Car Mileage Fails To Add Up

[jeffrey]

Those fuel-economy estimates posted on new cars and trucks are baloney. The government agency in charge of them doesn't mean them to be; in fact, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency seems unusually scrupulous about its fuel-economy testing.

But it's using 30-year-old tests that assume nobody drives faster than 60 mph, or turns on the air conditioning, or accelerates hard, or drives in cold weather, or runs a mile up the road for milk and bread at the convenience store and doesn't get the engine warmed up.

The result: a groundswell of complaints from people whose mileage isn't as good as they thought it would be. Spurred by those complaints and a formal petition filed more than two years ago by environmental group Bluewater Network of San Francisco, EPA finally, reluctantly, is considering the first change since 1984 in how it calculates the fuel-economy numbers pasted on new vehicles... [read more at usatoday.com]

For ways to reduce the cost of driving, read the SavingAdvice.com articles A Penny Saved Is Worth $200 A Year and Driving To Savings