Why Buy a Car With 600 HP if You Drive it Slowly

"Chart shows average per-passenger fuel economy of various modes of travel. All forms of rail achieve relatively high values because of high ridership, proportionally low drag, and high electrification rates (electricity is inherently more efficient than combustion-engine propulsion). Airlines are an increasingly efficient form of transport as more passengers are fit onto planes and ticketing software fills most planes to capacity. Motorcycles achieve a high number of passenger miles per gallon, owing to their light weight and very high fuel efficiency. Transit buses are not efficient with lower ridership rates."

42 liters, 1900 liters, 2 stroke marine turbo diesel burning heavy bunker oil to move tens of thousands of containers across the world's oceans facilitating global trade with economies of scale. Engines that make tens of thousands of horsepower idling at 80 rpm, very slow spinning high torque high power large ship engines. By passenger light duty vehicle standards, large commercial and industrial ship engines are enormous, bigger than your house and cost tens of millions. Jet engines on passenger aircraft are also super expensive fuel gobblers with incredible power output. There is a shift towards using ammonia as fuel in large ship engines. 

You can't actually drive it on public roads that fast, legally. I am thinking of the BMW N47 V12 engine in overpowered automobiles that get low fuel economy, not that people with enough money to buy that kind of vehicle actually care about fuel economy or fueling costs, but low fuel economy also reduces range per, or wastes time.  Have you ever heard the expression it is more fun to ride a slow motorcycle faster than it is to ride a very fast motorcycle slower. 

Then you pay a penalty by having to buy premium gasoline more often since the overpowered performance sports car gets terrible low fuel economy. If you push the pedal all the way down in a high horsepower car, the fuel economy drops to the single digit range, like the School Bus I drive professionally that gets 5.6 MPG average on a very hilly route. 

If I am alone on the bus, it's using 1 gallon of diesel fuel to move about 5.6 miles, or the bus gets similar economy when full of children and all their backpacks and instruments that actually fit into the seat area safely. Then again, the bus operating a lot of the time with just me driving it. Its less fuel per person moved when the bus full of passengers, but very inefficient with just me as the driver operating it to get to the passengers to pick them up from school and bring them to their bus stops or the other way around in the morning. 

Our 2022 Toyota Corolla Hybrid can go about 53 miles on 1 gallon of gas, though with hypermiling up to 70 miles per gallon. If Meg and I both ride in the Corolla, it gets about the same fuel economy, but moves 2 people instead of 1. It can carry up to 4 adults. Someone else used it for the first year, so I am not sure if it ever traveled with 4 adults inside at the same time, or more if they were being wild and crazy. We purchased it used, 1 year old, for a big discount vs new. 

Newer aircraft burn a lot less fuel than they did in the 1960's, up to 45% less. The Boeing 787 gets much better fuel economy than other aircraft with similar capacitors, but the 787 costs a lot more in capital costs, offset in the long run by savings in fueling cost. 

Fuel cost savings can be seen as the difference in fueling costs between a Hybrid car, when they cost more than similar conventional gas-powered vehicles, but save more than the cost difference in fuel savings over the life of each vehicle. Hybrid drivers are often seeing lower total cost of ownership even within the first 5 years if the vehicle driven 12 to 15 thousand miles per year. 

In other words, the Hybrid vehicle will get more than 40 miles per gallon while the ICE versions get less than 30 miles per gallon. Take a look at this website that tracks real world fuel economy of different popular cars, trucks and SUV's. Its called Fuelly and I have been browsing it for many years. 

Browse All Cars | Fuelly

Megs 2010 Prius gets about 43 MPG on her short commute, but if we take it on road trips at highway speeds, we get nearly 48 MPG. Meg had a Ford Explorer that got 16 MPG or used about twice as much fuel. At $4.40 per gallon, that difference adds up quickly. 

With 11 gallons, the Prius III can go about 500 miles $48 to fill 
With 10 gallons our Corolla Hybrid can go over 600 miles $44 to fill 
With 20 gallons the Explorer could only go about 320 miles $85 to fill

If we adjust in terms of fuel cost per mile 

10 MPG means $0.44 per mile
20 MPG means $0.22 per mile
40 MPG means $0.11 per mile
80 MPG means $0.06 per mile

15,000 mile per year
10 MPG annual fueling cost of $6,600
At 20 MPG that's $3,300
At 40 MPG that's $1,650
At 80 MPG that's $825 

Ten years 
10 MPG $66,000 on fuel at $4.40/gal
20 MPG $33,000 
40 MPG $16,500
80 MPG $8,250

Now you might say, what kind of vehicle gets 80 MPG, our 2013 Honda PCX-150 scooter gets 83 MPG when Meg & I ride the PCX150 together 2-up at 40 to 55 MPH! When I ride the PCX-150 alone, it gives over 100 MPG but only holds 1.1 gallons, so range is only about 100 miles. We fuel up every 50 miles or so when riding together. 

Our 2020 Yamaha MT03 averages 56 MPG but can easily give 70 or 80 MPG with mild hypermiling on my daily commute to and from work, and riding it saves me 40+ minute per day vs driving a car because I can lane split through stop and go traffic congestion that takes more than an hour in a car and less than 25 minutes of motorcycle / or scooter riding between the cars when needed to bypass stopped traffic. 

I only go about 5 to 10 miles per hour when lane splitting very carefully and only if there is enough room to do it safely, and only though traffic made of cars and trucks and SUV's that are fully stopped and not moving. I lane split to get to the front of the pack stopped waiting at the intersection for the light to turn green. Red light means all the vehicles must be stopped. Yellow warns that the light is about to become red. I know this is specific to America, as they use other colors in other countries. 

I lane split through stopped traffic on my bicycle if I have to ride in traffic. I try to only ride on dedicated trails away from other motor vehicles. I like the e-bike way better cause its half as hard to go twice as fast and makes climbing hills actually practical. 

The 2.0 L inline-4-cylinder engine, with direct fuel injection and turbocharged to various levels of boost pressure usually also intercooled to drop the intake air temp from 200 F to 50 F, using air to air or air to water cooling, some even use the cars AC compression cooling system to chill the air intake temps. Boost pressure level also typically directly affects the final power out from 160 hp to 700 hp, most are around 250 hp to 335 hp or in some case have been OEM tuned to 440 hp but not in volume or mass-produced cars. 

Tuning means you can trade off less boost pressure with a smaller intercooler and better fuel economy and less stress on the engine so better reliability and longer oil life between oil changes, and virtually no turbo-lag, or more power, more stress and more turbo lag but massive power once the bigger turbo produces full pressure, shoving more air and fuel into every cylinder to make maximum power or to overcome thinner air at higher altitudes in the case of aircraft piston engines that are turbocharged. 

500 cc displacement per cylinder a magic sweet spot in engine engineering in terms of block size, block mass, cooling performance, thermal efficiency or resulting vehicle fuel economy, torque and power output across a broad range or RPM. 

The kind of tuning the makes an F1 car engine so powerful can be reverse to reduce friction losses to make passenger car engines more fuel efficient giving the owners of such vehicles lower fueling costs that can save the price of the vehicle in fuel savings if the fuel economy more than 50 MPG like our Toyota Corolla Hybrid.

Our 22 Corolla Hybrid has the same engine as Meg's 10 Prius III, the 2ZR-FXE, but 650 lb. less weight and the lithium-ion battery lighter and more efficient and works better in warmer temperatures than the robust cold tolerant long lasting NiMH batteries of her 3rd gen. Prius. Toyota continues to use either li-ion or Ni-MH in their hybrid vehicles depending on where they are sold in the world, which influence the annual weather or real-world conditions the vehicle will experience. Li-ion batteries operate the best in the same temperature ranges that people tend to prefer with HVAC system at home, between 58-&-83 F or 14.5-to-28 C respectively.