Featured Consumer Reports "New Cars" Dec 2023

How is a single temperature and pressure point 'fairly gross'?

The different labs are following the same test procedures. Manufacturers do have some options, but the EPA does do audits and actual testing of models themselves.

No body else can replicate CR's results because no one else knows the test procedure. Their results would be rejected by peer review journals for that reason.

You can't just hand wave basic physics away. Changes in air temperature change its density. For a natural aspirated engine, changes in density change the amount of oxygen available to burn in the cylinder. Pressure also has the same effect, and it is why lower octane gasoline works at higher elevations. Moisture in the air has an impact on how combustion proceeds in the cylinder. This all impacts how the engine runs.

 

Yeah, but you can't run the tests at the exact temperature, pressure, and humidity specified. There is a window and/or extrapolation.

Modern engine control systems will automatically compensate/adjust for a wide range of ambient conditions to optimize the fuel economy and emissions.

Edmunds showed in their range tests how the EPA BEV-range values wildly deviated from their real-life results in both directions. This certainly indicated that the EPA tests are far from being standardized.

 

Adjusting for those differences is done all the time in other fields. Meanwhile CR won't even state the temperature it was when they did the test, let alone the weather.

optimizing for the air conditions does not equal the same. Those adjustments mean changes to the combustion conditions.

The window sticker range results are jsut like the fuel economy ones. Manufacturers can't post something better than the results, but are free to post worse. Most of the Edmunds results can be explained by whether the manufacturer believes in posting actual tested range or if they lower it to handle consumer expectations. Some of there published ranges, efficiency and usable battery capacity simply do not add up.

 

BEV range values are simply related to the fuel-efficiency values by a simple formula. If they misstate them, then they misstate the battery capacity and/or fuel efficiency. Nevertheless, I don't believe your statement "They provide worse values than the actual" a bit. That doesn't make any sense, and there is no information source that supports such a deliberate data fiddling. To give a counterexample to your statement, the EPA-provided 6.34-kWh battery capacity for Gen 4 Prius Prime is identical within the last decimal to what I have seen at ChargePoint Level 2 chargers.

There are sensors that precisely monitor the air-flow rates etc., and combustion conditions do not change within a wide range of ambient conditions. That was in the past when the amount of air flow etc. were significantly affected by ambient conditions such as temperature, pressure, and humidity. It was also in the past when the engine and combustion temperatures were significantly affected by the ambient temperature.

Another nice thing about the CR tests is that, unlike the EPA tests, they don't do them until the car is fully broken in.

Last but not least, last night, I got a 72 mpg of true fuel economy (no SOC decrease, no altitude change, 77 mpg shown on MFD) in a rainy night on a 16-mile freeway trip in my 2021 Prius Prime Limited. Now, beat that if you can with any kind of car. It is better than on a motorcycle.

 

Are all those functions something Autopilot can do, or are some FSD?

 

what happened to infinity?

jeep at 26, even though someone posted lowest depreciation after 5 years

 

That low depreciation was for the Wrangler, the iconic Jeep. It could be more reliable than Jeep's average, or some things trump that when it comes to resell value.

Was Infiniti once higher rated? Nissan generally wasn't in the same league as Toyota and Honda.