Okay, I have a somewhat slanted view. The Prius officially gets 51/48 mpg city/highway. Official EPA MPG ratings are subject to being nonsense, but I'm hoping they're at least a consistant scale that can be used in comparison shopping. "normal for an efficient car" means the Prius or the earlier Honda Insights (I remember early models being supposed to get 60mpg, now they're around 40). Since these things have been possible for 5+ years, I consider the rest of the industry to be slacking off and being laggards and worthy of ridicule for being proud of 30mpg (which in my mind, was a normal car of 20 years ago). I recently rented a 40mpg Ford Focus for a weekend, it was an okay smallish car. This fall Ford is supposed to come out with an electric version of that car, and I suppose with regenerative breaking and a few other tweaks they could get it up to the neighborhood of 50mpg or equivalent m/kWh.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2011-03-12 03:46 pm (UTC)