Has anyone heard such? that auto companies or one in particular has had the ability to make cars do up to 80mpg on gas but due to some conspiracy? of sorts with the oil companies that they will never release it? I have heard similar for a few years and always shrugged it off, but a personal story i heard made me wonder.

A guy i work with has a friend who bought a Toyota or Ford...i forget which. The guy was saying he only used like 2 gallons in "x" amount of miles, apparently some 50+ MPG but soon thereafter got a notice from the dealer saying he must return the vehicle due to a defect.
Upon inquiring, he was more or less told that the fuel injection system in his car was actually a prototype and somehow by accident made its way into the dealers lot. Now their trying to get it back, quite badly apparently.

Now i don't know how true the story really is. I just wondered if any of you guys have heard such, believe its true or not true?
Apparently there is a similar conspiracy with hybrid vehicles..something about Chevy and a hybrid they had in the early 90's that was only released as a rental vehicle? i forgot the details but seemed interesting.

 

There was the EV1, an all electric car by GM. The cars were only offered on a lease, not for sale. In 2002-3, they canceled the line and took back all the cars and crushed them.

 

that was it. there was some documentary made, i didnt see it, but somehow was some conspiracy of sorts. i guess the EV1 must have been a bad mofo of a electric car to make such an assumption.

 

the documentary was called "death of the electric car". hippie propaganda if you ask me. any market that facilitates another market will always hold favor over consumer interest. its capitalism. welcome to america.

the thing i find interesting is that as gas becomes more and more expensive, we start taking cues from third world countries and motorcycles/scooters and smaller cars become more prevalent. electric/hybrid is not the future. its low output, small displacement vehicles or hydrogen power.

 

Yeah the EV1 came out about the time when the Hummer H2 came out. People fought for their EV1's but they took them away by force.

GM killed the whole thing so they can focus more on their sales. Same with Mobil and other oil companies.

The EV1 also threatened dealer profits since it was so easy and clean to tune up.

Saw this documentary in english class last year lol. I would personally never want an EV1 tho :P

 

Would be more credible if you got the name of the movie right...

Anyway, on the main subject, it's pretty unlikely that 80 mpg cars are doable. Modern american cars require way too much in terms of metal, electronics, etc to make a car with that kind of milage.

 

oh im soooo sorry i got the title of a movie i saw years ago wrong. i guess whatever i say about cars isnt true then.

they already have 80mpg diesel cars in europe.

 

american or imperial?

 

70-80 mpg imperial
60-70 mpg american

look up the vw polo. its due to be stateside in a year or two.

 

My 1979 diesel Rabbit got almost 45 mpg, it weighed about 2000 lbs. I'd think that with technology we have now we could do better- but we also require a couple of hundred extra lbs of safety equipment.

 

The OP's story sounds like urban myth...I'd take it with a HUGE cynical grain of salt. I'd find it very hard to believe that an automaker would "accidently" allow a super secret 50mpg+ prototype slip out to a general dealership.

That being said? I also do believe automakers could do a LOT better with efficiency and MPG if they tried. I recently was going through a bunch of 30-35 year old magazines and took notice of some ads for vehicles of the 80's. 30 years ago they were touting vehicles that got just about the same mileage as the vehicles we drive today....

I think todays vehicles are heavier, and safer...but it still IMO shows a lack of real desire or ambition by automakers to not really have pushed the envelope. Hybrids and now "The Leaf" are still a popular but small segment of the market.

Hopefully the tide is turning. I don't really believe in the "myth" of a hidden super car, or a super technology that has been supressed. But I do believe if automakers really wanted to...we could make incredible advancements, relatively quickly. But as long as the status quo, continues to make a lot of people wealthy? Change will be slow in coming.

 

I’m also skeptical about such conspiracy. Let’s say GM really had the said technology, and it was really bad timing back then to introduce it to the market. After a near-death experience and oil price the way it is, the said technology would be very effective to strengthen GM’s position right about now.
Experimental cars can be crushed and records destroyed. What about the people who worked on them? Technology this magnitude is not a two men job. They have to silent the team, and prevent them from continue the development with, say, Toyota, VW, or Ford, etc.

If all this is true and your friend has the prototype Toyota or Ford with 50+ mpg, watch out! Something strange is going to happen to his car and possible him very soon.

While anything is possible, just I think it is not likely.

 

Can't directly compare mileage numbers since they've changed how the EPA estimates are calculated to make them more realistic (new #s are lower so 30 mpg estimate on a 2010 means better actual mileage than 30 mpg estimate on a 1995).

A typical sedan from the late seventies (bigger than a typical car today, but not by much) probably got mileage in the low to mid teens. They've made great strides with electronic controls (in the seventies we didn't have many fuel-injected cars, even) and multi-valve engines but even with $4 gas apparently we're more interested in power than economy. For example- Ford Taurus engine choices- 263 hp or 365 hp (torque #s about the same as hp) for a 4000 lb car (and Ford didn't make the weight an easy # to find). And look at all the SUVs people drive... good mileage doesn't sell a lot of cars.

 

And there's this:

snopes.com: Miracle Carburetor

 

Something... similar

Honda EV Plus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

340 cars, leased only, a scrapped after lease was over.

you'll notice, they mentioned GM's EV1.

The documentary is called... "Who killed the electric car?"
General Motors EV1 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GM_EV1#EV1_parallel_hybrid <--- "parallel hybrid" mentions 80 mpg (US) with diesel.

 

part of me is happy that eletric cars did not take off back then.. think of all the battery waste. even today people are throwing out old nicad and nimh batteries without recyling them properly. batteries are hardly known as environmental pollutants to most folks, i bet.

infrastructure first, then cars.

 

If you watch older episodes of Top Gear, they occasionally do a challenge or short film with little diesel cars that get 60+ mpg everyday and 80+ if driven for economy. Some of the cars are from the 70s and 80s too.

A quick google got me this: Best cars for MPG » Fuel-Economy.co.uk - sort of interesting but not what I was looking for from the show.

I fully believe that very high fuel efficiency could be had. It's not a technological problem. It's an economic issue with too many players and big industries that want to hold on to their market segment. If I was them, I would too, I'm sure.

 

Low Output? Really? I guess you haven't seen this video:

YouTube - &#x202a;WORLDS FASTEST street legal ELECTRIC CAR&#x202c;&rlm;

 

I had an 82 VW diesel Rabbit that consistently got 54.7 MPG..I also had a 62 Ford Fairlane that was good for 30 MPG on the highway... There have been tinkerers that have created some methods of creating a heating system for the fuel and were paid off by oil companies to buy the rights and met with untimely deaths anyway... Ford has been been working on a system that uses direct injection of fuel into a high compression combustion chamber at the moment of detonation in the same manner as a diesel but uses methanol or ethanol on command to control predetonation when there is too much heat in the engine or to much load....

 

I remember hearing this same exact story back in the early 90s. the only difference was that the subject was a little old lady, and it was set in the late 50's.

My parents had a VW rabbit back in the early 80's that got phenomenal gas mileage.