Luxagraf

Stick that in your hybrid and smoke it. I looked into hybrids a bit and realized the gas mileage isn’t much better than traditional engines, the key to hybrid’s success is, to my mind, best explained by the sense of guilt free superiority it lends their owners.

Still, I’m not cynical about gas mileage or hybrids, I just think that hybrids out to get a hell of lot better mileage, especially when I stumble across articles like this on in the Seattle PI:

…how does 376.59 miles per gallon sound? Makes your Honda Civic hybrid look Hummeresque, doesn’t it?

That number doesn’t come from some manta ray-shaped, wind tunnel-vetted carbon fiber space car. No, it’s from a chop-top, steel-frame 1959 Opel T-1 (think melting jelly bean, but uglier). And the record was set in 1973 in a contest sponsored by Shell Oil Co.

To be sure, the Opel isn’t much on looks, luxury or performance. The team that built it stripped the interior of everything but a seat, chopped the top to lower its wind resistance. They narrowed the rear axle, used super-hard low-friction tires and a chain drive to save weight.

The mileage from the mostly stock four-cylinder came from heating and insulating the fuel line so the gas entered the engine as lean vapor. Then they drove the car on a closed course at a steady 30 mph.

So some of that wouldn’t work in the street, McMullen concedes. But if the car were made more drivable and lost 200 mpg — it still would get 176 mpg.

“Here’s a car that was 20 years old at the time of the contest that was the project of a couple of guys in a garage,” he said. “You can’t tell me we can’t do better than this with cars today.”

Visit Site: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/351903_needle20.html