{"id":178,"date":"2007-06-12T09:49:24","date_gmt":"2007-06-12T04:19:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/daveandyvonne.com\/davintosh\/?p=178"},"modified":"2007-06-12T09:49:24","modified_gmt":"2007-06-12T04:19:24","slug":"wheres-my-100mpg-suv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davintosh.com\/index.php\/2007\/06\/12\/wheres-my-100mpg-suv\/cars\/","title":{"rendered":"Where\u2019s My 100mpg SUV?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was just listening to Laura Ingraham’s<\/a> 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.<\/a><\/em> 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?<\/p>\n

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<\/a> — the Toyota Prius<\/a> — only 60\/51mpg? (and the dirty little secret is that in real-world driving, the Prius is hard pressed to pull that off<\/a>.) The next best is the Honda Civic Hybrid<\/a>, which is rated at 49\/51mpg.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> that run at 132MHz and cost $5,000, to the mighty Mac Pro,<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cars"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davintosh.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davintosh.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davintosh.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davintosh.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davintosh.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davintosh.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davintosh.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davintosh.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davintosh.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}