h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There are many Sport Utility Vehicles (SUVs) in America, as they are favored among moneyed suburban residents "just in case" they are forced to drive somewhere besides smooth, paved roads.

SUVs are generally large cars built on truck chassis. Their most well known characteristic is being able to consume mass quantities of gasoline for very little passenger capacity. Most SUVs have seating for (at least) five, and a large rear cargo area. A vast majority of the time, the seats are empty (except for the driver), and the rear cargo area is unused, making the car that much less efficient.

By far, the king of the SUV world is the Ford Excursion. Weighing in at almost 4 tons and getting an astonishing 10 miles to the gallon, the makers insist that this car is the most fuel-efficient car in its class. Never mind that it is the only car in its class.

The Excursion has enough room to carry nine passengers and all their luggage, as if they were going on a long trip. The makers are quick to point out that this is as much carrying capacity as two average sedans, but the Excursion itself gets better gas mileage than two sedans; thus it is a very eco-friendly vehicle. One might suggest keeping a count of how many Excursions one sees with 9 passengers and luggage driving down the road.

10mpg is better than 2 sedans? What's your expectation of 'normal' fuel consumption for a sedan then?

Of the two cars I drive regularly, both do much better than 20mpg. One, an Audi A3 (OK, it's a hatchback not a sedan, but then it's a hot hatch and not the most fuel efficient A3 by a long way) gets anywhere between 22mpg (100% town driving) and 38mpg (100% motorway driving; I can get this to 40mpg on a journey from West London to Cambridge, but only because the prevailing winds blow in the right direction!). It only goes as low as 22mpg in town because I like to give it a lot of welly away from traffic lights. (The advertised mpg by the way is something like 35mpg, so they seem to assume a much higher proportion of motorway driving to town driving...)

The other car is an Elise (see the other thread I started in this forum...). This is a 2-seat sports car, not the kind of thing you expect stellar fuel economy from, and yet it consistently turns in 30mpg or better. So unless you actually need more than 1 passenger seat, it turns out to be a fairly economical choice. Honest.

But 20mpg below (and especially if this is the advertised figure, which is usually pretty...optimistic) seems to me to be into the 'gas guzzler' category. (10mpg or below is well into the 'bus' category! Seriously - the single decker buses round here manage between 10 and 12mpg.)

!!!! Anorak Alert !!!!

US gallons are smaller than Imperial ones, so 10 mpg is not _quite_ as frightening as it sounds.

Just back from my conversion tables - 10mpg in the US is approx 12mpg in the UK.

Ay thang yew.

I agree with the question of how much gas mileage two sedans would get. 20 miles per gallon is about how much my old minivan gets.

I was just repeating statements Ford made in some press releases about the car.

Every Excursion I have ever seen (and most Suburbans, Epeditions, F-Series, and other large vehicals), despite all their size and room, have only one (or maybe two) people in the vehical and NOTHING in the cargo area! Americans, as a whole, feel desire for what they don't need, and SUVs are not needed for most people, but they are the vehical of fashion now.

There was a programme on TV last night (Clarkson) which had something about this. Places like Knightsbridge and Virginia Water are full of mothers taking their children to school in wehicles like Jeep Cherokees, Range Rovers, Toyota Landcruisers, etc. He asked a few of them why they drove such ridiculously large vehicles on the school run. Some of them did say that they lived on a farm, but their vehicles were suspiciously clean nonetheless. Most of them just shrugged and grinned sheepishly.

He also did a fuel consumption test for town driving in a Range Rover and got 9 mpg (that's 7.5 mpg for US gallons).

Re the load carrying capacity thing, I've often thought that the Land Rover Discovery doesn't seem to have much for such a big vehicle.

Alert #2!!!!
UK mile is not a US mile. Last I checked in the UK they measure in kilometers, not statute miles. Once again readjust your figures.

Wrong!!

We still use Miles for road distances, its the rest of Europe that uses Km. but Ireland manages a wonderful inconsistancy with some signs in Miles and others in Km.

Quite! And even in Europe, a mile is a mile. When they mean kilometre, they say kilometre. I've never heard of anyone using the word 'mile' to mean 'km'. The only kind of mile that's anything different is a nautical mile.

And just to confuse matters further, whilst all our fuel prices are in pounds per litre, we still measure fuel consumption in mpg! (That's honest to goodness miles as used (and invented AFAIK) in the UK, and as also used without modification in the US. And gallons in the UK sense, not the smaller version available in the US.)

A mile is a mile anywhere in the world, excapt perhaps in Scandinavia. In Sweden, a "mile" is measured as 10 kms, which would be about 6 Imperial miles. Other than that, I didn't have much to say.

1. 4WD is great.

Going off road at the beach (only in designated areas) is very convienent. Last year it was very handy as it gave my two year old daughter a safe retreat when the sun and sand and wind was too much for her. Furthermore many of the better fishing spots are reachable only with the aid of 4WD.

In winter, icy roads and hills can get rough sometimes. Once you make it onto the main roadways your in the clear, 4WD helps you get there.

2. With children you need both passenger and cargo room. During my daughter's first year we regularly traveled with a stroller, a play pen, a diaper bag, a bag with extra clothes, a bag with toys, a booster seat, a small cooler with bottles and food and a small collection of plates, spoons, cups and bowls. We often had a small collection of blankets of jackets of different thicknesses because the weather can change suddenly.

3. As a home owner the extra cargo space comes in handy especially when you do alot of the work yourself (though I do have to borrow my brother-in-law's pickup to haul drywall). I've moved furniture, wood, kitchen cabinets, paint, wall paper, lawn and garden supplies, etc.

Of course I don't utilaize the full capacity of my SUV all the time (though my wife and I do take the bus to and from work each day).

Are you sure you're describing a 4WD? It really sounds as if you're describing a 1980's SAAB 900 Hatchback. The front-wheel drive gets you anywhere, even if you're driving through 10 inches of snow on a rought dirt road (It just takes a little time, but you'll get there eventually).
Loads of space? Do you know how much you can put into the back of a SAAB 900? Think 6 30-bottle cases of beer without any problem at the same time as there's four grown men riding along. Now, that's utilizing cargo space.
The space can almost be doubled when you need to move stuff about. All you have to do is flip the back rest of the back seat down, and you have enough space to pack in a small elephant!
All this, and you still get about 35 mpg driving it.

My present SUV is a 1996 Nissan Pathfinder SE (which I bought used in Feb.2000). We used to have a '91 4 door 4WD Chevy S10 Blazer and before that an '89 2 door 2WD Chevy S10 Blazer.

The strange thing about SUVs is that they're not as big on the inside as you'd think (they're just higher off the ground). Earlier hatchbacks and stationwagons could probably hold just as much. But nowadays they're making everything smaller (or at least more streamlined --look at Volvo ) and you just can't pack as much into them as you used to.

If it's cargo space you're after, buy a minivan. You can seat up to seven or eight people, and if you have to carry stuff, you can pull the seats out. It's like a SUV, only with better gas mileage and less status symbol. And you're still high enough off the ground to see over the heads of everyone except SUV and truck drivers.

There's no doubt that minivans can carry more cargo, but I also like having 4WD and for off road travelling you really do need the higher ground clearance (at least you do in loose sand). I don't think that an SUV does any one thing better than any other type of vehicle, but if you need to take your family on vacation and do some off-roading once you get there, you don't have many choices.

Just for the record I also don't like the monster SUVs (or the monster pickup trucks). Oh and don't think that you won't get cut off once you buy one (bad drivers will always be bad drivers).

Hmmmm... I'm curious. Would you call the new Volvo S40 (or is it V40, I keep forgetting) Cross Country a SUV? After all, it's got 4WD, higher ground clearance that your average car, and loads of cargo space. The strange thing about it is that it's basically just a regular S40 (or V40, whatever) that they've cranked up a bit higher and put in a 4WD in. Okay, so you've "only" got room for 4 passengers (not counting the driver here) but it's still a car you can go off-roading in.
Any thoughts?

Quite right. Mistake admitted and noted for future reference.