I was just listening to Laura Ingraham’s radio show, and she was in the middle of interviewing Clint Wilder, co-author of The Clean Tech Revolution: The Next Big Growth and Investment Opportunity. They were discussing ways that we can be better stewards of what we have, and take better care of the earth. While I was listening, they took a call from a guy with a great question; he said if his 1994 Honda Civic can get 45mpg, why hasn’t 13 years of automotive technological development improved gas mileage any more than it has?
I think that’s an excellent question. Emily drives a 1995 Civic with 120,000 miles on it, and I have personally seen it get 50mpg on the road. Heck, I once owned a 1981 Mazda GLC Sport, and that thing would get close to 50mpg on the highway. So why are the EPA mileage estimates on the most fuel efficient car in America — the Toyota Prius — only 60/51mpg? (and the dirty little secret is that in real-world driving, the Prius is hard pressed to pull that off.) The next best is the Honda Civic Hybrid, which is rated at 49/51mpg.
That’s pretty pathetic when the top fuel mileage ratings for new cars is nearly matched by real-world mileage on decade-old machines. Too bad I don’t still have that GLC; it’d be interesting to see if that’d still be capable of making 50mpg. The new cars get better mileage only by using hybrid gas/electric motors. The standard Civic has an EPA rating of 30/40mpg; it’d be interesting to see how that compares to the EPA rating for the 1995 model year, but can’t find that on the durned intarwebs tonight.
So what I’d like to know is why in the same amount of time, advances in technology have taken us from Apple computers like the 9500 that run at 132MHz and cost $5,000, to the mighty Mac Pro, which runs two dual-core Intel processors at 2.66GHz, and costs half what the 9500 did. If the same progress had been made on the automotive front, I’d be driving a new Honda Civic that could go across the state of South Dakota on a gallon of gas, and would’ve cost me about $5,000. Or better yet, I’d be driving a Chevy Suburban that moves & handles like a Corvette, costs $10,000 and gets over 100mpg. That’s the future I’ve been waiting for.