This magazine marked the 20th anniversary of Earth Day in 1990 by exploring ?future? technologies. We suggested cars would change radically in ?this green decade? but enthusiasts would still be having fun. They just wouldn?t use gasoline much longer.
Well, it?s 16 years later?long enough to grow a new driver from seed?and it?s fair to wonder, ?Are we there yet?? In a sense the question is as premature as the plaintive plea from the back seat that it echoes. Alternative fuels have made great strides since 1990, but gasoline plays as big of a role as ever on the American road. The battery-electric car has come and, at least for now, gone again. Hydrogen and fuel cells have garnered headlines but still have a long way to go before they are viable?if ever that day arrives. The decade many had trumpeted as ?green? turned out to be the high-water mark of the SUV, at best a detour on the road to sustainable mobility.
The driving concerns on this Earth Day (April 22) have shifted from the earlier focus on smog-generating toxins and onto fuel economy. Most Americans are focused on miles per gallon, whether they point to the complexities of climate change, the geopolitics of petroleum or the rising price at the pump.
So we wanted to know: What?s possible for a driver who wants to sip fuel judiciously without slowing to a crawl? Of course, we had to burn the fuel in order to save it, a turn of phrase eerily reminiscent of 1970, when the first Earth Day played out against the backdrop of a different war.
Look, we could get really heavy about this, but a simpler explanation is that it was time for a road trip. Spring was threatening to arrive, the ice was gone from the lakes, and it?s a ritual around here to point a car toward a Great Lake and go have a look. Lake Michigan is no Pacific Ocean, but it does let a man stand on a broad beach of tall sand dunes and stare out across the water without seeing the other side, and that?s a thing worth doing.
What we wanted was a one-day trip long enough to drain your average fuel tank. Where? Well, the New Holland Brewing Co. was bringing out its seasonal offering, Red Tulip Ale. Sure, it?s not Beaujolais Nouveau, but the town of Holland is on the Lake Michigan shore and this is spring in the rust belt?work with us here. The nature of our mission was to sip, not guzzle, of course, but bringing home a little art in fermented form is a suitable reward for 349 miles behind the wheel.
So we rounded up a half-dozen folks who could step off the Tuesday meeting treadmill long enough to test a few cars, and here?s what we discovered in an even handful of 2006 models. Oh, by the way, we topped off at the same station at 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. and the price had gone up a nickel a gallon while we were gone.
VOLKSWAGEN JETTA TDI
7.0 gallons of B20 biodiesel at $2.749
49.9 mpg vs. EPA highway rating of 42 mpg
Our fuel station was offering up B20 biodiesel, 20 percent veggie oil, which means that from an environmentalist?s perspective the German diesel didn?t just beat the Japanese hybrids, it trounced them. Not only that, it had more than half of its 14.5-gallon tank left at the end?it could have made the same trip again without refueling! Our example was pretty much a stripper, absent even the usual VW trip computer, so we had no instant feedback loop on our performance. Maybe if we?d had that, we could have nudged the economy from 49.9 mpg into the 50-mpg range.
As it was, we just drove gently, stayed with the caravan and employed the manual mode on the six-speed automatic transmission when it seemed useful. Spoiled by the Vette, perhaps, we sometimes screwed that up because first gear in the Jetta is so low that pulling away from a light runs you up beyond 3000 rpm rapidly, turning fuel into roar with not much accelerative reward. Most of us ended up slotting it into ?D? and leaving it there.
At about 11 seconds to 60 mph, the Jetta?s published road-test numbers are not as good as the Prius? (around 10 seconds, thanks to massive electric motor torque at 0 rpm), but at highway speeds its 177 lb-ft at 1800 rpm and 100 hp at 4000 rpm feel stronger than the Toyota and smoother than the Honda. The diesel spins harder than the Vette at 80 mph, running at 2500 rpm or so, but still it is a long-legged German car with autobahn-able credentials.
For comfort, quiet and highway handling, our drivers found the TDI had significant advantages over every other car in the test. It would have been our choice, in other words, for an easy daytrip on the interstates, regardless of fuel economy. And we topped the hybrids by driving with just a little attention to fuel economy, not making it an obsession. Maybe this German family sedan was inspired by our mission?we understand VWs make a lot of beer runs in their homeland.
Although we had our qualms before the storm, we think our little road trip shows the technologies are out there to promise massive gains in fuel efficiency in short order, should circumstances warrant it. Imagine a Prius-like hybrid that ran on biodiesel instead of gasoline. We may not be there yet, and adapting diesels to use the cylinder-cutoff technology found in the Jeep and Honda might be a tough task, but look how far we?ve come already.
