Turn Frugal with your Fuel – Turn away from Automatic Cars
Let’s say that you want a car that does more than 40 miles on a gallon. What are your selections rather than a hybrid or a tiny diesel? Actually, unless you pick a pocket handkerchief-sized Smart, you pretty much used to have no options when it came to a car that ran on regular gas. All of this has changed though with the launch of the Chevrolet Cruze Eco. The Eco is America’s foremost uber-mileage conventional gas-powered car. Not even the European car makers – VW or Audi – have anything like it. The Cruze Eco is nearly the same as any hybrid, and it matches what a similarly sized European diesel does. Oh, and there is one small difference – if you love automatic cars, you aren’t going to get along well with the Cruze. The reason it is so economical is that it’s a manual transmission stick shift. And a clutch pedal.
Not that the six-speed automatic does very badly; with it you still get a very nice 37mpg. The great part is, that the manual transmission Eco comes in at under $20,000. They don’t ask you to pay $40,000 to be nice to the environment like you have to if you pick a Volt. So how does the Eco do it? To start with, it has a superbly aerodynamic design. And then, there are some high-tech gizmos built-in to actually change the shape of the car in subtle ways to make it more aerodynamic – kind of in the way the slats on an airplane’s wings change the shape of the wing for different situations. The Eco has motor-driven slats on the front air intake that close the intake when the car reaches a certain speed. It’s supposed to make the car more slippery. And then, the body of the car comes down by a half inch. A spoiler and other panels act like utterly shaped wings to smooth airflow, and the car becomes 10% less resistant to airflow. If you want to make a car super fuel-efficient, you have to turn your design away from automatic cars and towards some very clever body styling.
There are other ways in which the Eco becomes frugal with your fuel. The designers have ruthlessly taken weight away from the standard Cruze. The tires are the low-rolling-resistance kinds that save 20 pounds. The wheels are lightweight alloy. The shell of the car is made of thinner metal, and they removed the armrest in the back seat. However, cars with manual transmission aren’t supposed to be this much more efficient than automatic cars. What is the Eco’s secret? The secret lies in its tall gearing. It has two overdrives, and you can easily reach 65mph when barely over 1500 RPM. You do give something up in acceleration. Nevertheless, it does give you an extra bit of warmth to be driving one of the most fuel-efficient cars in the country. So what are your options to the Eco? The Hyundai Elantra Compact achieves nearly everything the Eco does, and it’s not even manual.
