Can anyone school me on Hypermiling?

His record:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2013/06/24/volkswagen-passat-tdi-diesel-guiness-record-78-mpg/2453305/

was broken by:

https://www.cars.com/articles/84-mpg-couple-break-mileage-record-with-passat-tdi-1420663118471/

They hold more than 90 world fuel-economy and vehicle-related records.

They specified in their FUEL Academy what really defines hypermiling, I summarized it.

Negative. Ever since the EPA pushed the Diesel Emissions Reduction Act of 2010, all car manufacturers started to have issues to comply with outrageous expectations and requirements, leading to less reliability and relative performance.

Current diesel particulate filter systems put a huge strain on the engine, lowering reliability by a lot, limiting one of its main desires over gas powered engines.

Also, diesel cars still hold 40% of the market in Europe even though they got caught with the same emission tricks over there.


The EPA has been working against diesel for decades, every one in the industry - including me - knows that.

How the EPA Spent 35 Years Killing the Diesel Engine

 

Real hypermiling? Guess they weren't hypermiling for this achievement.
Hybrid drivers complete run for mileage mark | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

So has some gasoline cars, but people don't want tiny cars that take 12 seconds to reach 60mph.

Doesn't change the fact that hypermiling was a term created by Gerdes, and that he never limited it to manual diesels. I don't think actually owned one.
https://blog.oup.com/2008/11/hypermiling/

A manual gives a driver more control over the car, but there is nothing about it that prevent hypermiling techniques working with any type of car.

The EPA is enforcing regulations written by Congress, and signed by the President. It started because the public was literally sick of the pollution. The EPA isn't trying to destroy diesel, it is trying to reduce the harmful crap coming out the tailpipe. Many of the steps it took were taken years previously elsewhere.

As for diesel's reputation. That started going down hill with cars of low reliability in the 1980's, and the soot poring out of the truck smoke stacks. The banks of plowed snow on the side of roads was literally black back then. Diesel cars were starting to make a come back with a diesel Cruze and Equinox, but then VW got caught cheating. Which not only wrecked diesel's rep to the point that they stopped selling diesels here, it also keep other diesel options out of the market.

After the very first Accord hybrid(around the gen3 Prius intro), Honda was considering a diesel model. They couldn't figure out how to get efficiency and performance, while meeting regulations without a lot of extra equipment. Like VW was doing. Mazda ran into the same issue later on. Well now we know.

Before shifting blame by claiming VW was forced to this by stringent regulations, how much was the fix for the cheating for each car? How much would it have cost to install when the car was made?

 

VW diesel: 84 mpg, 1,526.6 miles on a single tank.
Gen2 Prius: 118.6 mpg, 1,889.4 miles on a single tank.

The old-era Prius went several hundred more miles, on several gallons less fuel, with a lower density fuel, over more days with more cold starts. Without getting sanctioned for emissions fraud.

Here is the Prius record progression:
Which gen Prius has highest MPG? | Page 2 | PriusChat

Wayne invented the term, so he really defines it. His website is:
https://www.cleanmpg.com

 

So we need better DPFs.

If I wanted reliable particulate emissions I'd go fight a forest fire.

 

DPFs have gotten better. Most of the problems were with older cars. People seem to have forgotten the problems early emission controls caused for gasoline cars.

The EU and China are requiring particle filters on gasoline cars. Turns out those emission levels are higher than the limit in place for diesels, even with some port injected engines. Maybe the EPA isn't being hard on diesels, but is lax on gasoline.

 

At that point I was talking about MPG numbers the average driver archives, in the realm of 60 MPG. That used to be possible in Germany, in the 80s, with every diesel Golf, Polo, Clio, Smart, Kadett, you name it.

If you want to talk about extremes, VW built a car that gets 240 MPG with a diesel hybrid called the 1-litre car.

They also developed a vehicle that gets over 900 km out of a single liter of diesel back in the day.

MPG didn't improve much over the decades because today every knucklehead wants a bigger / larger / faster vehicle.

Did you ever own a manual diesel passenger car and tried hypermiling with the factors I suggested, especially coasting out of gear? In my testing it makes a differences of almost 20 MPG. You can't properly coast in an automatic.

I owned 6 VW diesel, ranging from the 80s to 2011, I archived over 60 MPG in all of them, without proper hypermiling.

The energy density of diesel is higher compared to gasoline.

Last photo I took before I handed over my last 2011 TDI, just regular driving.

 

Who needs a slow econobox... hypermiling my 600 RWHP C7 Corvette...

 

I haven’t, try tuning up a’72 maverick

 

Those cars are all smaller than a gen2 Prius. Some much smaller, and some are slower than the Prius.

Fuelly users of the Golf, Jetta, and Polo with the 2L diesel aren't doing better than the Prius users. Maybe it's different at Spiritmonitor.

No they didn't. The XL1 is a PHEV, and the 240mpg is based upon use of grid charge during the trip. Its hybrid mode efficiency was over 100mpg, but the price tag was also over $100k

They also made a car with a 100mpg carb. It was an experiment for a record, and in no way would return such numbers in a street legal car.

You can so neutral coast in an automatic. i'm doing so regularly in the Outback. In past automatics, I'd even EOC. Hypermiling is merely the practice of driving for efficiency. It can be done in any vehicle.

It also has a higher carbon content than gasoline.

Diesels are efficient, and there is potential for renewable fuels for the engines. But it was VW that fucked that up, not the EPA. All the EPA did was hold diesels to the same emission standards as gasoline.

 

And he specifically discourages close drafting as a hypermiling legitimate technique, contrary to the definition stated earlier in this thread..

 

Uh ... Do we have particulate limits for gasoline-powered vehicles now?

That was a moot issue until DI.

 

Actually, port injection can have particle emissions higher than the limits on diesel. Hold gasoline to the limits on CO that diesels reach, and they are screwed.

The EU and China have such limits EU had it on the books for years, but kept waiving it. Now new cars need a GPF. It's part of the reason Toyot and Hyundai, and maybe others, have dual port and direct injected engines.

 

Would any of those be U.S. street legal as new vehicles today?

Looking at the versions you mentioned or linked as record setting diesel MPG in the U.S. this century, not a one of them averaged better than a Prius in the user results reported to the EPA. Though one did come very close, if we don't adjust for the fact that diesel has about 14% greater volumetric energy (and carbon) density than gasoline, which means we really should be comparing them in terms of miles per pound of fuel, not gallon.

Those gasoline figures I quoted were Japanese hypermilers with street legal Prii, the early ones just running their regular commutes to and from work. Maybe the later ones were special test runs.

That would be 2117 mpg of diesel, or about 1860 mpg-gasoline-equivalent.

If you want extremes, students at Université Laval in Quebec built a prototype gasoline-powered car that produced 2,713.1 mpg. Later, students at Duke University built a vehicle for the Shell Eco Marathon, that produced 14,573 mpg-gasoline-equivalent. (They didn't actually use gasoline or diesel, but hydrogen.)

Don't forget "safer" and "lower pollution", as required by federal regulations.

{quote]Did you ever own a manual diesel passenger car [/quote]Dad started me on manual transmission farm equipment when I was 8 years old. He made me start driving manual transmission road vehicles when I was [...mumble...mumble ... not...yet...legal...age...mumble...licensed at 14].

Other than a Prius, my three-car household has been using manual transmission gassers exclusively for almost four decades. I drove one of them across the state today.

I learned hypermiling from Wayne Gerdes, linked earlier, and use a decent selection from his large menu of choices.

Your drafting advice is dangerous. Screw that.

That is why diesel and gasoline fuel economy need to be translated before they are compared. Compare them pound-for-pound, not gallon-for-gallon.

 

Those (circled-i) icons on the VWs displayed in the EPA ratings that I copied in my previous post, all link to this note:

 

EPA mpg ratings are very significantly derated from what were originally CAFE test cycles. Derated because much of the public doesn't want to drive like that, so EPA scores are adjusted down to be more similar to what today's faster and more aggressive drivers get. And to allow for A/C losses too and common traffic impairments too.

Gen3 Prius has a CAFE mpg rating in the 70s (equivalent to 80s diesel). I've achieved that on mine. A Gen4 Prius ECO has a CAFE mpg in the 80s (equivalent to 90s diesel).

By driving similarly to the CAFE / original EPA test cycles, ordinary drivers should be able to match these CAFE results, also without hypermiling to do even better.

I've achieved CAFE results on all the manual transmissions gassers I've ever purchased, starting in the mid-1980s. Then beaten them with the ones I still had, after reading up on Uncle Wayne.

 

You are missing my point. Just because laws and requirements have been changed doesn't change the fact that the average car / driver doesn't see any better MPG compared to cars made in the 80s. Safety concerns and emissions are something we forced on ourselves by voting for them indirectly. The result is still that we are wasteful.

Your average car in the 80s, in Germany for example, came in below 1 ton. Now look at all the pickups and large SUVs going down the road, weighting up to 4 tons.

There was no proper evolution in the automobile industry for a long time. Most brands turned vehicles into throw-away products, only caring about more profit down the line.

Drafting is only dangerous when you don't know how to do it safely.

Just one example, since those databases don't go back into the 80s.

 

I'm not talking about EPA rating, they are meaningless, I'm talking about archived MPG.

 

I owned on of them and got 8k out of the settlement, your point? Half of them got a new map, removing the dyno trick, making still the same MPG, fulfilling the EPA requirements and losing a handful of HP.

 

I wouldn't consider my L5P old. The DPF is a total nightmare in my Dmax. What trucks with DPF do you own?

 

Fuelly's filters are a mess. Leave engine to any, and choose TDI for submodel. That'll return data for 437 cars. The average mpg for the group is 43.
2003 Volkswagen Jetta TDI MPG - Actual MPG from 437 2003 Volkswagen Jetta TDI owners

My cat died at 4500 miles. 3-way catalytic convertors must be crap then.

What percentage of GM trucks with the L5P on the road have DPF problems?