Fuel Economy

Sometimes you have to ask, What were they thinking? A recent article on five small cars with the worst gas mileage named four for which gas mileage may not even cross the minds of their buyers. But it did remind us that the 2012 Toyota Matrix has pretty low fuel economy for a compact hatchback. In...

Any reader who's not driving a battery-electric car (and there are relatively few of you) may have noticed that gas prices have stopped rising, recently. They're even falling slightly--and, more important, the national average price is slightly cheaper this year ($3.84 per gallon) than it was at...

Writing about the latest carmaker plans to add smaller, more efficient engines is now almost a weekly occurrence. Today's lucky winner is Jaguar, which took the occasion of the Beijing Auto Show to announce some future powertrain plans--including its first production four-cylinder engine since the...

Fuel efficiency is making news headlines lately, with new-car sales achieving record high fuel-economy numbers in the U.S. (and in the U.K. as well). But a survey of car buyers last month by industry analyst AutoPacific seems to contradict the idea that high gas prices are leading buyers to change...

There was a time when most car buyers looked on small capacity four-cylinder engines with distain. To them, unless an engine had 6-cylinders or more, it was over-stressed, underpowered and only fit for use in small European or Japanese economy cars. Nowadays, increases in gas prices, combined with...

In the automotive world, there’s a constant struggle going on between automakers keen to encourage customers to choose their green car over the competition. Just after a major auto show or car launch, automakers find it relatively easy to sell new car, especially if they have lots of new...

It's working. Concerted efforts by automakers to meet new, more stringent fuel-economy requirements are gradually driving up the efficiency of new passenger vehicles sold in the U.S. A report from the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute pegged the average gas mileage of new...

The New York Auto Show, now open to the public, occupies two floors of the Javits Convention Center, and organizers this year were strict about relegating trucks to the basement. Chrysler was allowed only a single truck or crossover in its entire main-floor display. So it chose the 2013 Ram 1500...

Electric cars get a lot of press, and they'll increase in number--slowly--over the next decade. But more efficient gasoline engines are what will drive the increase in fuel efficiency for U.S. vehicles over the next decade. We've written many times about smaller, more efficient engines, and in a...

Steady-speed highway cruising doesn't actually take that much energy compared to accelerating up to, say, 70 mph in the first place. The really hard part is getting consistently high gas mileage in all driving conditions--which is why the 50-mpg Toyota Prius hybrid is still a remarkable vehicle...

Volvo will move from six-cylinder engines to fours over the next few years, in an effort to boost fuel economy.

Several years ago, the U.S. auto industry worried that Chinese carmakers would use inexpensive cars to gain a foothold here, just as Japanese and Korean makers had done. That hasn't happened, for many reasons--one being that making cars good enough to sell here is remarkably hard. More recently...

When Indian automaker Tata launched the world’s cheapest small car, it gave thousands of people across India the chance to own a car of their own for the first time. While the cheaply-built Tata Nano might combine utilitarian construction, simple engineering and frugal motoring, Tata has come...

We've been saying for a long time that one way carmakers will meet new, tougher gas-mileage rules is to make their engines smaller but more efficient. Ford's EcoBoost lineup of direct-injected, turbocharged engines is one example, from a 3.5-liter V-6 used in full-sized pickups all the way down to...

With conventional gas engines incremental improvements of the range of 20% are possible over a 20 year span, but for really large gains alternative technology seems to be necessary.

Unless you don’t own a car, or happen to drive an all-electric car, the chances are you’ll have noticed that gas prices have risen dramatically over the past few days. But as growing uncertainly in the Middle East -- not to mention the knock-on effects of a large gasoline refinery fire...

Well, here's a bit of good news. The sales-weighted average gas mileage for all vehicles sold in the U.S. was the highest it's ever been, reaching 22.9 miles per gallon. That's almost 1 mpg higher than the 22.0 mpg figure for January 2011, according to an analysis by TrueCar. While 22.9 mpg may not...

Honda has managed to raise the gas mileage ratings on all of its new 2012 Civic models, including the 2012 Civic Hybrid, which is rated at a combined 44 mpg. In a road test over several days last May, we managed to get a real-world 45.3 mpg over a route that was about two-thirds highway, one-thirds...

In four years’ time, every automaker in the U.S. will have to ensure that their fleet-wide fuel economy is 36 mpg or better under tough new 2016 Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. But according to a University of Michigan study, the average fuel economy of new cars and...

When the covers came off the 2013 Dodge Dart at last month's Detroit Auto Show, the new compact sedan got high marks for style, interior design, and putting Chrysler back in the car game. The Dart lineup will also include a model that gets 40 mpg on the EPA highway cycle, but so far Dodge has been...