WHY ITS IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND THAT THE NUMBERS DON’T NECESSARILY REPRESENT THE REAL WORLD
Fuel consumption is a major factor in the purchase decision for many new-vehicle buyers — a fact supported by both consumer surveys and anecdotal experience. As you’ve probably learned from your own experience, it’s also a source of dissatisfaction for many customers after the purchase is made.
In particular, many consumers find they simply can’t achieve the fuel economy figures advertised by the manufacturers and reported by Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) in its EnerGuide publications. Consequently, they feel they’ve been misled.
Issues like the highly-publicized overstatement of those figures by Hyundai and Kia last fall — however inadvertent that situation might have been — do nothing to reduce that sense of victimization. That incident, in fact, triggered at least two class-action lawsuits in the U.S.
And you, the dealer, are caught in the middle.
COMPETITION AND REGULATION
The OEMs are not ignorant of that situation. Still, the competitive pressures they face, as well as Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards in the U.S. and corresponding greenhouse gas (GHG) emission regulations in Canada, dictate that they achieve and promote the best fuel economy numbers possible — whether they’re realistic or not. And they’re not.
I’ll put a caveat on that statement. As reported in this column a few months ago, a group of journalists who took part in the AJAC (Automobile Journalists Association of Canada) Brighton-to-London Eco Run last May were able to achieve NRCan’s combined fuel consumption numbers, in most of the vehicles driven, in some segments of the three-day run. But we were really trying. Really trying!
While we proved it can be done, we had to dramatically revise our normal driving styles to do so, including keeping our speeds within posted limits at all times and limiting our time on expressways. That’s a point you can make to your customers but, frankly, it’s unrealistic to expect them to drive in a manner that fuel-efficient when traffic around them isn’t doing so. And it isn’t. That’s a point that also became very clear during the Eco-Run, as our driving style tended to turn us into rolling chicanes for other traffic.
The problem is with the system for measuring and advertising fuel economy.
We all know it’s a laboratory test, rather than real world driving. The tests are conducted with the test vehicles driving rollers connected to a dynamometer, programmed to simulate the load the vehicle would encounter at the same speeds in the real world. As a parallel, think of an exercise bike on which you can adjust the load you have to overcome when pedalling.
But the fact that it’s a lab test is not the real issue. Determining results with sufficient precision and repeatability effectively mandates a laboratory test environment. The problem is with how the test is conducted – not with the fact it’s done in a lab.
In fact, the fuel-consumption ratings advertised by automakers and published by NRCan and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in the U.S., are not determined by actually measuring fuel consumption.
NOT TYPICAL OF DRIVING HABITS
For vehicles using carbon-based fuels (such as gasoline, diesel, ethanol, natural gas, propane,etc.) they’re calculated by determining the amount of carbon in the exhaust during selected segments of the tailpipe emissions testing process — a procedure that was initially developed for a totally different purpose. A procedure that emphasizes low-speed operation and relatively gentle accelerations atypical of most people’s driving habits. Even the highway portion of the procedure is conducted
at lower driving speeds than are typical in today’s expressway driving.
There are further complications for us in Canada, where customers are bombarded by U.S.-based advertising claims. There, the benchmark bars for advertising seem to be 30 mpg and 40 mpg (U.S. gallons, of course). If you’ve ever tried to convert those U.S. figures into L/100 km, you’ve probably discovered they don’t correspond to NRCan’s numbers. It’s not your math, or the difference between Canadian and U.S. gallons. The numbers do not necessarily match.
The U.S. EPA now uses what they call a five-cycle emissions and fuel-economy test procedure, which incorporates specific segments at higher speeds and a cold-startup sequence to bring the results into closer correlation with real-world operation. Canada’s fuel-consumption ratings are still based on an older two-cycle test procedure, with results interpolated from portions of the EPA data.
All of which defines the problem but gets us no closer to resolving it. Which in turns leaves you with the challenge of explaining to your customers why they’re fuel economy falls short — sometimes well short — of the manufacturer’s advertised figures. Perhaps the only consolation is that your competitors are all in the same situation.
