Power Hungry Americans

[Lawrence C Leung]

The same effect occurs on our turbos. Keep the pedal down, watch the gas
gage go down. Power produced is directly proportional to fuel consumed.
It's at part throttle that a turbo car is theoretically better. Even so,
due to modern engine control electronics necessitated by clean air
standards (and they said it couldn't be done, HAH!), the big V8 cars are
so much better on their gas usage that they are probably quite
comparable, all else being equal, to our 10 year old turbos. (check out
the real world fuel consumption in such rags as C&D, R&T and AutoWeek if
you don't believe me). Just goes to show you that the Audi turbos were 10
years ahead of their time. :-)

LL - NY

On Mon, 5 Feb 2001 14:00:01 -0600 (CST) Virtual Bob <hey9811 at yahoo.com>
writes:
>> According to http://www.fueleconomy.gov/, "big displacement" engines 
>with
>> lots of HP are not necessarily inefficient.  A Camaro or Corvette 
>(18 mpg
>> city, 27 mpg highway) gets better fuel economy than an S4 or even my 
>130hp
>> '90 80q.  Even a Viper has roughly the same fuel economy as a '90 
>BMW 535i.
>> ...
>
>That's because they cheat. As I recall from magazine reviews on, I 
>think,
>Camero and Corvette (or was it just Camero?), they have impossibly 
>high
>4th and/or 5th gear and at least on auto-trans ECU it's programmed to 
>go
>to those gear ASAP. That's how they get the awesome high milage in
>government testing, since DOT testing doesn't involve "push the pedal 
>to
>the metal" so ECU can try to shift auto-trans into the said high gear
>ASAP. The manual-trans testing procedure is probably similar.
>
>Make no mistake -- if they get driven by a very enthused enthusiast, 
>they'll quickly show their gas-guzzling nature.
>