RE: PistonHeads trolls MPG Marathon

[C7 JFW]

Really fancy taking my Mk4 Golf V6 4Motion to this.

[KarlMac]

Dixy said:

KarlMac said:

Fairly sure the people participating in this event will be the worst sort of driver, just awful bores.

I bet they all had dash cams too.

You met exactly how many of them, You are not being fair or sure, just prejudiced.

You show me someone who is interesting AND an mpg'er and I'll show you a liar.

[RoverP6B]

I dunno, the ecomodding scene is quite interesting, principally because that which saves fuel can equally be used to go faster. There's a spirit of enterprise and improvisatory skilled endeavour there that seems to have gone out of the conventional tuner scene.

[glazbagun]

RoverP6B said:

I dunno, the ecomodding scene is quite interesting, principally because that which saves fuel can equally be used to go faster. There's a spirit of enterprise and improvisatory skilled endeavour there that seems to have gone out of the conventional tuner scene.

Years back I was reading up on the MK I Insight and fell across some Eco modding forums, there was some awesome amateur stuff going on there- fibreglass custom body panels, hacking engine maps, arguments over drag coefficients and especially driving methods. Some looked really cool and professional, others looked like they'd been made in their kitchen!

I felt a bit sad for them and society in general in the sense that the masses will look down on them from the comfort of their leased diesel Mercedes/Audi with go-faster trim and not realise that they're closer to the spirit of a petrolhead than the knobheads who buy Lambo's and Ferrari's so they can blast up & down 30MPH roads in London.

[RoverP6B]

Exactly, there's a real grassroots petrolhead spirit there, they make do with what they have and do astonishing things with their limited resources. It's like the early days of Le Mans.

[hairykrishna]

If you were going to troll a mpg contest you should have taken a leaf out of Car and Drivers book and done it properly;

http://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/how-we-won-the...

[C7 JFW]

I think there's a great deal to be learnt from economical driving and travelling efficiently across country.

[MarkwG]

Dixy said:

I hear you were beaten by a Civic driven by two 17 year olds who had only just past their driving tests.

Just to say, if any of you have children 11 - 15 who'd be interested in learning how to drive all manner of vehicles in all kinds of different ways (not just as economically as possible ), here's how - http://www.under17-carclub.co.uk/ & now's the time, new season starting!

[Willy Nilly]

erm, the competition would have been about economy, not efficiency, they aren't the same thing.

[xRIEx]

Willy Nilly said:

erm, the competition would have been about economy, not efficiency, they aren't the same thing.

They possibly are in this situation. The work being done is "get from point A to point B", so using the least amount of fuel to accomplish that is the most efficient and the most economic.

In the case of an engine, the work being done is "convert potential energy into useful kinetic energy" so efficiency is the best ratio of fuel consumed to power produced, in which case efficiency and economy are not the same thing.

[Willy Nilly]

xRIEx said:

Willy Nilly said:

erm, the competition would have been about economy, not efficiency, they aren't the same thing.

They possibly are in this situation. The work being done is "get from point A to point B", so using the least amount of fuel to accomplish that is the most efficient and the most economic.

In the case of an engine, the work being done is "convert potential energy into useful kinetic energy" so efficiency is the best ratio of fuel consumed to power produced, in which case efficiency and economy are not the same thing.

On Boxing day I crept home at HGV speeds along the motorway in my car and it did 54mpg measured at the pump and showed 57, which isn't bad for a petrol car. A truck would have done about 5, so would used about 11 times as much fuel while being 40 times the weight. So tell me, which is the more efficient?

Regardless of what the test wanted to achieve, they were only measuring miles per gallon, so can only ever know which vehicle was the more economical, not the most efficient. I have looked for specific fuel consumption figures for cars, but as far as I can tell, they are rather thin on the ground. My company vehicle was tested at 244 grams per kilowatt hour at full load but isn't a car.

[xRIEx]

Willy Nilly said:

xRIEx said:

Willy Nilly said:

erm, the competition would have been about economy, not efficiency, they aren't the same thing.

They possibly are in this situation. The work being done is "get from point A to point B", so using the least amount of fuel to accomplish that is the most efficient and the most economic.

In the case of an engine, the work being done is "convert potential energy into useful kinetic energy" so efficiency is the best ratio of fuel consumed to power produced, in which case efficiency and economy are not the same thing.

On Boxing day I crept home at HGV speeds along the motorway in my car and it did 54mpg measured at the pump and showed 57, which isn't bad for a petrol car. A truck would have done about 5, so would used about 11 times as much fuel while being 40 times the weight. So tell me, which is the more efficient?

Regardless of what the test wanted to achieve, they were only measuring miles per gallon, so can only ever know which vehicle was the more economical, not the most efficient. I have looked for specific fuel consumption figures for cars, but as far as I can tell, they are rather thin on the ground. My company vehicle was tested at 244 grams per kilowatt hour at full load but isn't a car.

If the truck was carrying 20 tonnes of goods then it was most efficient; for you to carry that much in your car you'd probably have to make 40 trips or more - now which vehicle was most efficient?

However, your car's job was not to transport 20 tonnes of stuff, it was to move you from point A to point B, and in that respect it was much more efficient than the HGV. The HGV was moving its driver from point A to point B, but that was not its purpose.

The purpose is the important bit, because efficiency rates the amount of useful work done for the amount of resource consumed. A HGV's purpose is to move G; a car's purpose (in this case) is to go from A to B; an engine's purpose is to convert hydrocarbons into circular motion; a vehicle's transmission's purpose is to convert circular motion into linear motion; a salesperson's purpose is to convert prospects into clients. All different purposes, all can be efficient or inefficient and can have different ways of calculating depending on the intended result.

A light bulb and an LED both have the job of converting electric charge into photons and the LED is almost always more efficient at doing so; however, if the job was to heat the air around the object, the light bulb would be most efficient. The efficiency is a measure of the desired result.

The purpose of this competition was to travel from point A to point B using the least fuel (which is the job of the car), not to generate the most power using the least fuel (which is the job of the engine).