A race to use less gas in the long haul
With energy crisis on full bore, fuel-efficient cars are scarce. But a new breed of driver is stretching what you can squeeze out of a tank.
Darius Tarman dreams of roaring engines. He owns three classic muscle cars, races on weekends and sells exotic racing pistons for a living. He is what is known as a car guy.
Tarman's vehicle of choice these days? A 92-horsepower, 16-year-old Honda Civic hatchback with a fading teal paint job that takes about 15 seconds to reach highway speed.
Then again, it does get 61 miles per gallon -- and when your daily commute, from Rancho Cucamonga to Irvine, is 100 miles round trip, that's huge.
"There's nothing like driving a big, black 440 with a four-speed. But . . . this Honda is the best car I've ever owned," Tarman says. "I would cry if anything happened to it."
Tarman's love affair with a slow, undersized Civic shows the tremendous effect soaring gas prices have had on the way everyone, even hot-rodders, thinks about driving. And the fact that he turned to a creaky old 1992 model serves as a stark reminder that it's nearly impossible to buy a new car today that gets the kind of mileage many automobiles got 15 or 20 years ago, despite the industry's insistence that it's focusing on efficiency again.
"In the 1970s, '80s and '90s, carmakers all offered super-high-efficiency cars," says Eric Noble, president of the Car Lab, an auto industry research and consulting group. "Now that consumers are clamoring for them, those cars are pretty much all gone."
For the 1992 model year, car buyers had the choice of 33 cars that had a combined city and highway EPA rating of at least 30 miles per gallon. For the current model year, there are 12. And though the 1990s had its share of gas guzzlers, it's notable that the two-wheel-drive Ford Explorer from 1992 had better fuel efficiency (17 mpg) than the same model in 2008 (which gets 16).
With demand for efficiency surging, carmakers are racing to improve their lineups. General Motors Corp., which currently doesn't have any cars that top 30 mpg combined, said last month that it would spend $500 million to produce a new compact car for 2011, the Cruze, that would reach 45 mpg on the highway. That's about 13 mpg below the rating for its most fuel-efficient Geo Metro 14 years ago.
(Last year, the government adjusted the way it calculated fuel economy, but even under the new rating system, the Geo beats the Cruze by 6 mpg.)
