Quote:
Originally Posted by Stav
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Per the last sentence of that paragraph:
"However, the combined city and highway fuel economy that is used to determine tax liability is
not adjusted to account for in-use shortfall, so it is higher than the mpg values provided in the Fuel Economy Guide (
www.fueleconomy.gov) and posted on the window stickers of new vehicles."
There are no cars that I am aware of with window stickers of 17/26 (or even 17/24) that have a gas-guzzler tax.
The EPA updated its testing system a few years ago with the intent to make window stickers more realistic. But it was only used to update window stickers. The testing system which generates fuel economy numbers for CAFE and gas-guzzler caluculations is different and gives higher results. I believe this is a major reason why the industry has not protested the large planned increases in CAFE as they aren't as large as they appear on the face of it. I'd be curious to know the numbers produced by this different regulatory scheme, but I suspect they are much closer to the EU numbers (which almost universally reflect much higher mileage than US window stickers).
Bottom line(s).
- The 22.5 combined number in the gas-guzzler reg is not calculated the same way as the window sticker combined number and they aren't directly comparable.
- The new M3/4 gets better mileage than other cars which are not gas-guzzlers and should not be one.
- If the maual gets 2 MPG better on the highway (26 vs 24), this is a surprising result as the taller top gear in the M-DCT would seem to predict the opposite. Does the M-DCT have significantly higher friction/losses? How else to explain? Well, other than explaining it by the manual being the number in parenthases (24).
Regards