This may be old news to some. Electric Honda Fit deemed most fuel efficient car at 118 mpg equivalent | Fox News
I always have great respect for Honda engineering and their extensive product lines! HOORAY for the Honda Fit at being the most fuel efficient. DBCassidy
I think a plug-in hybrid will be standard in the near future. may be 2018 prius? I think toyota will start to use Lithium Ion Batteries for the hybrid when the price getting lower. like the new concept Toyota FT-Bh, it use 1.0-liter with Lithium Ion Batteries and it get over 100MPG. lol
Comment above about it not being available to public. even if it were it would be another egregiously expensive electric vehicle, I am sure. OK, found data: 2013 Honda Fit EV - Leasing Information - Official Site 123 mile range city. $389/month 3 year lease, no money down, but that doesn't include tax tag title, etc. no lease-end purchase option (hmm, where have I heard that before?). $37k MSRP That range seems not bad and a competitive (for EV) lease rate, but still you're paying about $200/month more than a regular Fit.
Which means you need to drive more than 1600 miles per month in order for the EV to be cheaper ($0.11/kWh; 4.00/gallon). Should be some people who fit into that category.
...I am struggling with the "most fuel efficient" I think we should say highest ranking on the EPA MPGe methodology, which means Fit is the most "electron efficient" car on the market (assume this means with heat and air cond off - best case scenario).
The lease requires extra money over 12K miles a year. Nissan has dropped there lease rate for the SL to $319, $70/mo less expensive. These are compliance cars and Honda has not priced these to get many on the road. Nissan Announces LEAF Lease Special Rate of $289 | PluginCars.com You need to really want the fit over the leaf to pay that much extra for 82 mile aer versus 73 aer. The higher efficiency numbers do show that BEV R&D is improving.
Back to my point...it's COMING SOON...IOW, it's not here yet. It will only be released in CA in 2012, and "limited markets on the East Coast in 2013. So, in a year or two, the general public may be able to get the Fit EV, and you can only lease it, so who knows if it will stay around. The iMiev is here now and can be bought. I fully expect every 18 months there will be major improvements in range/power/batteries (Moore's Law).
Moore's law REALLY REALLY doesn't apply to range or power or batteries. If it did, we would all be running our cars on those little 9 volts.
I didn't mean it in a literal sense. Look, before plug-in cars were commercially available, maximum mpg was about 50 (as in a Prius). Today we have cars pushing 118 mpge, and I'm sure in two years, we will be pushing 150. Let's call it fjpod's law.
My confusion comes from you mentioning it at all. "I fully expect there will be major improvements in range/power/batteries." would seem to cover what you wanted to say (without confusing those of us, who would be expecting a doubling every two years). Sorry for being nit-picky, but Moore's Law does say something rather precise, (as befits a pronouncement by an engineer) and that meaning is lost if every improvement over time is called 'Moore's Law'.
Then why did the EPA bother inventing it? It is designed to compare to MPG. There are, of course, caveats.
While Moore's law really applies because of realestate, there is a similar exponential gain in range/battery$. Today some think it is an improvement of about 7% a year. The volt introduced in december of 2010, has a slightly different battery/software design for the 2013 model that gets 8.5% improved range (38 miles instead of 35 miles), by a combination of car effieciency and increased capacity in the same sized battery for the same user cost. No one really knows what the improvement rate will actually be, but many expect it to be exponential with technology breakthroughs. This follows the progress in lap top batteries. If the rate is 5%,after 10 years a battery with 68% greater range will be available at about the same cost in 10 years. If its 7% it will be a doubling in 10 years. Much slower than silicon but still likely exponential.
