Cite.Okay, so it was on a test track at 30 MPH, and fuel economy drops off once you get over 60 MPH. You have to wonder what they did to the car to enable it to get that kind of mileage, and you also have to wonder why Detroit can seem to get it's act together.

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i'm sure they had it set to run a ridiculously lean fuel mixture, and they probably took a long, long time to get up to speed.
was it an early gas/electric hybrid? running on battery power for some of the time is a good way to fudge economy numbers up a bit.
was that fuel mileage or gas mileage. mix the gas with some other fuel- say, ethanol or methanol- and get 50miles per gallon of fuel, but you can claim a couple hundred miles per gallon of gasoline..
i'm kind of curious as to what they did to the car to get that kind of number- what kind and size of engine, what was done to it, what kind of aero changes did they make, gearing, etc.

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A little googling has turned up this page with photos and more info.

Kind of interesting what they did to the car, it certainy had some major surgery, but I don't think that all of it is impractical for a modern daily driver (like insulating the engine).

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looks pretty simple to me- get rid of everything that makes it livable and practical as a car- things like suspensions and transmissions and interior and even most of the roof- and cover the engine with insulation to keep all the heat in the motor where it belongs.
i imagine the engine was tuned to work at a specific rpm- like an industrial engine you might find on a lawnmower- and keep it at that rpm without moving the throttle blades on the extremely small carburetor. what kind of power would it take to keep that thing at a steady speed of 30mph? 10 hp, maybe?
it's an interesting car, but i can't help but wonder how much fun it would be with a 1500 horsepower twin turbo 500" Chevrloet LSX engine in it. the same things that make a car fuel efficient also make a car fast with more power added...

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Given how well a practical 400 mpg car would sell, that we don't have them tells us there is something hard about it--either it's way, way expensive, or for whatever reason (speed, comfort, style, etc.), few people would buy it. There is no conspiracy to keep MPG low.

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Four people can fit in a Lancair Evolution. It cruises around 330 kts true airspeed (380 mph). The fuel flow is 39 gallons per hour. Do the math and this comes out to 39 miles per gallon per person.

Not bad, and you get there a LOT faster than if you were driving! Of course, it's a little impractical for going cross town...

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Conspiracy? No. Stupidity? Yes, yes, yes. Every time Congress tries to raise fuel economy standards, the car makers come out screaming that it's impossible for them to do this, and yet every time they're required to, they manage to meet those new requirements. (Not surprising since the US has some of the lowest standards in the world.) They make the claim that no one would ever want to buy such a thing, as it'd have to be incredibly weird looking or small. Right now, they can't build high mileage cars fast enough, and US dealers are charging a premium for hybrids because the demand is so high.

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anyone see who killed the electric car?

How cool would it be to have one of those with gas at $4.00 a gal

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Not very. Despite the film's claims, electric cars are nowhere near ready for prime time. GM (and other car companies) have poured billions into battery technology and haven't gotten the improvements needed out of them which would be required for electric cars to go mainstream (not to mention the grid in many areas couldn't handle the added demands). We'd be better off if we took some of the money we're currently blowing elsewhere and invested in technology like this.

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We want our children to go to the planets. Burt Rutan 6/21/04
Tuckers! Science! Automotive Oddities! Boycott Trek XI! Building my hot rod with the help of the intarwebs

The whole conspiracy argument is irrelevant. That vehicle used solid rubber tires and was run where and when? What would it do in winter with 10 below temps?

There are no plots by the auto makers or oil companies A 700 mpg car would draw a lot of sales and the oil companies? They would be richer than ever since more people would be driving more often and the roads would need more repairs than ever. It takes oil to make roads and newer roads that are now missing would be demanded by a more dense population of drivers looking for more convenient short cuts.

it's that thing called "bargaining" -the law makers say they want a 35mpg average in x amount of years, but GM and Ford know that they can realistically pull off 30mpg, so they say that 25 is a mroe realistic number. so the lawmakers lower the offer to 30, and the car makers grudgingly say "ok, if you insist" and get it done.
but of course this is all just a show for the public- they actually agree on the new standards well before they have a hearing that is broadcast live on C Span to make it look like the leaders are doing their jobs.
the car makers know what they are capable of doing, and they know what the general public- including people like me that aren't refined and intelligent enough to live in major metropolitan areas- will buy in large enough numbers to justify them putting in all the $$$ and time to bring to to market.
that, and they don't want to make promises on what they can do until they know they are going to be able to do it.
all you people that think that the fact that some one off test car back in the 70's got 300mpg under a set of very tightly controlled circumstances means that GM and Ford could build a reliable 100mpg car that everyone would want to buy make about as much sense as the people that think that just because the Hubble telescope can see far away things in great detail it should be able to easily make out Neil Armstrong's footprints on the moon.
it just doesn't work that way.

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Its not all bargaining. Any changes to automotive regulations are met with opposition by car makers, nor are they unique in doing this, every company fights most of the regulations put on them, mainly because they want to keep doing things the way they've always done them.
Which would be true if the changes passsed in a relatively short period of time, which doesn't always happen. CAFE standards in the US haven't changed in decades, while the rest of the world has pushed them higher.
Only somewhat true. The US car makers kept churning out SUVs even though gas prices were slowly climbing, while the Japanese were working on hybrids. The foreign car makers are all in good financial shape and have been for a long time, while the domestic car makers are failing financially.
You really believe that? The hybrid car was first invented in 1899 by Porsche, redeveloped in government sponsored projects in the 1980s and didn't go mainstream until Toyota brought out the Prius (even though the technology had been used to power locomotives for ages before this). Mercedes has just announced that they're going to install a device to shut the engine off when a car sits at idle. Hybrids have had this since the Prius rolled off the assembly line, and the technology has been around since the 1960s, if not earlier. Airbags first appeared on cars (as a hidden option that you had to ask the dealer about) in the early 1970s (the Pinto was supposed to come with them standard, but the idea was dropped as being too expensive), but they didn't appear on cars until they were compelled by law to include them.
Show me where I, or anyone else, said that folks would want to buy a car exactly like the one in the OP? Heck, show me where I claimed that even 100 MPG was possible.
How it "works" is that companies, like people, get stuck into a rut, and don't want to be bothered with expending the necessary effort to get themselves out of the mess they're in. Had US car makers kept up trying to improve fuel economy (instead of simply pouring all their money into finding out what's the optimal number of cup holders), they wouldn't be in the mess they're in now. There is no conspiracy against building high mileage cars, there is, however, a lot of stupidity in automotive design. Proof of this can be found in the fact that domestic car makers have been caught flatfooted by the spike in gas prices (many of them are buying their hybrid technology from Toyota) as well as the fact that someone at Pontiac thought that the Aztek would be a good selling vehicle. It wasn't, and the automotive press blasted Pontiac long before it ever went into production. Car & Driver editor Csaba Csere in this NPR interview describes the situation of higher gas prices "totally predictable."

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the car makers built what their customer base told them they wanted- that's the way business works.
whenever they offered smaller cars with less features, they didn't sell.
people in the USA like big vehicles, they like cup holders, and, for some reason, they like built in surround sound dvd systems. and we tend to like pretending we are better off than we are.
the market is changing, and they are working on it.
in the 90's, Toyota, Honda, and Nissan were trying to figure out how to make big trucks for the American market, instead of focusing on what they did best- small cars.
now that the pendulum is swinging back in the direction of environmental doom and gloom and the need for "energy independence" from the people that use the money from our oil to teach their next generation to hate us- it's like the 70's all over again- smaller vehicles and vehicles that use alternative forms of energy are "cool" again.
the foreign car makers merely have to dust off their notebooks from 10 years ago to go back to focusing on smaller more efficient cars, where the US auto makers need to learn how to do it again for the first time, since what they learned in the 70's and 80's doesn't really apply any more.
it's not that they are "unwilling" to do these things- it's just that they know what's involved and how long it will take and how much it will cost.
i know that GM, at least, is pulling on resources and knowledge from all of it's divisions all over the world to figure out a better way to make affordable cars for the world market. and i think Ford might be doing pretty much the same thing. Chrysler, however, is kind of on it's own these days, what with Daimler ditching them to the first people that would give them any money to take it off their hands.

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Not really, the focus groups are designed to give the prospective clients a limited number of choices, and they're forced to pick between what's offered to them. It is exceedingly rare for car makers to ask customers, "What do you want in a car?" (And it should be apparent that they don't always listen to what focus groups tell them, otherwise they'd have never brought out the Aztek. Nobody liked that thing, and even Pontiac's own promotional material struggled to find positive things about it.)
Tell that to Honda, Toyota, Nissan, and Mazda, all of them made boatloads of money even before gas prices spiked.
Big does not have to equal heavy, unaerodynamic blobs, but that's what US car makers turned out.
The market has changed, and they are playing "catch up," again. Just like they did back in the 1970s.
You'll note, however, that none of the imports totally gave their lines over to the big gas guzzlers, and that each of them were highly successful in their large vehicle launches.
Higher gas prices were inevitable and not something that they should have been unprepared for. Indeed, many of the foreign makers weren't, as they never stopped producing diesel cars, which get mileage equal to that of the hybrids, if not better. Toyota was the first out the gate with a hybrid, and the domestics laughed at Toyota, thinking it would never sell. We see who's laughing now.
Wrong. Saturn built small cars in the 90s, and GM certainly has access to all kinds of technical information since it owns Kia, Hyundai, and has a joint partnership with Toyota (and Honda) in building some cars.
It takes anywhere from 2-5 years to go from drawing to production, depending upon how much of a design change is involved, with a price ranging from a few hundred million to a billion dollars. Ever read an insider's perspective of the auto industry? Several of them have been written, save for the ones written by CEOs or former CEOs, they all describe working in US car makers as a cluster, with no clear vision of how to do things, and projects constantly going awry because of interfering middle management types who've no understanding of anything to do with the automotive industry poking their heads into things. That anything gets produced at all is a wonder.

I've spent the last 10 years working for various automotive suppliers, with part of that time in the Nissan plant in Smyrna, TN, and I can tell you that there's a world of difference between what the domestics will accept, and what the foreign makes will handle. I've also watched cars go from being stamped out of raw sheet metal, to rolling off the finally assembly line, and had a hand in putting the cars together. The Japanese car companies are focused on cost and quality like you wouldn't believe. If a part has a cosmetic defect in an area where only the person who installs it on the car can see it, it's rejected by one of the Japanese car makers, whereas a domestic's liable to take the part, even if it doesn't meet the operational specs. In a Japanese plant, everyone works, while in a domestic car plant, who does what, and how much they do of it, is governed by strict union rules. In a union plant, an employee who has a bit of down time (say the line's down, or they've managed to get their job completed in less time than is required) and decides to clean their own work area (you know, grabbing a broom or disposing of some trash) will quickly find themselves subject to the wrath of the union, while in a Japanese plant, this sort of thing is encouraged.

Again, I am not claiming that the car linked to in the OP is something that everyone would want to buy (or even anyone, for that matter), or that car makers are keeping technology locked up because they're in cahoots with the oil companies. I am saying, that they've quite clearly dropped the ball in terms of getting better fuel economy out of cars. People like to claim that government is just some large bloated mass that is incapable of getting anything done, what they forget, however, is that large corporations (like the car makers, software companies, etc., etc., etc.) are just as big, if not bigger (especially when you include subcontractors, many of which are simply spin-offs from the larger company) as many national governments. That some of them can be flexible and adapt to rapidly changing conditions, in spite of being huge monsters, is a sign that the corporate culture is such that they reward flexibility.

Note, also, that I've pointed out that the Japanese developed technology to improve fuel economy (up to 10% in city driving) in the 1960s, but it didn't show up in automobiles until Toyota put it in the hybrid, and just now is one other company looking to put it into a non-hybrid, and no one can claim that they were held up by patent rights, as any that Toyota would have had on it, would have expired in the 1970s. Heck, if you had the necessary skills, Mother Earth News in the early 1980s showed you how to convert your car to a hybrid. The answers are pretty much out there, and have been for quite some time. (Jay Leno thinks that steam is something we should give another look at. Honda and BMW are both looking at steam to suppliment their engines, so I'd say that the former Mercedes mechanic and avid car collector Leno isn't exactly crazy in his thinking.)

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We want our children to go to the planets. Burt Rutan 6/21/04
Tuckers! Science! Automotive Oddities! Boycott Trek XI! Building my hot rod with the help of the intarwebs

Correct! I am just working on the new Saturn generation. Working at Opel, another european GM daughter, we do not have to dust off our notebooks, because small cars with high mileage is what is requested over here for decades. We are at 5.56€/gal. Thats $8.47/gal.

By the way. My Mazda 5 has a mileage of about 60. And we do not have a 66mph speed limit...

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