T1B

When I was 20 I had a beat up 1984 Honda Civic hatchback that was a gutless wonder with six figures on the odometer. It did get a bit above the speed limit and I averaged 45-50 mpg in it. It was little, but it had to be safer than one of those smart cars.

Now the best and most expensive hybrids brag about 45mpg? WTF?

Wait a second...how does a car go from getting 230mpg to just the mid 30s.

I understand the logic of the gas engine doing the work alongside the electric motor, but that is a huge drop off from GMs original claim.

I know this is a game the automakers play when they roll out new vehicles to the dealership when that sticker on the window is rounded up a few mpg, but this seems a bit rediculous.

My mother-in-law, who isn't the brightest bulb in the bunch, was convinced the new hybrid Tahoe would get nearly 30mpg. I told her it reall only gets 21 city/22 hwy. She said that isn't what Chevy's figures showed in the brochure. And I said, "Yeah, 'cus they're trying to sell you a car." I then explained to her that Chevy's numbers aren't fabricated but they are giving you those numbers based on the most ideal conditions. The hybrid Tahoe probably does get 29 mpg if it's driving 45 mph....on a long straight away....with no traffic....and its 65 degrees out.

I'm still getting 40 mpg burning shitty gas in my 2005 Mazda 3 even after 105,000 miles and no major mechanical work.

As for the politics: see Unions, Automobile.

I'm getting 33mpg in my '08 Ford Focus. Getting the tires rotated every 4000 miles and using Mobil One fully synthetic oil has helped tremendously. My commute is 155 miles round trip.

Mrs. Rumps' '06 F-150 only sees city driving. We bought it brand new nearly five years ago and it gets maybe 15 mpg. The good news is it only has 42000 miles on it and I just made the last payment on it yesterday. Now she wants an SUV. I may grant her her wish, but there is no fucking way in hell I'm trading in that truck. It's an asset. Don't know how I'm gonna workout the details in the driveway if we have three vehicles.

Go Coogs' wrote:Mrs. Rumps' '06 F-150 only sees city driving. We bought it brand new nearly five years ago and it gets maybe 15 mpg.

Lots of idling in fast food drive-thru lines?

Go Coogs' wrote:My commute is 155 miles round trip.

Jesus Christ on a popsicle stick. How long does it take you to get to work one-way?

Hour and twenty roughly.

Audio books and Sirius are my close friends.

Go Coogs' wrote:Wait a second...how does a car go from getting 230mpg to just the mid 30s.

It never did. It never will. They just lied through their teeth.

The 230 mpg rating was killed back in July.

There's no standard mileage rating yet for electric cars and "plug-in" hybrids, which is what the Volt actually is. I mean, come on, how do you relate "miles per gallon" to something that runs on electricity? It all depends on how you use it. If you run it less that 40 miles per day you'll get infinite "mpg" but you still have to charge the batteries. It would still be a lot more economical than running on gas, though.

Maybe the answer is to take any and all claims with a grain of salt (you already do that, right?). Then go and do some research, and educate yourself before dropping $40,000 on anything.

Mikey wrote:Maybe the answer is to take any and all claims with a grain of salt (you already do that, right?). Then go and do some research, and educate yourself before dropping $40,000 on anything.

What a concept.

Works so much better than "let the Government worry about my mortgage default."

Back in my old home town of Cortland NY we had this:

http://www.barthworks.com/cars/electric ... largen.htm

Imagine a front end collision with all kinds of sulfuric acid getting loose; great idea and a good use of the taxpayers money back then. I knew someone that had one of them, took out all the batteries, and put in a real engine.

Go Coogs' wrote:Mrs. Rumps' '06 F-150 only sees city driving.

I am calling bullshit. You mean F-450, right?

Wolfman wrote: I knew someone that had one of them, took out all the batteries, and put in a real engine.

You "knew someone"?

Right.

You're about the only one dumb enough to try something like that.

Electric cars are for queers and effeminate metrosexuals. You Americans need torque.

Scrap this insanity and burn all the R&D paperwork.

Sincerely,

The guy that did that was the husband of our school secretary and "the" mechanic. Must be he didn't like the idea of all that sulfuric acid in front of him. It was funny seeing that car driving around town with "Solargen Electric" still emblazoned on it.
Romer took quite a few local folks $$$ in his scam. I was not one of them. Electric cars are nothing new and they are not the wave of the future either.
At the time I had a new 1979 Pontiac Le Mans. It had a V-6. I sold it to my older son in 1985. He went to the local car scrapyard and bought a big block Chevy V-8 engine for it. I helped him take out the old POS V-6 and put in the V-8. He just had to add dual exhaust headers and glass packs. I always knew when he was coming home, could hear him coming-- for sure.

Go Coogs' wrote:Hour and twenty roughly.

Audio books and Sirius are my close friends.

Not real unusual to a lot of folks..I go to the office about twice a week...43 miles 1 hour and 15 minutes through the heart of liberal Portland..still get there faster than there billion dollar fucking train..

Usually drive my Ford Ranger..gets about 18 max on the highway..got a F 350 Powerstroke that will get 24 if you get it out on the highway..got to love working from home though...

Martyred wrote:Electric cars are for queers and effeminate metrosexuals.

I challenge you to present any evidence to the contrary. Seriously. See if you can do it, Marty. Think of it as a class project or something. Maybe Phibes could be your study partner.

Derron wrote:Not real unusual to a lot of folks..I go to the office about twice a week...43 miles 1 hour and 15 minutes through the heart of liberal Portland..still get there faster than there billion dollar fucking train..

Ooooooh. Big man. Strike a blow against the liberal establishment!

it is a fukking joke that so called economy car mileage today is worse than it was in the 80s. back then a crx hf got real world 50+ mpg.

it did this by following basic high school physics. it was light and has a small engine.

today every fukking car out there is bloated thanks to the safety nannies and marketing nimrods who apparently think EVERY fukking car out there has to have power everything and get to 60 in under 10 seconds.

with engine advances over the last 20 years, we should have a new version of the crx hf getting at least 80 mpg, but, it's hard to do that with 29 airbags, power steering and AC.

ucantdoitdoggieSTyle2 wrote:

Go Coogs' wrote:Mrs. Rumps' '06 F-150 only sees city driving.

I am calling bullshit. You mean F-450, right?

that's what ya call "built ford tough".

personally, i can't see anything in the ford lineup handling that chore since ford sold off their medium and heavy duty lines about ten years ago.

88 wrote:My commute is exactly 0.4 miles. I ride my bicycle to work about 50% of the time. In order to get my carbon footprint to the same size as Al Gore and/or James Cameron, I'm trying to find a low mileage dragline excavator to make the commute.

Not sure why anybody would call that a dragline excavator when it's actually and electric shovel. A large electric shovel, yes, but no dragline.

A dragline excavator generally uses a dragline to do its excavating.

Gov't conspiracy here, I tell you:

http://blogs.motortrend.com/6719595/gre ... index.html

Here's why I'm so geeked on the Chevy Volt and why you should be, too. In normal, everyday driving we got 127 miles per gallon (fine, 126.7 mpg). Which is pretty amazing. Broken down, over the course of 299 miles on Los Angeles highways, byways and freeways, the Volt burned 2.36 gallons of gasoline (fine, 2.359 gallons -- we rounded up). Most other cars use up a tank of gas going 299 miles. The Volt, to reiterate, used 2.36 gallons over 299 miles. That's freaking amazing!

...Here's what you should take away from the Volt. The 127 mpg number we recorded is around five times the average mileage of other cars. So while the Volt does burn fuel, it burns 80% less of it.

Lil' too much hysterical, handwringing faggotry going on up in this bitch.

88 wrote:

I thought Mike Mulligan turned that bitch into a building furnace.

Screw_Michigan wrote:Gov't conspiracy here, I tell you:

http://blogs.motortrend.com/6719595/gre ... index.html

Here's why I'm so geeked on the Chevy Volt and why you should be, too. In normal, everyday driving we got 127 miles per gallon (fine, 126.7 mpg). Which is pretty amazing. Broken down, over the course of 299 miles on Los Angeles highways, byways and freeways, the Volt burned 2.36 gallons of gasoline (fine, 2.359 gallons -- we rounded up). Most other cars use up a tank of gas going 299 miles. The Volt, to reiterate, used 2.36 gallons over 299 miles. That's freaking amazing!

...Here's what you should take away from the Volt. The 127 mpg number we recorded is around five times the average mileage of other cars. So while the Volt does burn fuel, it burns 80% less of it.

Lil' too much hysterical, handwringing faggotry going on up in this bitch.

Turns out that 299 miles was driven over a course of three days and it looks like they charged the batteries 5 or 6 times during the trip. So, if you're making a 50 or 60 mile commute you could get 127 but you couldn't do it in one day.

as we go to grid power as a fuel for cars, it's only a matter of time before someone decides that they need to slap a road use tax on it as we do for oil based fuels.

how will this be done?

how do you separate electrons used to power your PC from those used to power cars or do we just say fuggit and tax all of them?

Screw_Michigan wrote:Gov't conspiracy here, I tell you:

http://blogs.motortrend.com/6719595/gre ... index.html

Lil' too much hysterical, handwringing faggotry going on up in this bitch.

I read that Motor Trend article and they claim the car was taken to the Mojave Desert, went up steep grades with AC on, etc. When I worked @ HD one of the vendors told me what a few customers also said to me about Lithium Ion batteries on the cordless tools they use out on the job... they simply shut down over a short time when exposed to constant heat.

You can Google "Lithium Ion battery life" and "heat" and you'll see that owning one of these cars out in the SW desert long-term may not be wise. How much would it be to replace one of those Volt batteries?

41k for something that wont pull a boat or carry a load of lumber is stupid.

The ex and I had a 1980 Datsun B-210 that got 40-45mpg. I think she paid $1200 for it in 1992. Sold it for $900 in 97.

What we need is a car that runs on hot air. Downside, you'd have to listen to political talk shows all the time to make it run.

Roger_the_Shrubber wrote:What we need is a car that runs on hot air. Downside, you'd have to listen to political talk shows all the time to make it run.

If they came up with something like that one would be able to cross the country w/o stopping in the LTS TRN 2 model.

Diego in Seattle wrote:

Roger_the_Shrubber wrote:What we need is a car that runs on hot air. Downside, you'd have to listen to political talk shows all the time to make it run.

If they came up with something like that one would be able to cross the country w/o stopping in the LTS TRN 2 model.

This type of sharp, witty repartee is what keeps T1B alive and thriving.

Keep up the great work, guys.

You're a homo.



Get fucked.

Mikey wrote:

88 wrote:My commute is exactly 0.4 miles. I ride my bicycle to work about 50% of the time. In order to get my carbon footprint to the same size as Al Gore and/or James Cameron, I'm trying to find a low mileage dragline excavator to make the commute.

Not sure why anybody would call that a dragline excavator when it's actually and electric shovel. A large electric shovel, yes, but no dragline.

A dragline excavator generally uses a dragline to do its excavating.

Trying to slip this one in when Dins isn't all UBTF? I caught 'cha.

smackaholic wrote:safety nannies

fuck those morons. they are trying to interfere in our lives. get lost and stop trying to ruin our lives.

Hey Hammy, who is that fugly bitcjh with the pubestache? Kinda looks like heywoods's mom

Cuda wrote:Hey Hammy, who is that fugly bitcjh with the pubestache? Kinda looks like heywoods's mom

Cliff Burton.

Bizzarofelice wrote:

smackaholic wrote:safety nannies

fuck those morons. they are trying to interfere in our lives. get lost and stop trying to ruin our lives.

not sure what these pics are other than dale, but what is your point?

i have no problems whatsoever with crash standards. i want the wife and kids in a nice safe minivan with 46 airbags, but it should not be mandatory for every 4 wheeled bvehicle out there.

why is it a 16 year old can go out and buy a brand new 200 hp 400 lb 2 wheeled ticket to hades, but no one, not even old boring safe driver types like me is allowed to buy a four wheeled 900 lb 30 hp 2 seater that will keep me dry and warm on my way to work and get 100 mpg simply because it must be "safe" because it's a car.

the enviromental footprint for such a vehicle is way smaller than alleged green cars like the prius. the footprint on my wallet would be much smaller also.

it should be perfectly legal to build small ultralight extremely efficient vehicles. are they as safe as an S class benz? in some ways safer as they are inherently safe due to moderate top speeds. in other ways, not so much, but they are still way safer than sport bikes which, last time i checked are legally sold here.

the funny thing is in japan, you can buy that 4 wheeled soda can but can not buy a ridiculously overpowered bike until they have demonstrated they can handle a much lower powered one.

this logical type of safety nannieship i can respect.