116mpg in a geo xfi in Road and track magazine
 

I finely fixed the link on my web page for the Road and Track article where they took a metro xfi to one of those fuel mileage competitions where they acheave thousands of miles per gallon with single person vehicles, and ran a xfi, and a civic vx on the same track, under the same conditions, it's a few years old, maybe 1995 or so.

https://nbtsc.org/~ryland/RoadAndTrackArticle/

116 MPG Geo
 

Damn. Does this seem just too easy to anyone but me??

Drive in off the street, inexperienced driver, little or no adjustments, no mods, 116 MPG.

I may have to borrow my brother's Geo and see if I can come close.

Then maybe I'll melt down Old Reliable and make a couple Geos.

What do you think???

Me thinks it's not as easy as it looks.
Metro do those numbers sound right 20MPH steady state at 84.1 MPG?

Ryland! Cool! Reading now...

First note: Dr Andrew Frank, mentioned in the lead-in is credited with being one of the inventors of the plug-in hybrid and is in the news a lot lately (if you follow that kind of news). Interesting.

Back in a bit...

I would say it is as easy as it looks... in those circumstances: 20 mph average, summer weather, on a closed course, no traffic to interfere, plus some experienced drivers offering tips.

The MPG numbers are believable too.

Very awesome article. I love it.

Burn and coast!

EDIT: and it's more support for my belief that the ideal 2-car FE garage (as far as gasoline, non-hybrids go) would have a Metro for city driving, and a VX for highway use.

Hello -

Does this mean we need a new acronym :

bandc =? bac =? b&c => Burn and Coast?

But I agree that the "bicycle speed" of 20 MPH with no stop lights can lead to misleading MPG. I have noticed in very slow freeway traffic that I can maintain very good MPG if I can just keep moving, at least over 10 MPH. It makes me wonder how all the "MPG record" cars would fair under CAFE testing. The CAFE "standardized test" would show strengths and weaknesses in the different strategies.

It's another vindication of conventional ICE technology.

CarloSW2

No more acronyms for this technique!

As long as people put their numbers in context (like avg. speed), I don't think there's any problem with reporting super high numbers. Without the context, I'd lean toward calling it misleading.

me too, but i dont get over 60mph anymore and my mpg went down from when i used to go 65mph for about an hour.

speed and driving conditions are what really makes the difference.

Ryland: you sure this was a R&T article? I did a search on the author's name and came up with hits for Motor Trend.

Not a big deal, but I'm working on an article based on this article, and wanted to double-check.

I found my paper copy of the artical, and yes it's Road and Track, the only date I could find on it was a copy right date on a number of ads stating 1992, so it's a 15 year old artical.