Is it fair that the sticker MPG on new cars is 99% inaccurate?

guenndu

I bought a car that was supposed to get 30MPG highway and 20MPG city. I drive about 50/50 but have yet to get past 15MPG on the thing. I bought the car new and was really counting on the great gas milleage. I saw a 20/20 or 60 minutes special on this, and they are 99% inaccurate because of in house testing which does not consider the elements and inclines in the road and such. Also, I think it is fudged slightly. Anyone else feel a little ripped off? What can be done about it?

kelly_f_1999

fair to guess sure they do test on tracks or by a machine with best fuel they can use















most do not test with over road or with more thna once brand or type of fuel































and when buying fuel one needs to know what octane and brand gets the best mileage they not all the same cant say use just high octane or say use mobil only each person wil get differen tmileage since no one drives the same mpg is about what it should get you getting only 15 you have a problem what to do is know what fuel gets you best mileage not price or what octane but what mileage it gets you and then learn how to drive to drive fuel my 89 ford gets better than 20 and my truck gets close to that its ten years old

twiztidxxninja

check it on http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/findacar.htm and what kind of car?

Huba

Since the test is standardized, it is "fair" but not realistic. Look at Consumer Reports for a true driving test result.































From the description you give, you may also want to look at your driving habits. Sorry, but it leaves me with the impression that you are a bit lead footed. No jack-rabbit starts? Is the car's trunk loaded with lots of extra weight? Do you use a light grade of oil such as 5-30W? Are you using gas with ethanol in it like ARCO (which gives lower MPG)? Are your tires at the right pressure? All things to consider.

Windowphobe

If you drive the car exactly the way it's driven in the EPA routine, you will indeed get exactly what the EPA figures say. It's fair, to the extent that every single car tested gets the same treatment. But there are never any guarantees. (There's a reason "your mileage may vary" has become part of the vernacular.)































That said, I've beaten the EPA numbers on my last two cars: my current ride, using the 2008 "corrected" numbers, is rated at 17/25 and I get something like 21/29.































And since the EPA test regimen is known and open to the public, it's theoretically possible for an automaker to program a car to do well on the test without regard to how well it will do outside the test lab. (Several stick-shift Corvettes, for instance, have had a little guide in the gearbox to "encourage" you to shift 1 to 4, rather than 1 to 2, for the sake of an extra mile per gallon; for many years there have been Mercedes automatics that start in second unless you really stomp the pedal.)































I figure, it's government work, this is about as good as it's going to get.

StanS

'Fair' has nothing to do with it.































The number you have for mileage is relative to other new cars. If you bought a car that is supposed to get 30MPG highway and 20MPG city, then, relative to another car that gets 15MPG highway and 10MPG city, you will get about twice of whatever he gets.

cosy

(Those ratings aren't 99% inaccurate. They are perhaps up to 50% inaccurate.)































The EPA has a particular way of testing mileage. That method comes up with results that overstate gas mileage when compared to actual gas mileage. That itself isn't a huge issue. If the error is predictable in some way, then you can correct for that. For example, if you know their method comes up 20% short, then you just add 20% to their ratings. (The wrong ratings appear to come from a bad testing method, not actual fudging.)































The problem is 1) that many people (like you) don't know that the ratings are overstated, so they don't know to correct for that, and that 2) the error is hard to predict, so even if you know that you need to correct for that, you don't know by how much. For example, the EPA ratings don't cover inclines, as you mention. How much do inclines hurt gas mileage? Who knows? What about air conditioning? Etc.































In particular, the EPA's method doesn't work well for hybrid vehicles. Their actual gas mileage averages almost 20 mpg below their ratings.































Besides pissing people off, the inaccurate ratings allow car manufacturers to pass their federal fuel-economy standards when they don't actually deserve to.















































But the EPA just came up with new methods to determine fuel economy ratings. You can read about them here. The new ratings are supposed to be closer to reality for average drivers. They will also will be generally much lower, probably.































They were long overdue. I would guess that the delay was caused by the whining and lobbying of auto companies, claiming that new mileage testing would require them to make more fuel-efficient cars, which would be the end of the world for car (and oil) companies, they would claim. They whined in that way about requiring air bags, which have been around since the 70's. Air bags are required now, and yet miraculously, the car companies haven't gone under.

titians

The changed it to take into account more realistic driving styles. People who were buying the hybrids to get the advertised 60 MPG were finding themselves getting in the 30s and 40s.































The now have more realistic acceleration guidelines and a higher top speed they need to reach.































Not much you can do about it...a class action suit will either peter out or you'd get a settlement of like $10 with the rest going to the lawyers.































One way to get a more realistic guide for the MPG is to visit auto enthusiast forums for the cars you are considering. The web is full of them - you can usually just search for the car name and "forum" and you'll get several. Post a question there about real-world MPG and find out what people are really getting.































Here's an article from USA Today about the rating changes































http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/...ids-usat_x.htm

engage

They're not very accurate, but driver matters more than car. When you pull away from a light, almost no car will do better than 10mpg. If you do a lot of that, your mpg will suffer. Many drivers drive more aggressively than they think, citing "traffic flow" or "the car likes to go fast" or other reasons. That mpg rating, for instance, is rated for driving very conservatively, well within the speed limit. Do you drive 23-25mph on side roads where that's the limit?































99% inaccurate, though, would mean you were getting 1mpg and they were claiming 100mpg...































That doesn't mean it's not fudged - of course it is, just like computer makers fudge benchmarks, and Consumer Reports can never seem to duplicate the 0-60 times that car makers claim. I think it's important to look at this number not as an expectation of what you can get from the car, but as a comparison between cars. They're ALL fudged about the same amount. True, some more than others, but not a lot or they'd get very bad press (as some are now doing). The tests do have regulations guiding how they're done and what can be claimed, which is why they ALL quote "city" and "highway", not whatever the heck they want, like "close to home" or "on premium gas".































One question though. Are you using the trip meter for this? Those things are notoriously inaccurate, AND if you just got the car recently it's probably showing what they got when they were demonstrating it, which means people punching it all the time. Car dealers are hard on the cars they show so they can impress buyers. Driving slowly doesn't impress buyers. Reset the trip meter, and drive normally for a few weeks. Mine went from showing 14mpg average to 22mpg average, which is in line with my expectations for my car.

Taylor82608

The MPG ratings that are given for a car are based on preferred driving conditions. Meaning traffic, weather, road conditions, and how the car is driven all come into play when deciding the actual miles to the gallon the car actually gets. So if your average speed on the freeway is 80 MPH, then you're probably not going to get the MPG rating that the sticker has on it. So you are absolutely right about the in-house tests.















My only advice for possibly changing this to get better miles per gallon is to be more cautious about how you drive, or try and find things to put on your car that could help increase the miles per gallon that your car gets.