Big List of Fuel Economy: September 2009

You should've had the Mini E in the list as a joke.

Mini E: N/A-----Nada-----Zippo.

And the M3's mileage is still pathetic. The G8 and Camaro weigh more and are still more efficient.

The M3's mileage is probably that bad because if you are driving it you can't help but drive it on the edge often.

@1487,

Considering the performance of the M3, it's not that far off from the lesser S5... but then again, the GT-R did edge it out the M3 by a touch.

The Mini E isn't zip, zero, nada. It's just that we have no way to know how many kilowatt-hours we're using each time we charge the battery. The Mini E's 240 V and 110 V chargers have no built-in meter, you see. We do not know how much this thing is costing us.

I meant it as a joke.

Sure, we can do the math and find out how much oil is used to create the electricity that's sent through wires to your home that charges up the battery in your car, and then we can do a couple equations to adjust for parasitic losses and then do a couple more equations to find the equivalent MPG, but from an ownership standpoint the car itself (as opposed to the processes that created the electricity in the first place) does not burn gasoline; therefore in keeping with the article's intention, it doesn't get miles per gallon per se.

Hence my comment about the Mini E not getting any miles per gallon. :-)

Wow, at least there is one occasion where the Hondas rule the roost. Given the performance, the Z gives great mileage. The EVO X is also doing well, given its power compared to the Challenger.

It's also interesting to convert this to gallons/100mi, since that measures the question of "how much gas does it take to drive this route or commute that I'm taking?"

That looks very different, because each step going from 10 to 11.1 to 12.5 to 14.3 to 16.7 to 20 to 25 to 33.3 to 50 to 100 MPG saves the same amount of gas for a fixed distance. (For 100 miles, it counts down from 10 to 1 gallon.)

For example, over any given distance, the additional gas the M3 uses over the 750i is the same as the additional gas the Fit Sport uses over the Insight EX. Using 100 miles:

M3 15.6 MPG 100mi/15.6 = 6.41 gallons
750i 17.3 MPG 100mi/17.3 = 5.78 gallons
.63 gallons difference

Fit Sport 30.8 MPG 100mi/30.8 = 3.25 gallons
Insight EX 38 MPG 100mi/38 = 2.63 gallons
.62 gallons difference

"The M3's mileage is probably that bad because if you are driving it you can't help but drive it on the edge often."

Same could be said for GT-R, Camaro, G8, etc. The car is a gas guzzler for its weight.

Eh, what does weight have to do with it again?

Here they are as gallons/100 miles

Insight: 2.63
Civic: 3.15
Fit: 3.25
Mazda 6: 4.22
SX4: 4.37
A4: 4.61
Genesis: 4.69
Flex: 5.24
370Z: 5.46
G8 GT: 5.56
Camaro: 5.65
750i: 5.78
FX50: 5.81
Evo X: 5.88
S5: 5.88
Challenger: 5.99
GT-R: 6.1
M3: 6.41
Ram: 7.52

I just noticed the large proportion of imports in Edmund's LT fleet list. Only 7 of the 28 cars are domestics (25%), yet domestics comprise 55-60% of sales in the U.S.

So why so many imports in the fleet?