I Love Efficiency

First things first.  I love effi­ciency.  I am a fan of effi­ciency.  I think in terms of effi­ciency often.

When it comes to cars, I like light­weight cars.  I like small cars.  I like cars that are engi­neered to han­dle really well. For these rea­sons alone, I love old cars, as they used to weigh a lot less.  And I love old Euro­pean cars to be spe­cific, as they both han­dle well and are light weight.

When the MINI Cooper came out in 2003, it impressed me because there was finally a car on the mar­ket that looked really euro, han­dled well and was quite practical!

Let’s be real­is­tic about its supposed-subcompact-class though. It has usable rear seats to accom­mo­date 2 peo­ple in the back.  The rear leg room makes a mock­ery of the inte­rior design of most other sports cars such as the Ford Mus­tang. The rear seats fold down com­pletely flat allow­ing bet­ter ver­sa­til­ity than most trunks! (Hatch­backs > Trunks)

I don’t a wife or kids. I’m almost always dri­ving alone and occa­sion­ally, I’ll have one pas­sen­ger.  Very rarely do I have more than one pas­sen­ger in the car. Iron­i­cally, I could even say that this sub­com­pact car… is actu­ally too large for me!

So… in 2003, I vis­ited a MINI deal­er­ship to see their inven­tory.  Almost all of them were loaded with exces­sive pack­ages that were dra­mat­i­cally inflat­ing the price AND mak­ing the cars heav­ier than I’d pre­fer. I found I could cus­tom order my car to come the way I want.   I wanted min­i­mal options to keep the price low and the weight of the car low.  For you see, weight is every­thing in rac­ing, han­dling, efficiency/mileage.  The draw­back was I had to wait 3 months for it to arrive but it was totally worth the wait!

So I chose the Mini Cooper S in dark sil­ver and a black roof while pur­posely avoid­ing the fol­low­ing options:

The Cooper S up until 2006 came with only one choice for a trans­mis­sion: a 6-speed man­ual. That was an unheard of (and an awe­some) move by MINI USA.

• A man­ual trans­mis­sion is  15% more effi­cient in its sim­pler design com­pared to an auto­matic AND sig­nif­i­cantly lighter by any­where from 60–100 pounds.  Also, auto­mat­ics increase the cost of a car by over $1000. All these fac­tors are very sig­nif­i­cant and give you a clue as to why, in the rest of the world where gas is much more expen­sive, manual-transmissions are common!

• I made it a point to NOT order a sun­roof.  First of all, it costs an extra $500 for that option. Sec­ond, a sun­roof adds 60 pounds of glass and motors to the roof. Those are 60 pounds that I don’t need. Also, that extra weight goes in the high­est point of the car, the roof, which would raise the cen­ter of grav­ity caus­ing the body to lean more in the turns.

• I then had a choice from an array of 16″ wheels designs.  I looked up the weights of all the dif­fer­ent 16″ wheels that I could choose from. I chose the light­est design which luck­ily for me, was also the most visu­ally appeal­ing to me.

Wheels are a sig­nif­i­cant fac­tor in affect­ing effi­ciency, han­dling and com­fort because a wheel qual­i­fies as both unsprung and rota­tional weight.

Here are the log­i­cal rea­sons why I pre­fer to have the the small­est, light­est wheels on my car:

• The larger the diam­e­ter of the wheel, the heav­ier it is on aver­age.
  The heav­ier a wheel is, the higher the unsprung weight it adds.
  Unsprung weight is any­thing that is not held-up by the sus­pen­sion (wheels, tires, brakes).
  Reduc­ing unsprung weight dra­mat­i­cally increases nim­ble­ness and ride qual­ity because the sus­pen­sion has less work to do and can do its job better.

• The heav­ier the wheel, the more rota­tional weight you have, the more momen­tum it car­ries.
  Rota­tional weight dra­mat­i­cally affects how fast your engine can accel­er­ate (and how fast your brakes can decelerate).

• The larger the diam­e­ter of the wheel, the more expen­sive the tire that goes around that wheel (x4!).

• The larger the diam­e­ter of the wheel, the wider it and the tire will be.
  The wider the tire gets, the higher the rolling resis­tance gets, which reduces gas mileage.

• The larger the wheel, the thin­ner the tire side­wall will be to main­tain the same over­all diam­e­ter.
  The thin­ner the tire side­wall is, the harsher the ride qual­ity because there is less cush­ion.
  Or to put it inversely, the smaller the wheel is, the fat­ter the tire pro­file will be, pro­vid­ing more cush­ion.
  The only advan­tage of larger wheels is that because the tire side­wall is thin­ner, the initial-turn-in response will be bet­ter, but that’s so insignif­i­cant given all the afore­men­tioned reasons.

Unfor­tu­nately car mak­ers for over the past decade have been increas­ing the stan­dard wheel size that cars come with solely for aes­thet­ics. Iron­i­cally, they often­times label the option for larger wheels as a “sports” pack­age. These “upgrades” are actu­ally DOWNGRADES when it comes to han­dling and gas mileage. They do noth­ing but give you cos­met­i­cally larger look­ing wheels (for about $1000 too!).

This trend may have been cat­a­pulted due to all the inane main­stream hip-hop songs brag­ging about the size of their “dubs.” First they were 18′s… then it became 20′s… then 20″ spin­ners, then 21′s… then it became 24′s due to SUV’s and so forth… really child­ish stuff. I’m sure it has some­thing to do with this Amer­i­can men­tal­ity that big­ger is better.

I didn’t order leather seats, power seats, heated seats, none of these unnec­es­sary things that only add both to the cost AND weight!

The only options I ordered were DSC for safety and the Har­mon Kar­don sound sys­tem because lis­ten­ing to music with a nice sound sys­tem is AWESOME.

Three months later, after a boat ride from Britain to the east coast, and a truck ship­ping my car to the west coast, I got the car…  That was a great time…

Early on, I weighed my car with a quar­ter tank of gas.  The scale showed 2,540lbs. That was pretty light rel­a­tive to most cars on the street in the USA!  How­ever, it’s not really some­thing to brag about since 2,540lbs is still quite heavy for a car maker whose name is MINI.

Since buy­ing my car, I have light­ened it fur­ther over the years.

• The MINI comes stock with run-flat tires that weight at least 7lbs more than reg­u­lar tires. I replaced those when they wore out with nor­mal tires.
• I found some­one sell­ing a set of 15″ wheels with tires for the MINI that each were a few pounds lighter than my 16″ wheels!  This was a great deal from craigslist, with tires on them already.
  • I saved at least 15 pounds in unsprung and rota­tional weight.  An imme­di­ate improve­ment in han­dling and accel­er­a­tion were noticed, as well as bet­ter mileage.
• Much later, I mod­i­fied my exhaust sys­tem to free up more power and lose some weight.  I saved over 20lbs by hav­ing one muf­fler instead of 2, as the pic­tures show below.

I didn’t weigh my car since doing these changes, but I can safely say that I saved over 60 addi­tional pounds bring­ing the weight down to 2,480lbs.

Weight and per­for­mance trends in the US car market…

Cars have only got­ten con­sis­tently heav­ier over the decades.  For some rea­son a lot peo­ple think older cars used to be heav­ier and often­times selec­tively remem­ber large Cadillac’s and Lin­colns that are col­lo­qui­ally referred to as “tanks” due to their size and weight. But let me remind you that com­pact cars existed back then too and up to the very early 1990′s, they could be as low as 1800lbs and as heavy as 2300lbs.  In com­par­i­son, my MINI cooper, a sub­com­pact, with the low­est weight con­fig­u­ra­tion pos­si­ble from the fac­tory, weighed 2,540lbs.

One rea­son why cars of today are rel­a­tively heav­ier are due to increased safety stan­dards that demand frames be more rigid and have front and rear beams under­neath the body.

A more glar­ing issue is that car mak­ers are ever increas­ing the size of their mod­els.  Have you noticed that cars are get­ting slightly longer, wider and taller with every updated gen­er­a­tion?  After so many gen­er­a­tions, pop­u­lar mod­els that started out as sub­com­pacts and com­pacts from the 70′s and 80′s are now com­pact and mid-size, respec­tively.  Any­time a car is made larger, it’s going to sim­ply require more mate­r­ial and be a bit heavier.

Also, the hun­dreds of man­u­fac­tur­ers that cre­ate the indi­vid­ual parts that make up a car are not being upheld to higher stan­dards to cre­ate lighter ver­sions of their parts.  As a result, cars have got­ten not only larger but more bloated over the decades, just like our soft­ware! And people!

The gen­eral pub­lic seems to have a per­cep­tion that larger cars, namely SUV’s, are safer sim­ply because they are larger.  Honda, which makes some of the safest AND most fuel-efficient vehi­cles, has con­sis­tently shown us that dimen­sions and design are far more impor­tant than weight to have a safer car.  This trend of buy­ing larger cars just to feel safe cre­ated a domino effect of large cars dom­i­nat­ing the scene just to feel safe.  Would you fear dri­ving a small car, if all the other cars on the road were also very small?  Prob­a­bly not.

The good news is that our engines have got­ten dra­mat­i­cally more effi­cient over the decades, con­stantly increas­ing the amount of power they can get out of the same engines.  How­ever, the advance­ments in engine effi­ciency are often nul­li­fied by the ever increas­ing stan­dard for power and the extra weight of bloated cars.

Car mak­ers are con­stantly rais­ing the bar for per­for­mance and the stan­dards for accel­er­a­tion and power are higher than ever before.  In the 1990′s, only very high per­for­mance cars had engines exceed­ing 300hp for exam­ple, but nowa­days the very pop­u­lar, Ford Mus­tang 3.6L V6 cre­ates over 300hp and the 5.0L V8 ver­sion gen­er­ates over 400hp!

Imag­ine how much bet­ter a mileage a Mus­tang would have if they also offered a small, 2.0L 4-cylinder ver­sion that gen­er­ates just 200hp, which is STILL way more than nec­es­sary for every­day dri­ving.  It’s not like most peo­ple actu­ally USE (let alone NEED) all that power.  But then again, the Mus­tang is sup­pos­edly their “mus­cle” car that’s meant to appeal to inex­pe­ri­enced teenagers who often like to speed, get­ting in trou­ble with the law or hav­ing accidents.

Any­way, my point is that instead of smaller, lighter cars with smaller-displacement engines, car mak­ers seem to be doing the exact oppo­site.  I know that they are very well aware that weight is every­thing in regards to effi­ciency, but they need to make much bolder moves, offer­ing options for even smaller-displacement engines and to stop mak­ing cars big­ger.  Imag­ine how effi­cient our cars would be if they were very light weight like older cars but mate with our newer engines.  What that would do to our mileage and performance?

I sup­pose if a gal­lon of gas is $10 one day, maybe we will catch up to the Euro­pean effi­ciency stan­dards.  But then they’ll be 20 years ahead of us by then. 

–Antranik