For years I’ve been hearing about fantastic carburetors that can give your car up to 200 mpg. But supposedly the automakers and Big Oil won’t allow them to come to market because they’d wreck the industry. The people who tell you this are usually conspiracy buffs who offer it as an example of how the masses are duped by the Illuminati, so you have to be skeptical. But still I wonder: is the 200-mpg carburetor a complete fantasy, or does something like it actually exist? Do you have one on your car? –Mike Wells, Santa Barbara, California
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Actually, Cecil has been thinking about trying the gas-saving strategy pioneered by legendary Straight Dope cartoonist Slug Signorino. Never one to miss a chance to economize, Slug makes it a practice to go only to places that are downhill from him, so he can just put the car in neutral and roll. Admittedly this system has its limitations. But all sorts of other energy-efficient technologies exist, none of which has exactly lacked for publicity or industry backing.
Sounds great, you say? Well, don’t rush down to the auto showroom just yet. It may be years, if ever, before the new technology becomes widely available. That’s not because the automakers are conspiring to withhold it, but rather because they doubt the public will buy it. People today are less concerned about energy efficiency, and for good reason: corrected for inflation, gasoline today costs less than it did in 1973. Fuel-efficient cars tend to be little cars, and the trend in recent years has been in the opposite direction (although no one foresees a return to the old boats of the 50s and 60s). The only reason gas mileage has improved at all in recent years has been government-mandated fuel-economy standards, and God knows the Reagan administration did everything it could to frustrate those. The superefficient cars now on the drawing boards don’t figure to be cheap, and unless gas prices skyrocket, the fuel savings probably wouldn’t cover the higher cost. Barring a sudden burst of altruism on the part of the car-buying public, you probably won’t see ultrahigh-mileage cars for sale until we’ve had three consecutive greenhouse summers or we’re down to the last two gallons of Arab oil.
