The oil economists and auto experts over at ESPN.com have decided to lay down the law about automobiles and ending the fuel import issues that plague the United States. In a post called “Hold Your Horsepower,” writer Gregg Easterbrook begins a multifaceted festival of wrong that continues for several excruciating paragraphs. His thesis: cars should have less horsepower; if they did, we’d use less gasoline. He goes on to, in a manner vaguely resembling accuracy, describe how today’s cars are “overpowered” by their comparison to vehicles from twenty and thirty years ago. While we’d all concur that a 268 horsepower Toyota Camry just sounds silly, Mr. Easterbrook’s “solution” is comparable to a 12 year-old mapping out a trip to Mars with a box of Crayolas. Just cutting horsepower isn’t the answer to anything. Cars had less power in the 1970s because of emissions laws and insurance. The went on to be functional with less horsepower because Federal safety requirements like airbags and side airbags and antilock brakes and electronic stability control and rigorous NHTSA and IIHS testing just weren’t part of the gameplan. At the heart of Easterbrook’s article there is undoubtedly a kernel of truth, which is that many American-market cars have far more horsepower than we need. But that’s a qualitative perspective, not quantitative. Look at the best selling cars in America in August: among the top ten, there were four trucks. The other six are cars, and their sales numbers are almost exclusively made up of four cylinder engines with less than 180 horespower. If you click over to the article, see how many statistical/data errors you can spot. Easterbrook should stick to sports. And I promise not to talk about the Maple Leafs; only cars.
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He is right, even if the cars in question are making less than 180hp.
Remember when 0-60 in ten seconds was more or less the standard? Now, it’s at least eight seconds (and eight is derided as slow) while the V6 versions of the Camry, Accord and Altima are pushing times that a Ferrari would have had trouble meeting only a few years ago.
What if you could get a Fit or Civic with 90hp or an Accord with 110? What if we had gearing that wasn’t tuned to produce burnouts at every intersection?
Easterbrook is all about colouring outside the lines. Used to love his TMQ stuff. I will read the article later, but from Justin’s post the epiphany I get is that bestselling cars don’t need a lot of “horespower” to sell. Overpowered cars are frequently compensating for whatever deficiencies their designers, engineers and execs have burdened them with. Is the Chrysler 300 going to sell with a 180hp 4 cylinder?
Now then, to the heart of the issue. I think everyone should be talking about the Leafs. They need loan guarantees so that a Stanley Cup might be procured in my lifetime, or before I develop a passion for some warm weather sport, or something obscure like world cup football.
Actually, a 268 hp Camry sounds pretty badass.
Easterbrook is easily my favourite ESPN writer. I look forward to his TMQ rants every Tuesday. Even when he’s wrong or contrarian, his tangents on things totally unrelated to sports are always great.
IMHO, since Bill Simmons jumped the shark, Easterbrook is the only real reason to read ESPN page 2.
Anyway, more on topical note, the same rant was ridiculously pro-CAFE. That made me gaggle.
To his credit: a Geo Metro gets 55 MPG. If Camry’s were designed that way, they’d probably pull 45 mpg. In a way he’s right. The only thing he fails to consider is that no one would buy it. The price of gas isn’t high enough such that a 40% increase will make a dent in most American budgets (Nascar Dad: “Wow… $40 to $56 a week in gas… big deal”).
The current RAV4 is pretty close to being the antithesis of this idea. The V6 is crazy fast, and only gets 1 mpg less than the considerably less powerful I4
“Pontiac’s new 361-horsepower G8 GT is a small car that gets just 18 MPG. Only in America do small cars waste gasoline.”
The G8 is a small car now? Has he ever seen one? I guess “only in America” is the G8 considered small.
“The Dodge Avenger, a family car, when ordered with the optional 255-horsepower engine posts just 18 MPG.”
It actually makes 235hp, and its EPA combined score is 20 MPG.
“Ford’s new Taurus sedan has a 263-horsepower engine which delivers only 22 MPG in its front-wheel-drive variant, an awful 19 MPG in the all-wheel-drive version. The Taurus isn’t a sports car, it’s a family car!”
The Taurus is in the large-car segment, which 2 decades ago (Easterbrook’s “good old days”) required V8s that returned (by current EPA ratings) around 17 MPG.
“Lexus has aired ads boasting that its new IS-F model, with a 416-horsepower engine, does zero to 60 in 4.6 seconds; the new 480-horsepower Nissan GTR is even faster at 3.8 seconds. Both have dismal mileage ratings. “
I highly doubt the low production IS-F and GTR are the cause of high gas prices.
Even if this guy’s main idea makes theoretical sense, he doesn’t seem to know much about automobiles.
Easterbrook is a blowhard, and I hate CAFE.
But he has a point.
First, you are excluding SUVs from you analysis, and they are the worst HP offenders — they don’t need HP, they need torque. However, they get engines too large for competitive reasons.
Second, a midsize sedan doesn’t need 180 HP. 110-120 is more than enough. 80 could be acceptable although with significant drawbacks.
Third, you are arguing that safety regulations are pushing the weight of cars up. True, to a small degree. Safety regulations prevent true city cars from arriving in the US — and that is probably a good thing. But the weight thing isn’t true.
1990 Honda Accord:
Weight: 2700 pounds
hP: 2.2 I4 with 140 HP (the base model had a 2.2 with 125 HP)
MPG: 21 / 28
2009 Honda Accord:
Weight: 3600 pounds
HP: 3.5 V6 with 271 HP.
MPG: 22 / 31
Almost double the HP, but weighs only 900 pounds more. Given the size difference between the two, that is NOT of extra fat for safety systems.
Where I have a problem with Easterbrook’s argument is that today’s better engines could be retuned for higher efficiency in a lower weight car. I suspect they would be faster, but not much more efficient. Aero drag, rolling resistance, and how that weight is distributed also all play a role.
So yes to lower weight cars. And a qualified yes to smaller engines in mainstream cars.
I used to be a fan of “barely adequate” horsepower and its attendant fuel savings, when I drove a 2002 5-spd Civic LX. However, after spending a year driving said Civic on a two-lane undivided highway where I had to pass multiple gravel trucks every day, I’m now willing to take a mileage penalty for lower blood pressure and a greatly reduced risk of head-on collisions. While I wouldn’t mind seeing a little bit of a trade-off here or there, I just can’t see going back to the underpowered cars so prevalent in earlier years.
@snabster:
I agree with you, mostly. The thrust of my post was this:
Mr. Easterbrook’s “solution” is comparable to a 12 year-old mapping out a trip to Mars with a box of Crayolas. Just cutting horsepower isn’t the answer to anything.
Improving efficiency should be the goal, not just cutting horsepower numbers for kicks. That’s the mistake. While they tend to be related to one another, we don’t need to be on a horsepower cutting crusade. We need to be on an improving fuel economy mission, to the extent that we reach a pleasant balance between fuel economy and horsepower.
Easterbrook is a great sports writer, but here he is a little over his head. I actually saw this yesterday and fired off an email to him. However, the ESPN readerbase is not going to understand how technology like turbocharging and direct injection improve efficiency, so Easterbrook went with the simple more hp=less mpg, which is largely true. I actually enjoy most of Easterbrook’s off-topic commentary, but yes, he could do better with the car stuff.
G8 is a small car? that was a definite facepalm.
Ah yes, but he forgets that, in order for me to safely merge onto the freeway in my part of town, I need a car that can do 0-60 in under 6 seconds. This is because my brake pedal doesn’t work and I can’t judge distances or modulate my speed – if I can’t rocket ahead of the “other guy” I pretty much need to hit him or her, because they certainly won’t slow to let me in.
Also, the ability to sprint to 60 has some other safety-related implications, I think usually relating to “accelerating away from danger.” This of course makes perfect sense and I have many anectodal examples of how my life was saved.
The HP game is just macho number-padding, but since the market is completely irrational it is supported by sales. If we all weren’t in such a damn hurry all the time or desperate to show off, the 268 HP Camry wouldn’t exist, the roads would be immensely safer and we’d probably be calmer, more happy people.
So easy to punch holes in his premises. Here are a few examples from the top of my head:
1. Fuel consumption is related more to engine displacement than horsepower (unless you’re talking about adding a turbo or supercharger). Increasing horsepower in same-size engines by making them more efficient can actually improve fuel economy.
If he had argued that our updated knowledge to improve engine efficency should be used to make smaller engines with the same power output, not same-size engines with higher power output, he might’ve been on to something.
2. He is confusing 0-60 time (ie: acceleration rate) with top speed when he states, “Don’t buyers crave speed? Most cars are already too fast!”
0-60 times between a new Taurus and a ’68 Vette is not a reasonable comparison. With suitable gearing, almost any car can improve it’s 0-60 time, at the expense of top speed. (Then a transmission with more gears is used to keep a reasonable top speed.)
3. He counters his initial argument (horsepower = high fuel consumption) when he later discusses that people use less gas when they drive slower (drive fast = high fuel consumption). Which is it? He tries, weakly, to link the two by saying that high-power vehicles encourage speeding, which causes extra fuel consumption.
Thus, what he really wants people to do is drive slower (or is it accelerate slower?) but this rant is about car horsepower, not about lowering or enforcing speed limits, so we won’t discuss that.
eh_political :
Is the Chrysler 300 going to sell with a 180hp 4 cylinder?
Not as its only engine choice, no. But the 2.7L V6 in the 300 now only wheezes out 178hp. I kid you not.
Samir, I think you have it backwards. Easterbrook is a sports writer stuck in his little cave as the rest of the world passed him by years ago. He’s just shouting at the echos of the world that left him behind.
Simmons is actually still relevant. He stirs up new ideas with his writing and is continually adding to the sports vernacular: The Lindsay Hunter All-Stars, The Ewing Theory, The Levels of Losing, The Reggie Cleveland All-Stars…
Either way, Easterbrook has occasionally written about cars before there, and he’s just as far of the mark now as he was then.
My Golf has 115hp. While it’s not fast, it’s still fun to drive, can go up to 120mph (done that with another Golf on the autobahn) and smoothly maintain it. And, driving it as if I stole it, I pass 300C with 340hp all the time.
Which, by the way, pisses me off to no end. Why do people buy a 340hp car, or a blown BMW inline-6, and then go from 0 to 60 in, oh, about 25 MINUTES?
I know, I know: image, small penises, and all that. But let’s be honest: Europeans make do with much smaller engines, and they drive faster than Americans.
As of 2007, the average hp in Germany was about 140hp, vs over 200hp for the U.s. (Source: The Economist). Something like 115 in France and Italy.
And most Americans driving in Europe would get scared crapless.
eh_political:
“Not as its only engine choice, no. But the 2.7L V6 in the 300 now only wheezes out 178hp. I kid you not.”
Amen; I drove a rental Charger with that one, and while it was OK on level roads, the hills of PA really got it breathing hard.
fuel mileage has nothing to do with horsepower.
weight matters in regard to acceleration (city mileage) and rolling resistance (city and highway combined), and aerodynamics matters in regard to speed (highway MPG). the reason you’ll see more fuel consumption from a larger engine in an otherwise equal car is because of the weight penalty and pumping losses. if you make a smaller engine make more horsepower by allowing it to breathe better at high revs (a al variable valve timing), you make plenty of horsepower with no cruising MPG penalty.
if horsepower alone is the culprit, then tell me why a 430hp Corvette will return 28 mpg and a 220hp SUV will return 18 mpg.
When will people learn!! Those who don’t know anything about cars or engines seem to envision a slider along a spectrum going from “hp” to “mpg”. That’s not how ICE’s work. I suppose downsizing engines could save a few mpg here and there (although not all that much if you crunch the numbers), but we already have quite a bit of engine choice. Toyota offers that manaical V6 in the Camry, but most buyers still go for the more frugal 2.4L I4.
@snabster:
I completely agree with your point, but your facts are off. The 2009 Accord 2.4 manual gets the mileage you stated, but the V6 does 19/29. Still, good comparison…
@AKM:
You’re furthering the myth that more horsepower necessarily means worse mpg. Yes Europeans drive faster with less hp, but if you have to wind out that little engine ALL the time to get up to such speeds, you will see your mpg advantage diminish quite a bit.
the reason you’ll see more fuel consumption from a larger engine in an otherwise equal car is because of the weight penalty and pumping losses.
Generally, in the case of gas engines, larger displacement engines also consume more fuel at idle than smaller ones. For COMPARABLE vehicles, this gives an economy advantage to the smaller displacement engine in city driving.
Conventional gas engines need to maintain near-stoichiometric air/fuel ratio to both minimize emissions and prevent damage to themselves. New(ish) technologies such as cylinder deactivation and direct injection change the rules in this regard though.
…a 430hp Corvette will return 28 mpg…
…on the highway and driven strictly per EPA cycle. The Corvette games the EPA’s testing methods pretty hard. It’s the original poster child for doing so, and it’s trickery is only less front-and-centre since we started seeing hybrids and/or cars with five-speed automatics that zip into fifth at the slightest provocation.
It’s still impressive, but driven like you’d want to drive it–or even like a normal driver, rather than an EPA tester–a Vette will not be a hypermiler.
But yes, you’re right about the Corvette versus an SUV of equivalent mileage. The issue isn’t the Corvette, though, it’s the near-200hp base engines and near-300hp sixes. It’s getting so that you cannot find a car with a small, efficient engine in North America that isn’t a hybrid, or hooked up to a turbocharger, unless you want an automotive hairshirt.
I don’t drive fast in a straight line, and I don’t make a habit of passing people. I’d be totally satisfied with an Accord equipped with a Civic’s engine, and a Civic with the Fit’s.
I don’t understand why they don’t consider putting an “adrenaline” system in to cars for emergencies. Nature figure out long ago that this is very efficient.
Rather than buy a motor that constantly produces the amount for power needed for worse case scenarios, why can’t there be a system designed for energy conservation averages with the ability to invoke energy expensive bursts of output for emergency situations.
Example: The HarvyBirdman posted about his experience with a small Honda and his need for passing power.
Why can’t we hook up Nitrous Oxide injectors to small motors that kick in when we punch the gas pedal? We know that we will be using up our NO2 reserve and that we will need to top it up later. But that’s ok.
Who said that the motor must only use ONE fuel at ALL times? Use cheap fuel to cruising, and expensive fuel for brief emergencies.
Anyhow… I see people justifying the purchase of larger-than-they-need vehicles because of worse-case scenarios they anticipate.
Why can’t we hook up Nitrous Oxide injectors to small motors that kick in when we punch the gas pedal?
Lawyers.
My Prius can do 0-60 in 10 to 10.5 seconds, which (back when I was a kid in the 1960’s) used to be mid-sized car, small-block V8 territory, with corresponding 13-17 miles per gallon (and virtually no more useability than my 44-48 mpg Prius).
My wife’s Hyundai Sonata would tear a pound of flesh off of virtually any mid-1960’s Pony car, such as Mustangs, small block Camaros, even some GTO’s. 0-60 in about 8.5 seconds and 125 mile per hour top speed. In a four door sedan. With automatic. Air conditioning. Oh yeah, and FOUR CYLINDERS. Plus it got 32 miles per gallon on a 5000 mile trip from Michigan to the Canadian Rockies and home in July-August. Phenomenal…
It’s true we could easily get by with a few less horsepower (which equates to unnecessary top speed) and with smaller engines in a very effective and purposeful trade-off for better MPG.
The writer of the article over-simplified it all for a non-car-savvy readership, but overall, he has a point.
99.9% of the time, I don’t use, or need, the extra performance available in my wife’s Sonata compared to the Prius. Even with WOT high speed highway merge situations, the Prius has plenty of performance and in fact, I find myself going 80 instead of 70 in the Sonata with WOT merges! “Er, whoops…”
eh_political:”Now then, to the heart of the issue. I think everyone should be talking about the Leafs. They need loan guarantees so that a Stanley Cup might be procured in my lifetime, or before I develop a passion for some warm weather sport, or something obscure like world cup football.”
Good luck with that. The Leafs couldn’t make the playoffs with Sundin, how do you think they’ll do without him? No, this is Montreal’s year – the silver will be back with the Habs… where it belongs.
As for horsepower reduction – if the racing organizations reduced the horsepower in the race cars down to something like 50hp, the races would be so boring that no one would drive their RVs and pickups to them – think of all the fuel saved!
lprocter1982 : Good luck with that. The Leafs couldn’t make the playoffs with Sundin, how do you think they’ll do without him? No, this is Montreal’s year – the silver will be back with the Habs… where it belongs.
Look, Sundin can’t do everything. He was never a defensive forward like Gilmour was (though Sundin could deliver the occasional punishing check). But the Leafs haven’t had good defensemen or goaltending in years.
@lprocter1982: I am merely suggesting that a 50 billion dollar loan guarantee to the Leafs might produce a few playoff runs, not suggesting they would actually win the cup. That would be surreal.
I would like to see a racing series involving unmodified minivans with crash test dummies in every seat. Also stop signs, a track that intersects with itself several times, and perhaps even a radar trap. It would be part racing series, part experiment in human nature.
Why can’t we hook up Nitrous Oxide injectors to small motors that kick in when we punch the gas pedal? We know that we will be using up our NO2 reserve and that we will need to top it up later. But that’s ok.
For cars that have aftermarket nitrous systems installed, that is how these systems work presently. The solenoid only engages to spray the nitrous at WOT. There’s no point injecting nitrous at any other time.
A small 4-cyl. engine with factory-equipped nitrous system would probably have to be so over-built in order to survive past the warranty period that it would be prohibitively expensive.
What if you could get a Fit or Civic with 90hp or an Accord with 110? What if we had gearing that wasn’t tuned to produce burnouts at every intersection?
We’d be lamenting how unbelievably lifeless these cars are, sorta like what everybody did with the Smart FourTwo and their meager three-pot mill.
Justin,
At least you got Maple Leafs correct. I bet he couldn’t come up with Priora to save his life.
Another article by someone who presumes to know better than the people who really matter in this equation – the ones signing on the dotted line for that shiny new vehicle.
Yes, cars are heavier than before. Part of that is safety equipment, but another part is the increased demand for improved control of noise, vibration and harshness. Posters on this site may wax lyrical about “feedback” from the engine or the road, but most car buyers regard that “feedback” as annoying noise and vibrations, and expect it to be engineered away. This requires stiffer, weightier platforms.
Also note that many areas of the country have poorly designed entrance ramps and hilly, two-lane roads, and, yes, you need rapid acceleration to successfully merge or get around that slow-moving tractor trailer to avoid oncoming traffic.
On the highway, it’s time to accept that the MINIMUM speed on many limited access highways is 75 mph, and it’s perfectly safe, and many people drive faster than that (and that’s safe, too), and vehicles need to keep up while carrying 2-3 passengers with the air conditioner running.
If Mr. Easterbrook wants to go back to the bad old days, that’s his choice. I’d suggest he find himself a nice 1980 Toyota Tercel or Chevrolet Chevette and drive at 55 mph in the slow lane, although if he gets blown off the highway by faster traffic, I won’t feel sorry for him.
Somehow, though, I get the sneaking suspicion that like a lot of celebrity automobile “critics” he would never lower himself to drive for long distances, preferring to fly, and in a private jet, if possible.
I buy cars based on performance, handling, comfort, etc., not on horsepower. A light car with modest power is just as good as a heavy car with high horsepower. That said, I now own a coupe with 330 hp because that’s the engine that came in the car I wanted. A couple of other candidates came with 220 and 245 hp engines. However, it was the rest of the car that made them unacceptable.
For several years, we owned a 70 hp Honda Civic that weighed about 2,100 pounds. It was OK around town and cruised comfortably at 65 mph. However, it thrashed at the current 75 mph interstate speed limit and acceleration was too slow for safe merging. Note that the current Civic weighs 700 pounds more than our old one.
I have driven a couple of Geo Metros. What dogs! They were the first cars since my 40 hp VW beetle that couldn’t handle hills on the interstate without downshifting.
Consider the German system. Taxes are set by horsepower class. That’s why every german car is 180 hp or 230 hp. With horsepower as a “given”, not a selling feature, each maker has to make the car more efficient at that given power. So, you end up with a 230 hp BMW inline six which reliably gives 25 mpg, even driven like it was designed to be.
I consider adequate power to be a safety feature when the dimbulb ahead suddenly accelerates when the road FINALLY goes to two lanes.
@speedlaw:
My understanding is that Germany taxes vehicles based on the engine displacement, not rated horsepower. They’re considering changing this to a tax based on CO2 output.
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2356253,00.html
More and more anxiety to fill space causes faults. You really need a copy editor. E.g shouldn’t that be “lay down the law”? Quality improves with caution.
@austinseven:
Thanks for the catch. Usually we copy edit one another’s work. It’s just me today.
Mileage has nothing to do with horsepower, this guys not connecting the right dots. Weight is the killer. Cars today weight so much more than those 20 years ago, so they need 300hp to move comfortably. Every driver wants to be just a little faster than the next guy.
I have a 5.0L Mustang, and my wife drives a 2008 Rogue.
We get similar mileage, believe it or not, around 20 mpg because she’s a lead foot, who tears away from every stop light. I only cane it maybe 5% of the time, the rest my V8 lumps along at 2k rpm.
Not to mention the weight difference between the two.
I do think it’s strange that every automaker increases HP, with a minor increase in MPG every time they update an engine.
Saying that mileage has nothing to do with horsepower is just plain biased. That’s like saying engine size has nothing to with horsepower or mileage. It’s not nothing, it’s not everything, but it is something.
The Corvette is the exception that proves the rule.
my advice with easterbrook is to skip over the political and economics stuff and just read the bits about football and cheerleaders (science fiction tangents are your call).
the sad irony is that his day job isn’t really as a sportswriter — he’s a “serious” journalist on various issues. or at least he used to be. I don’t see his serious stuff as often any more. but I do owe him a debt for getting me interested in football!
Import levels for oil have nothing to do with the horsepower of cars. There is a finite amount of oil available in the world and only a relatively few countries have any extra oil to export.
The Export Land Model tells us that as these countries become more prosperous due to high oil prices they consume more of their own oil leaving less for export. Often oil exporters subsidize oil consumption as in the case of Venezuela and Saudi Arabia which encourages consumption and leaves less for export.
While Saudi Arabian exports are holding their own for now Venezuelan and many other countries’ exports are declining. Mexican exports are in free fall due to the collapse of the Cantarell oil field.
The only way American oil imports can be maintained at current levels is to out bid the competition. But world wide oil exports are set to decline big time and that means oil imports must also decline worldwide regardless of horsepower.
The implication for the auto industry of continually rising oil prices is very negative since rising oil prices suck more money out of the economy to pay for oil while giving no increased benefit. Since higher horsepower cars are generally more expensive, it stands to reason that sales of such will decline the most.
No offense, but you guys can get absurdly stupid and reactionary.
I personally don’t agree with many of Easterbrook’s views but there’s no doubt he’s an “expert” on many political and economic issues; he’s written a few books that are quite good and original (and not sports related.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregg_Easterbrook
He just happens to write for ESPN because (and I know this might be hard for some of you to grasp but please bear with me here) he also happens to enjoy sports in addition to a lot of other things.
He’s just as qualified to talk about curbing HP (and btw this isn’t the first time he’s mentioned it in an ESPN article) as any of us; if not more so.
And btw, I really can’t emphasize enough with how much I disagree with him on so so so many different issues.
I wouldn’t trust Easterbrook regarding sports. He has no published background there; instead, he’s a well-established, extensively published environmentalist/journalist with a contrarian streak. How he wound up on ESPN, I dunno.
I second his sentiment about horsepower, though. It’s spoiling the modern driving experience. Cars are wastefully dragging around useless power, while drivers grow less likely to ever use what’s on tap.
Face it- any modern car is capable of speeding any public road (in the US, anyhow). Ninety-five percent of the time, your velocity is a measure of your tolerance for legal penalty and physical risk, or simple courtesy to other drivers. What’s under your hood is irrelevant except for those rare, full-throttle moments where max acceleration is possible. But the faster you accelerate, the sooner you have to back off and assume cruising speed, so this is one pleasure that’s it’s own antidote. The better it is, the sooner you have to quit.
Everyday I’m surrounded by oversized, overpowered vehicles that are driven with the apparent reflexes of a city bus. I may just drive a 90 hp turbodiesel, but I’m usually first off the line at a stoplight, though using only 1/4 the go pedal’s travel. Then I have to slow down to a stop while the SUV in front cautiously creeps over a driveway entrance, despite its one-foot ground clearance. That’s when I realize that we’ve bred a generation or two of drivers who are so afraid to push a pedal or turn a wheel with any real decisiveness or intent. They’re just creeping along. In some strange way, I think excess HP is a cause of that.
A few cars today have a bit of overkill on the power department. I say that 20lbs/hp is the ideal for a car that isn’t being raced.
That would mean;
200-250 for a large sedan
150-200 for a mid size
100-150 for a small sedan/hatchback
225-250 for minivans
We also need some more tiny cars.
Bring all the Opel models here, even the Agila city car.
To explain the HP problem; On another forum a minivan buyer complained that a van she test drove didn’t have enough power because the transmission would downshift while climbing hills. She thought that it meant there was something wrong and the tranny would need to be replaced.
What if you could get a Fit or Civic with 90hp or an Accord with 110? What if we had gearing that wasn’t tuned to produce burnouts at every intersection?
I have a 2008 Versa SL 6-speed with 122 horsepower, and 127 lb-ft of torque; even if I’m in the car by myself, if I’m running the air conditioning it can be painfully slow, to the point of making left turns in Los Angeles somewhat dangerous. And this, despite gearing on the 6-speed that puts me over 3500rpm at 80mph on the freeway in 6th — I haven’t seen highway revs that high since my 101hp 1985 VW Jetta.
The solution? I have to keep the revs up, much higher than I’m used to, to keep things moving. As a result, my city driving MPG is hovering around 25 (1 lower than the EPA estimate.) That’s 6 more than my old Mazda Protege (which produced more horsepower) but only 2 more than my 2005 Sentra SE-R Spec V 6-speed, which I could drive around with a very light foot.
It wasn’t the raw horsepower that made it possible, though; it was when the horsepower was available. The SE-R had lots of power at low rpm, whereas the Versa gets it high up in the band.
That’s probably why I got 25 city in my automatic-transmission 2000 Sentra GXE, which only had 126hp and 129lb-ft of torque, but had it down low — and I never felt like it was low on power, so I could drive it with a light foot, too.
Of course, it didn’t hurt that the GXE weighed almost 200 lbs less than the Versa does, and there’s the whole safety feature part of the equation, as the Versa has side-impact and curtain air bags that the GXE didn’t have.
I’ve gotta agree with Wheatridger and Davey49.
To the former, I used to own a 2002 Infiniti G20 – an outdated, ‘underpowered’ (145hp 2.0L), tarted-up Nissan Primera (as it was known outside the US market). Reviews everywhere bemoaned the car’s ‘dismal’ ~10 second 0-60 (automatic, mind you) as unacceptable. In urban driving, however, I managed to be somewhat of a subdued ‘redlight racer’ without needing to flog the thing to stratospheric RPMs and as a result, it returned 25+ MPG in town.
Was it fast? No – but aside from the few folks willing to accelerate briskly (and actually hit the speed limit) everyone else just drove much slower. The power and acceleration was certainly more than adequate for me, especially since it had wonderful handling.
To the latter, right on. HP needs to cease being this pissing contest and more of a ‘given’ according to a vehicle’s size. Sure, ‘performance’ variants can exceed the rule of thumb as much as they want, but achieving a balanced power-to-weight ratio is part of the equation influencing efficiency.
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Davejay – wow, driving must be pretty agressive in your part of the country. I bought my wife a ’07 Versa last year to replace her showing-signs-of-oil-sludge ’01 Toyota Camry. Her main ‘want’ was a sunroof; my concern was getting ABS. Thanks to Nissan’s insistence on linking packages, only one (loaded) hatchback on the lot was available in such configuration at the time. So she got an SL with the CVT.
The CVT keeps revs low, if you choose (and apparently if traffic lets you). We rarely exceed 3000 RPMs, and acceleration is quite decent. The Versa has been tested to go from 0-60 in 9.5 seconds, which isn’t shabby for the segment (it’s faster than my former G20, too). Because of the nature of her ‘semi-urban’ commute, and the apparent relaxed nature of driving around Tulsa, she’s got an overall average of 30 MPG going, with 15,000 miles (smack in the middle of the EPA rating). It’s a shame you’ve got to flog yours to keep up with the flow.
Qusus,
Thanks for the link, it was interesting to learn that the guy is even more of a moron than I originally thought.
Maybe detroit thinks America has way too much useless sports coverage.
He made plenty of errors in arriving at his conclusions, but he is correct in stating that the typical performance of many new cars is higher than many buyers need or want. In fact, many would prefer more mileage and less power. Which is where having several engine options comes in handy. But the real improvements in mileage and performance will come from getting rid of the unnecessary bloat that has afflicted most modern cars. Weight kills performance, fun, and efficiency all in one swoop. Just as obesity is killing America, it is pounding our national fuel consumption.