from Amazon
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
MPG
Non-sports (but numbers-based) post.
A car can potentially get an infinite number of miles per gallon, seeing that if a car goes slow enough it can run on non-gas powered fuel. So, you end up seeing some cars listed at say 200 MPG because, well, that’s true. But, for a consumer, does he really care about the environment, or does he care about how much it would cost him to drive 200 miles? It may cost him a 3$ gallon of gasoline to drive 200 miles, but it’s also going to cost him a charge to his battery to do so. How much is that charge? Say that that charge will cost him (just for illustrative purposes) 21$. That would be equivalent of 7 gallons of 3$ gasoline. So, in terms of “gas equivalency” in order to drive 200 miles, you need 1 gallon of real gasoline and 7 gallons of equivalent gasoline, for an effective total of 8 gallons. That puts the MPG (in this illustration) at 25 MPG.
Now, what is the equivalency in terms of environmental cost? Darned if I know, but you would need to index it the same way. If, for example, charging your car the equivalent of 1 gallons is half as costly as what 1 gallon of real gasoline costs, then driving this car for 200 miles is costing the equivalent of what you’d expend from 4.5 gallons of gasoline (that’s 3.5 equivalents and 1 real). So, the MPG impact to the environment would be the equivalent of a car that gets 200/4.5 or 44.4 MPG.
This is how I’d like to see the reporting being done.
(All numbers for illustration purposes only.)
Recent comments
Older comments
Page 1 of 344 pages 1 2 3 > Last »Complete Archive – By Category
Complete Archive – By Date