived through the Great Depression and WWII when gasoline was either unaffordable or rationed. So it was natural when I began tinkering with cars to be aware of efficiency.
I remember well when I was gifted an American Motors Rambler with a straight six cylinder engine. As a struggling college student, I thought it would better fit my needs than the gas swilling V-8 my mother drove. Wrong. I was shocked to learn that the Rambler was hard pressed to get 18 mpg.[1]
Eventually I migrated to a four cylinder MGB. That was much better. It got a whopping 25 mpg. And the efficiency has steadily increased in every car I’ve owned since then.
The last conventional car I drove, a Mazda Protegé, averaged 32 mpg over 120,000 miles and a decade of ownership. We finally broke 40 mpg when we switched to a Prius hybrid. We averaged 40.6 mpg over the 30,000 miles we drove the car. Though the car itself reported that we averaged 41.5 mpg during that period I never quibbled. The Prius averaged ~41mpg in real-world driving, not some hypothetical number from a dynamometer.
By my standards today, that’s simply unacceptable. We can do much, much better.
I remember being in the pits at Shell’s Ecomarathon in 2008, hoping to see my niece drive some laps on the track at Fontana raceway. The target that year: 2,000 mpg. (Yes, you read that right.) They needed that to beat the previous year’s winner.
They didn’t make it. The team from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology came in second with only 1,637 mpg. The winner the previous year reached 10,000 miles per gallon! (See 10,000 miles per gallon of gasoline: Shell’s Ecomarathon.)
Practical vehicles these were not, but they showed what could be done when you put your mind to it. (I am still surprised that Shell sponsored the event.)
That was sixteen years ago. Fast forward to today. There are now a slew of swanky new vehicles that get over the equivalent of 100 mpg in what the EPA labels MPGe. They’re all electric of course that’s the only way to get such numbers. Normal cars with a conventional combustion engine—even a Prius hybrid—can’t touch that.
The question came up recently when a friend was trying to determine the efficiency of her Hyundai Kona. She hadn’t thought about it before, and now when she did, the numbers just didn’t look realistic. She thought she was making a mistake. I reassured her she was right. She hadn’t made a mistake. As a very conservative driver on mostly surface streets she would sometimes get nearly 200 MPGe.
EPA estimates that one gallon of gasoline in a combustion engine is equivalent to 33.7 kWh in an EV. (See www.fueleconomy.gov.) So if you’re driving a Chevy Bolt or Hyundai Kona and see a trip efficiency of 4.0 miles per kWh, EPA calculates you’re getting 135 MPGe. My friend occasionally sees 6.0 miles per kWh around town for a stunning 202 MPGe!
On the EPA’s web site, they list the mileage in MPGe for city and highway driving as well as in combination. They also provide a summary of efficiency in kWh/100 mi. Of the nearly dozen vehicles I’ve listed for comparison, only Ford’s Mach-e gets less than 100 MPGe.
On average, we got about 4.2-4.3 miles per kWh in the two Bolts we’ve driven. That’s much better than the results for our early Leaf of 3.9 miles per kWh or 130 MPGe. Still, the Leaf’s efficiency far exceeds many modern EVs that are much larger—and heavier.
Altogether, we’ve driven nearly 80,000 miles at an average efficiency of ~4.2 miles/kWh for all three vehicles at the equivalent of 140 miles per gallon. Not bad. It’s a far cry from our Prius and its light years away from the paltry 18 mpg I got in that ancient Rambler.
As I said, no one today should buy a car that gets less than 100 MPGe.
[1] At the time I was a student at General Motors Institute of Technology, now Kettering University. We were all car geeks. That’s why we were there—and a co-op education. The Rambler didn’t fit well with all the muscle cars and sports cars in the school’s parking lot. I quickly dumped the Rambler for the MGB.
