It's not too hard to get good gas mileage on open roads. A few years ago me and my girlfriend drove a 2001 Honda Insight 1040 miles on one 12 gallon tank. (85mpg - fully loaded with luggage + nasty traffic.) In the Tour De Sol rally, we got 94mpg. Keep in mind it is a stock car and there was a lot of weight we could have removed. (AC, second person, interior, hybrid parts, spare tire, air bags, glass, etc.) We also only came in second place.<p>The car is truly light (1850 lbs), but weight mostly affects rolling resistance (unless you hit brakes). With a lighter car, you can use a smaller engine. Though, around the same time I drove an 80s sedan with a v8 engine several hundred miles on the open road and got 40 mpg. It was so loaded down I mostly drove 50-55mph.<p>For open roads, aerodynamics is everything. 80% of the energy is spent moving the wind at highway speeds. Even hills aren't a problem (they store energy like batteries). Perhaps cars could look more like airplanes? Then we could go 80mph and still get good mpg.<p>Also, I find it curious that you need to modify a car to make it "safe" for use on a race track. They have insurance policies that require cages, fire suppression, rigid seats, 6 point belts, air bags removed, etc. They still tend to be quite light.
While I realise that the HN guidelines encourage keeping the original headline, knowing the size of the gas tank he used to drive those 1400 miles would be much more interesting than knowing the fact that he's from Washington State.
Totally cool, but the car is made of fiberglass, so what happens when it gets in a crash? Does it have airbags?<p>I've heard (although have no good source) that we've made big leaps in fuel efficiency in the past 30 years, but much of it has been eaten by safety advances that make the car significantly heavier.<p>Can any gear head HN'ers comment?
Headline omits a critical piece of info. Semi-trucks can do the headline claim easily, provided the driver is male and from Washington state. It may take them 250 gallons to do it...
MPG numbers mean less and less as they get higher. It's much more important to go from 10mpg to 20mpg, than it is to go from 20mpg to 50mpg.<p>It would be better to list fuel consumption in "gallonage" rather than "mileage". If you drive:
10k miles @ 10mpg = 1000gal of fuel burned,
10k miles @ 20mpg = 500gal (600gal less),
10k miles @ 50mpg = 200gal (300gal less)<p>The compromises you have to make to reach higher mpgs are generally not worth it to most drivers.
For a high school summer job, I used to work at the facilities which test the emissions on cars as per washington state law. I got to see a wide variety of vehicles this way. In particular, when I worked at some of the places in north seattle, a surprising amount of yuppies would come through in very old hondas with 3 cylinder engines. They were getting 50mpg regularly in city driving. It was surprising to me at that age to see how long we've been able to get cars with such good gas mileage, it didnt make sense to me why more city dwellers weren't driving these small cars, especially since so many people were spending so much money on newer expensive prius's...