GRA wrote: ↑Thu Oct 10, 2019 5:48 pm
powersurge wrote: ↑Thu Oct 10, 2019 11:51 am
Now that everyone has chimed in, I think that we should ask what meaning does the discussion on fuel economy have?
Are we interested in how technology has progressed? How much each person use? Or how much we, as a nation, have changed in our fuel consumption.
Honestly, looking at MPG over 50 years means nothing. No one cars that we use a few gallons more or less over the years.
What information would be important to know about MPG over the years? I know... How about a graph of how many gallons of gas our country consumes yearly (or daily) over the past 50 years. That would truly be a frightening picture.
Of course, population, cars, cars/capita, VMT and VMT/capita have also increased over that time.
We're still waiting to hear why you think the fleet average doesn't reflect reality.
For the last time... Making a chart of what a car gets for MPG (fleet average) (over the last 50 or so years) is irrelevant. Like I said before, the "AVERAGE" statistic is meaningless because the average of a population of anything could be a totally different to another. You need to know how close to the "average" most of the individual are--- E,g,, Standard Deviation, mean, mode, etc. Also, this statistic is meaningless. It is like asking, "how many hamburgers have people been eating over the years". Who cares.
Most importantly, I don't care what MPG anybody gets. If a car gets poor mpg but carries many people in it all the time, that car is more efficient than a high mileage car that is driven by one person. What we should be asking is, "How many cars do we have over the years for a certain number of population and for each developing country?", and "How many gallons of gas have we been consuming over the years?", and "How long will we be able to sustain an increasing population of car drivers with a decreasing amount of natural resources?" THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT OF THE CONVERSATION ABOUT EVS, PETROLEUM VEHICLES, THE NEED TO MANAGE OUR WORLDWIDE TRANSPORTATION METHODS.
The hell with worrying about global warming in the future. Ask how much of a precious (and decreasing) natural resource are we blowing through today. We, as a world, are using up our resources with impunity just as we hunted whales to near extinction in previous centuries. The difference is that you can't make more oil.