HP, 60 mph, level ground (2025 Update)

Some of us have lives, and mine recently included a gorgeous spring road trip. It's good to know that your slavery to your obsession continued during my absence. It seems like you could save time and get empirical results by springing for a ScanGauge. But yeah, I know, they're $150! This article might get you started.

See the episode of Top Gear where the fella takes the Bugatti Veyron to

A lot of daily driver cars (in all of this time since the '30s) would be more than adequate with a Model A engine with some minor modern engineering/design changes made along the way. A diesel version coulda reduced the need for a lot of gasoline in all this time (kerosene or anything that readily ignites), because a lotta farmers (and still owner/operators) woulda most likely been growing/using a biofuel. Don't drink outta that blue jug Vern.. that's high-test.

When ya gonna calculate how much the additional costs are, just due to the high rate of obesity in this country? I couldn't give a FRA, but I'm sure some folks are regularly working on numbers like that.

Cool. :)

Well, since I just rejoined Usenet Newsgroups after a really long absence I don't know who I'm supposed to hate and like and to make fun of and all that childish kind of crap. LOL :)

I'm a skeptic in pretty much everything but that doesn't keep me from enjoying something well written like that.

I thought the post was cool. :)

...but I am easily entertained tho!! :( I'm really st00pid like that. :/

But, EA, how'd you know I drive like an asshole? :/

Alvin in AZ drives like an asshole but thought it was a secret.

Gawd, the Bliss is over.....

Did your period get in the way??

It's good to know that your slavery to your obsession

How do you know the scanguage is accurate?? Do you know how the scanguage calcs hp?? Btw, I have a scanguage, but not the most recent one. Dudn't do hp, but you can infer relative hp.... Well, you couldn't, but I can....

As far as numbers go, apparently you aren't so quick with numbers, given your mis-calc'd ROI on the volt, AND given all the s*it you COULD have slammed me for if you knew a fukn thing about anything.

Not to worry.... I'll post the omissions. Study hard..... but pace yourself, please, you don't wanna readjust yer meds.... again.....

It isn't. (for hp) Although it can be pretty close, and it's excellent for relative hp, which could teach you the difference between driving at gross weight up a muddy hill vs level pavement. In situ vs diddling a calculator and piling one erroneous assumption upon another. Regular people could grok that without knowing hp. For example, if your vehicle runs out of steam in worst case, then it's underpowered, as in, gutless beetles. Yes I know you think it's a tragedy that most people (including you) refuse to suffer. It was especially funny though to read that you won't have your cherished old beetle on account of the lack of AC, at the same time you're complaining that others aren't willing to compromise. I suppose you're never going to accept that the market has already judged what is reasonable, and that it won't change no matter how loud or persistent your yipping and yowling.

So you have a lot in common with these guys.

Such as? Oh, you mean the erroneous assumptions that GM engineers are addressing?? Like, uh, lack of sales of the Volt???

THAT erroneous assumption?

Or F = ma, E = mgh erroneous assumptions??

Regular

Oh, the in situ thing: Math-deficient peeple are often in situ peeple, who often have to BUILD a perpetual motion machine and/or take one apart and study it in effing depth, to figger out why it dudn't work. Oh, yeah, math and the laws-of-thermo deficient.....

You DO have a matching ascot for your Volt, right??

fuknFit..... LOL!!!!! Thanks gawd it was cheap!!! But the "A" might make up for it, ito total CdA. Did you see the Wiki article?? Cd's of .07.... !!!! Car proly looked like a racing kayak.... lol

HP/Speed vs mpg: God invented the cubic relation between power and speed..... y = x^3 is hard to circumvent, ito getting BETTER mpg's at higher speeds, altho with a car geared suff'ly high, I suppose that's possible too.

Fyi, if you fill your car up to the lip of the fill-hole -- which yer not supposed to do -- you can get very VERY accurate mpg calcs, poss. to 5 significant figures, depending on your odometer type, but easily 4 sig figs.. Really extraordinary accuracy, rare in the every-day world. That would translate into under-1% accuracy. The question then is, as you alluded, to correlate that with driving styles, etc.

If you rely on the gas station's nozzle cutoff, then yer proly in the 5% accuracy range.

Well, if you look at the readout, they read to 0.001 of a gallon, which is a cupla cc's.... perty accurate. Heh, assuming they're not rigged.... lol

True, given the reality of the road, sub-1% measuring accuracy IS proly moot. But it's still neat that you CAN get that level of accuracy, perhaps in more controlled circumstances.

The assholeKidding keeps harping on his effingScanguage. I have one, and they can be an EXCELLENT "behavioral modification" tool, and learning tool. But, after you've mod'd yer driving behavior, and learned a few things, they lose their real utility, altho you can do neat experiments with them.

For example, on one of the Nissan Frontier (pickup truck) forums, a guy used a scangauge to do pretty exhaustive experiments on whether driving with the tailgate up or down made a diff, mpg-wise. Intuition would tell you that of course, driving with it down ought to make a sig. diff. He found that it made very little difference!!! And iirc, a bed cover didn't make that much of a diff either. Seems like a simple experiment, trial, but it was fairly involved, and experimentally tedious.

There's a few things you learn from a ScanGuage -- which of course Kidding has no clue about, cuz the ONLY fukn thing he's innerested in this world is rationalizing his Chevy BloatVolt purchase, and other brags.

Well, obviously, you learn that hills burn more gas than level driving.... LOTS more. But the eye-opener is, the mpg's REALLY plummet when you (or the tranny) drop down a gear. Moral: near-lugging the engine saves gas, even if it feels like your position in the powerband sucks. It DOES suck, power-wise, but is good, mpg-wise. How good it is for the engine is another story, but mpg-wise, high-gear low-rpm roolz.

I read where one car maker explicitly acknowledged this, forgot the context. But the way most cars rev, it's pretty clear most carmakers are oblvious to this, or just don't care about gas conservation, unless they can get some EPA brag out of it..

The other thing it teaches is simply to be lite on the pedal. Lite lite lite lite LIGHT!!!!! No heavy acceleration. The ScanGuage brutally illustrates this!!! But, otoh, you don't want to take forever delaying the gear-shift point, either!! So it's a bit of a balance. I think, if you bustid yer ass, you can use the Scangauge to accumulate "trials", so you *might* be able to assess total gas consumption in a specific gear-shift/acceleration pattern, but I never got that far. So basically I will just accelerate as light as possible to get what appear to be normal gear shifts.

The other thing you'll notice is that going downhill, with no gas whatsoever, yields near-100 mpg stats -- no real surprise, cuz after all, it IS down hill. The surprise comes in when yer goin downhill, and you shift to neutral. Then, yer mpgs JUMP a full 50% or more!!. So in my Frontier, downhill, I'll get 70-90 mpg -- keep in mind that the idling engine burns about 0.3 gal per hour -- another inneresting factoid, vehicle-specific of course. Shift to neutral (free-wheeling), and the mpg's jump to 120-140 -- depending on the grade, of course.

Depending on the downhill grade, you can do FULL MILES in 100++ mpg-mode, which bleeve me, I can really use in dat goddamm Frontier..... what a guzzler, but not as bad as the big chevies, fords. Mine is an '04, I think now the bigger trucks are doing much better on gas.

It is inneresting stuff, very accurate. So accurate that if you have developed a good feel what your car SHOULD do, mpg-wise, you can actually tell if you've gotten bad gas, or when they shift to that ethanol s*it -- it really shows.

Your SWAG is way off. You want to find out how much horsepower it REALLY takes to run a vehicle at any given speed, under any given condition, run an ELECTRIC version of that vehicle, ballasted to the same weight, and read the motor current. It takes almost 6 hp to idle a 4 liter Ford V6 according to the scanguage.

They call themselves "Hyper Milers" - and accuracy of fuel consumption calculations can be over 99% over a number of tankfulls because the fill error only counts once. Ten fillups of 20 gallons = 200 gallons, with a fill error of 1 gallon is still only half a percent error.

My scanguage is accurate to within 1 % over 5 tanks full for fuel quantity. (took a bit of calibrating to get there)

A couple of the hyper-sports and liter-bikes can run quarter-mile times under 10 seconds. 0-60 times are in the 2½-3 second range, and generally cannot be bettered without wrecking the bike for other uses (e.g. extended swing-arms and lowered suspensions) - more power does not help until near triple-digit speeds since it just lifts the front end and/or spins the back wheel on stock configured bikes.

My little Honda CBR600F4i (which some idiots will say is a good beginner bike) will run 0-60 in about 3½ seconds, 0-100 mph in ~7½ seconds, 0-150 mph in ~18 seconds, and the quarter-mile in ~11¼ seconds - the latest super-sport bikes have about 10 more HP and will be slightly faster. Fortunately the handling is in a whole other realm than the Kawasaki H3/Mach IV - the latter are quite rare now, since the combination of poor handling and on/off nature of the power-band led to most being crashed at some point.

As for power at speed, I can tell you my Yamaha TW200 uses all of its ~13 HP at the rear wheel to maintain 65 mph on level ground (70 mph if I lay on the tank). Of course, it has horrible drag with no fairing, upright seating position, and wide bars, and likely poor rolling resistance also (130 and 180 mm wide knobby tires inflated to 22/20 psi front/rear). So real world fuel mileage is only about 70 mpg despite its 280-pound "wet" weight (the air-cooled and carbureted engine dating back to at least 1987 is also likely not the most efficient, and the stock gearing is also short).

I am hoping that J*st*n B**b*r crashes badly on his MV Agusta.

Yeah, the idiots out there suggest a 600cc super-sport for a first bike, when a Honda CBR250R or Kawasaki Ninja 300 is what they should be choosing.

Will the dealer take her in trade? ;)

As is riding only a few times per year, especially when combined with drinking (thinking about all the H-D and other cruisers that get ridden less than 2000 miles a year).

I not only ride regularly (including the Yamaha TW200 on the back roads in the snow in winter - I may not meet any traffic but ditch riding snowmobiles), but also attend several advanced riding refresher classes and a couple of track schools every year to get feedback on my riding skills. And of course, ATGATT.

Cd of ~0.06, and 82 mph on level ground at about 0.6 HP (Sam Whittingham pedaling). Front end is taller than optimum for aerodynamics, but needed for knee clearance.

Why I do not have accurate figures on my Honda Elite 110. The fuel tank is under the floorboard and has no filler neck - just sticking the nozzle in and squeezing the lever fully results in gasoline spilling all over the place - a partial squeeze until mostly full, then a series of short squeezes to top off the tank is the best technique I have found. So the best I can say is that mileage is better than 90 mpg around town, and drops to near 80 mpg if one flogs the poor little scoot along at top speed (50 mph/7700 rpm).

I just saw that, and realized how stupid of a statement it was.

If I put any one of my vehicles on ANY downhill grade (greater than about

LLoyd

There was a big shift in RPM at cruise back when I was a kid in the bad old days post-fuel crisis... you can really tell the difference. An old car with a direct drive top gear and a 3.54:1 or 3.73:1 rear end is positively screaming compared to RPM at cruise today. There were even some limited holdouts like my '84 GTI (3.94 final drive IIRC with a very slight OD in 5th) which would sit at 4000 RPM @ 80 MPH (seemingly happy about it, and for hours on end...)

And yes, the older cars felt much more lively than the newer ones (for comparable weight and power output) but obviously didn't get anywhere near the fuel economy of today's vehicles (possibly due to cruise RPM; definitely also due to improvements in chamber design, engine management technology, other developments e.g. direct injection etc.)

There's still something nice about cruising at 3200 RPM and passing someone being as simple as look, signal, push down a little on the skinny pedal. However those days are gone I fear...

nate

Again, this is an advancement in engine management technology. An older car with a carburetor will still be metering fuel through the idle jets with the throttle fully closed, and even some early fuel injection systems did not incorporate a closed-throttle fuel cutoff (I'm thinking of CIS when I type this; I kind of miss the "snap crackle pop" on overrun even though I know it's wasteful.) However most (all?) modern cars shut off all fuel completely with a gear engaged, engine speed over a certain RPM, and throttle at 0% allowing the engine to run in "air pump" mode when coasting down a hill.

nate

Math is good except where it's used to avoid the obvious. Your problem, like your brother crackpots who believe in perpetual motion, is denial. There is no space between the VW XL1 and a Prius Plugin for the $20k one ton hybrid EV Angstmobile. I don't think you'll ever admit it but at least you're on your way. Your idiotic claims have gone from a 99% Volt that you or Gunner could build, to a much lesser vehicle that would cost $100 million to develop. Keep "evolving," someday reality may appear to you like a revelation.

You might use your calculator for something useful. Such as to compare the power to gross weight ratio of a Fit to Volt. In a few minutes you could figure out who has the greater "greed" for hp. arf arf Oh wait, you're going to say that the Volt should have been made of CF. Why didn't they use that for the Fit again?

LOL Another benchmark that shows the difficult road for the fantasy Angstmobile. EA wants a 4 place hybrid EV with the utility to haul lathes and pallets, and with the max hp and retail price of a low end Hogly Ferguson.

My next 2 wheeler is going to be an FJR. I may have to get a beefier ascot. :)

That was my experience as well. I tweaked the offset about a dozen times until I was confident that discrepencies weren't worth chasing. The offset seemed to affect the speed readout, which I then tweaked seperately.