solved poor aveo fuel economy

[gone.m]

How many can you eat? I'll even give you the choice of what kind.

[thehunterooo]

I like peanut butter cookies...

[gone.m]

A dozen for you

[thehunterooo]

Thank you!!

[Lefty]

Well I'm on my second Aveo. My 2004 was a stick shift base model with no AC and sadly I did no fuel mileage tracking. I bought an 08 Aveo5 fully loaded with the 15 inch wheels, auto trans and AC. It now has 92,000km on it and I have tracked mileage religiuosly. I drive an almost 50/50 mix of city and hwy and get between 9.4 and 9.8 L/100km. Even on 100% hwy tanks its 9.4 but my hwy speed is 115km/hr. I have recently switched to non ethanol fuel and will see if that helps. Unfortunately I had to switch to premium to get non ethanol.

[gone.m]

Glad you like aveos so much. what happened to the 04?

[thehunterooo]

Not too bad, 24-25 mpg mixed is about right, if you went from 70-75mph to 55mph you would see a large gain on highway miles, but no one including myself drives at 55mph on the highway (Florida highways are about 70-75mph). If you are using the A/C a lot as well, your mileage is pretty good.

[bjorkmae]

Too bad there isn't an appropriately priced electric car. The EV1 was but we all know what happened to that car. The leaf is ok but the price is again too high and quantity limited. The volt is awesome but about 10-15k too much $$. Converting your current car to electric is doable but to make it have a decent daily commute range for most people your talking about and easy $15k plus your labor and no warranty to convert it yourself. If I understand correctly the whole purpose to most people of an electric car is mostly about economics aka saving money. Being green is nice but saving green in my wallet is really my motivation to get off of gas. My point is the costs of converting a car to a feasible electric car are too great of a $$ investment with a very long time to break even. Even a good hybrid takes about 80k miles to break even with the higher up front costs at the current price of gas.

[thehunterooo]

Not to start a debate or anything, but in reality an electric car is no better than a gas powered vehicle in way of being green. But money wise, they should become cheaper in the next couple of years, but if energy costs continue to increase then there is no point.

[bjorkmae]

Well the green part is an interesting debate. Sure they produce less emissions while running the real pollution issue is disposing of the batteries afterwards. Lead acid car batteries are currently recycled and the lead is used in making new car batteries, unfortunately lead acid batteries weigh too much and don't hold enough power to be effectively used on a massive scale for most cars. More of the energy from gas goes to wasted heat through the exhaust or through the radiator then actually goes to rotational power to make the car move. Then there is the energy from gas that goes directly towards friction and wearing the engine out. Electric motors have both wasted heat and friction but at a substantially reduced levels. In addition electric motors are in their peak efficiency range during their entire operating range, where gas motors have sweet spots where they produce the most power per unit of gas. These sweet spots are why gas engine technologies such as variable cam timing, variable compression ratio, and vtec have been used. Plus producing power on a massive scale is often, not always, more efficient then on a micro scale. Massive scale being power plant as an example and micro scale being a small portable generator as an example. Anyway the point is the cost savings are realized through the efficiency of mass energy production and the substantial reduction is energy being wasted in the forms of friction and heat out the tailpipe and through the radiator. A gallon of gas here costs $4 as of 8/6/11, I drive in the city and might be able to go 21-23 miles on the gallon. In other words it costs me $4 in gas to go about 22 miles. People who have nissan leafs or who have converted the gas cars to electric don't pay nearly that much per mile. A full charge on a nissan leaf is about $2 to $4 depending on the utility rates and they claim to go 100 miles on a charge, reality is more like 70 miles. So that $0.057 per mile at the $4 per full charge and $0.028 per mile at the $2 per mile charge. Those costs per mile vs the $0.18 per mile I pay in my aveo getting to work. That means my commute could be 3 to 6 times cheaper in a leaf then my aveo. Plus no oil filters, air filters, spark plugs, spark plug wires, timing belts, oil, ect as maintenance. Plus there are less parts overall to go bad like O2 sensors, cats, gaskets & seals, ignition coils, ect. There will be different maintenance items and parts, but the over all cost to repair and maintain should be less. If I could buy an new electric car, comparable to the leaf, for the price of a new civic, corolla, or aveo I would.