Forget What Your Brand Or The EPA Says About Mileage. Here Are The REAL MPG Champs For 2008!

Errr, the flaw here is what type of driving, city or highway or if both what the percentage?

The issue is the Honda is built of better highway mileage and the Toyota of city. My commute is all highway so this information could be meaningless to me without more data.

Did anyone notice the selective editing of this article to reflect that the BMW 750li was class leader when it was not? Agent 001 if you are going to post the information please post it without editing. Let the info stand on its own. Please!

I wonder if that is 001 making the judgment that the Volvo S80 (the winner when you click the link) does not really belong in that category. It seems like the Volvo should be in midsized premium category. (Maybe the EPA classifies it large.) So the 750 would win, but I'm guessing they didnt test many premium large cars, if that is the best they could come up with. For instance, they did not test the LS600hL.

Ok can they explain what real worlds is? 50% city and 50% highway? By the way if you live where I live the highway moves at 15mph but the city moves at 35mph. The government should just focus on giving us the 10mph/40mph/65mph gas mileage for each car.

I totaly agree with you on the MPH aspect. city/highway varies greatly with location traffic and driver.

at one time, CR did give actual mpg at set speeds, just like you proposed.

maybe their nerdish auto engineers got shot down for this, by the usual complainers of the "toaster tester" guys.

Exactly. And on top of that we have no clue how long each driver had each car. Some drivers drive harder in general, accelerate harder and brake harder rather than coasting and such. Vehicles like the prius and other hybrids with large fuel consumption readout can change driving habits in a forcing you into a game sorta thing also and when that happens it's not the efficiency of the car as much as your habitual changes due to non efficiency related feature.

001: hope you dont drop the ball on us and get taken away in a prostitution ring of your own!!! where will be go if autospies is taken down??? :)

Seriously though, who is that in the picture? "premium" unleaded? ;)

I thought Bill Clinton legalized that years ago? ;)

Just like Austin Powers, we like to be a little naughty sometimes...OH, BEHAVE 001!!!

001

haha!

Gee, I thought Tundra was tops in class for fuel economy , their not even on the list !!!

so that we click on the article and boost site traffic / hits! common, get with the program.

Just like the article say's GM pickups , best fuel economy

When an article says that the Tundra has the better power than the GM the complaint is ...but that's the 5.7 liter Tundra vs 5.3 GM. Now you have the 5.7l tundra with barely worse fuel economy than the GM with the 5.3 engine and it makes significantly less HP. You can't have it both ways. Go to edmunds and see how the 6.1l GM does for fuel economy....it's actually quite a bit worse.

Well since GM doesn't make a 6.1 I would say it gets 0 mpg. The GM 6.2 V8 does get slightly less mpg than the Tundra 5.7 but then again it makes more power. As you so eloquently put it "you can't have it both ways".

So what do you want? Better gas mileage=GM 5.3. Most power=GM 6.2. What part of your logic am I missing?

can i have some of what you're smoking?

pickups aren't even listed! only suvs.

The GM makes LESS power with it's larger and less fuel efficient engine......not to mention that it's top power is harder to achieve due to it's laggy engine mapping.
http://www.edmunds.com/apps/vdpcontainers/do/vdp/articleId=119281/pageNumber=2#2

800over, Since you quoted an article w/ neither engine I mentioned and from a few years ago I think you can do better than that. Wanna have another go at it?

XYZZ, Both the GM 5.3 and the GM 6.2 are available in the GMT900 SUVs (6.2 in the GMC Denali series, Caddy Escalade series, and recently in the Chevy Suburban). The Tundra's 5.7 is available on the Toyota Sequoia.

And you'd think this list would be dominated by ToyoLexus.

It is. Toy/lex has 10 vehicles total on the lists, if you click the link.

i have a feeling you are rosko...

rosko was a giant TURD with stinky, highly opinionated, xenophobic views that little to do with reality.

i'm surprised our new Star STOOLchecker totally missed him.

had little to do

I guess the reviewers drove the Prius without a ton of bricks in the hatch. And didnt drive uphill going 80mph the whole way. Cuz when you drive normally, you get 50mpg, even on highways.

My Prius got 59mpg yesterday over an hour and a half drive on a windy coastal highway, averaging about 60mph.

All them Lexus Hybrids and not a one of them made it on the list.

What a farce :-(

Click the link, if that is not too hard for you.

The RX is tops in its category, and the GS450h is 2nd (to the slower, smaller TL) in its category. (For some reason, the article is listing the GS as the 350, but when you click through, the numbers quoted actually belong to the 450h "In Consumer Guide testing, a GS 450h averaged 22.7 mpg in city/highway driving.")

Interesting that the BMW 750i beat the Lexus LS Hybrid.

They have not tested the LS600hL, which is why it is not on the list.

From the Lexus website:
"Prior to the 2008 model year, EPA tests assumed:

- Very slow acceleration
- Straight, level roads
- Air-conditioning is turned off
- Average speed of 20 mph for city test (top speed of 56 mph)
- Average speed of 48 mph for highway test (top speed of 60 mph)".

Still wondering why those figures are way off??

nonetheless, MANY have beat the old EPA figures, myself included.

the new EPA numbers are even easier to beat.

(except by small brained, big heavy footed fools, the existence of which the EPA has had to acknowledge. some probably even helped compile this list.)

would you care to give us some proof?

how about 40 mpg overall, in an '03 corolla automatic? more than than the epa rates even the yaris at.

many of my friends who own prii consistently get in the mid-40s, some even exceed 50 mpg.

i've also gotten 32-33 mpg in a Camry. b-i-l whose car it was says he gets about that too.

LOL! stoolchecker is so fixated on how ONLY TURDS, apparently he hadn't even noticed that a toyota or lexus is #1 or #2 on just about EVERY CATEGORY where they have a qualifying model.

the prime exception being just large, luxury SUVs, where owners don't care so much about mpg as luxury. and of course, only Lexus provides a REAL luxury suv.

fixated on ONLY TURDS

REAL lux suv, as in LX570. and the toyota Land Cruiser. (still luxurious, despite TOYOTA nameplate.)

no other suv will ACTUALLY GO off road with as much competence and as little fuss.

or without breaking, or have some electrical gremlin or other pop up. even the overrated Range Rover is put to shame by the LX570.

One way that you dont have to worry about the miles is to shift to electric vehicles. They are so much cheaper to run and because of zero emission, so much more environment friendly! Check out these alternatives at http://www.zapworld.com

Until they start using a test track to do all of their testing the results will always be bull****.

Things like Air Resistance make a lot of difference to mileage so testing indoors on rolling roads or some computer simulation is nonsense in my opinion.

There are enough oval shaped racetracks in the USA that can be utilized for highway speed testing {Inside Lanes not Banked} and the city tests can be done by simply driving into any NEARBY BLOODY CITY.

There are not that many new cars out there that needs to be tested, these guys are either LAZY or JUST CORRUPT. {Easy to skew figures in Indoor Testing or CGT}

except for that toxic battery

you do realize its complex and takes a bit of mpg out.

htay-- just how would eliminating the battery INCREASE mpg for the Prius? it is INTEGRAL to the car's efficiency.

weight has NO NET effect on mpg when you have regenerative braking.

Boobies! Oh, wait...we're talking about MPG? Sorry, I guess I got distracted. ^^;

why is the prius listed as a mid-sezed car...it's practically the same size as a civic/corolla!

*sized

The Prius is mid-sized, larger than Civics and Corollas.

I can respond to some of your healthy skepticism of this piece, as I wrote it.

A couple of things:

We put at least four test-car editors through each vehicle that we report fuel economy for.

We are careful to report only on cars for which we achieve a fair balance of city/high driving. (generally within no more than 40-60% in either direction)

By "real-world" we mean actual daily driving. No performance testing, no track time. We put any averaged of 400 miles on most test cars.

Note:

There are a number of variables that cannot be adjust for: driver aggressiveness (or lack thereof), weather, and temperature.

Though we cannot provide identical conditions for the testing of each vehicle, we still believe our findings have comparative value for consumers.

Please feel free to email me with any thoughts or concerns regarding our fuel-economy findings.

Tom Appel
Managing Editor
Consumer Guide Automotive

tappel@pubint.com

(Is it wrong for me to boost this article?)

And thanks to 1970 Toyotamarc for catching the GS snafu. Am fixing it now.

DriverTom,

have you or any of your staff heard of Hypermilers? i presume none of you tried some of their (less outrageous) techniques?