The record was for a non-hybrid car. Read all about it. Volkswagen Passat TDI Smashes World Record With 78 MPG On U.S. Trip
Congrats to Wayne and Bob. I've been fortunate to meet both of them and they are very dedicated and know how to get every mile out of a gallon. They had stiff headwinds for most of the drive, with better luck 80+ would have been do-able.
start date/time : Friday, June 7, 2013 12 pm @ VW HQ, Herdon ,VA end date/time: Monday, June 24, 2013 (morning) @ VW HQ, Herdon ,VA vehicle: 2013 Volkswagen Passat TDI 6 speed manual EPA rating: 31 city/43 highway Tires: Continental Pure Contact w/Eco Plus Technology Tires Energy Monitor: Linear Logic ScangaugeII drivers: Wayne Gerdes, Bob Winger distance 8122 miles. Fuel usage: 104.94 gallons of diesel fuel fuel efficiency: 77.99 mpg map of route taken http://www.cleanmpg.com/photos/data/2/Herndon_to_Herndon_Route_small.jpg description/blog (21 webpages of comments) of road trip here 2013 Volkswagen Passat TDI Ready to Hit the Road - CleanMPG Forums
Congrats to them. Hopefully people will realize that the numbers don't work unless you hypermile. But it is a great step forwards.
A car might have the tech but it is driver skill that makes it happen. Even using hypermiling techniques it is very challenging to achieve 60 to 65 mpg on a road trip - the long hours requires a significant amounts of stamina. Traffic and driving conditions -can at random- degrade fuel efficiency quickly ... Put an idiot driver like BBC's Top Gear Jeremy Clarkson into a fuel efficient car and things can go very badly very quickly, aka a BEV stuck in the middle of the road with a dead battery or a hybrid exploding into a ball of flames... That being said... most effective way to get high fuel efficiency from any vehicle on a long road trip is to drive when nobody else is on the road IIRC Wayne used the ScanguageII determine the optimum acceleration range the ICE can operated at for a given particular instance. He does this by using xgauges like LOD to avoid accelerating using a rich and less efficient (more fuel less air ) fuel mixtures which increase fuel efficiency dramatically but requires either timing your acceleration at the downhill grades of a road, accelerating very slowly, decelerating when you don't have enough momentum to go uphill, or extending the distance/time of the glide phase in a P&G cycle. In this case of a VW Passat TDI 6 speed Manual - it means avoiding or at least restricting the use the turbo diesel function - unless there is an opportunity for an extended glide. The 6 speed manual transmission selected is also preferred when doing advanced hypermiling technique called NICE (aka putting the transmission in Neutral during glide phase of a Pulse and Glide(P&G) - which btw is illegal in half of all the states of the USA). Knowing/mapping out the topology/elevation of the road (to maximize gravitational assist acceleration value), precise management of speed/momentum of the vehicle (to avoid stopping), and extended trip/route (to mitigate warm up overhead cost) - were likely large contributing factors in achieving high fuel efficiency here. The Bob and Wayne traveled 8122 miles in 16 days, which means they had to drive about 500 miles/day - which is doable with a dedicated two hypermiler team even at an average cruising speed of 25-50 mph ( reportedly they start at about 9am and stop about midnight each day and if you include about 2 hours for stopovers per day - they are driving 13 hours per day ) - this speed is low enough to get some benefits from new hi tech low rolling resistant tires, too. When the driving temperature gets too hot ( hypermiler Wayne does not appear to be using a cooling vest to avoid using the air conditioner in this particular trip). For most people, this is just way too much to do and just impractical for their driving environment and they won't be able to achieve anything close to what Wayne and Bob has done.
I'm not sure, you could go visit his site at CleanMPG, An authoritative source on fuel economy and hypermiling and ask him.
WHOOPS--I put this in the "news" section July 3, because I hadn't looked down into this forum. I guess I'm pretty behind the times of el Dobro and others here on diesel news. Anyway, what I said is: I haven't seen this here, so here it is. (And yes, I saw it on tdiclub.) It's a pretty impressive feat if you ask me. VW Passat TDI sets 77.9 mpg fuel economy record through Lower 48 states - Autoblog
