Welcome to Brainstuff from house stuff Works dot com where smart happens. Hi Am Marshall Brain with today's question, is it possible to create one hundred mile per gallon cars that can run on real roads? Recently a car drove from the Canadian border in Washington State all the way down to the Mexican border in California on I five. That's nearly fifteen hundred miles. What was amazing about the trip was the fact that the car burned on the twelve point four gallons of fuel. The car got an
average of a hundred and nineteen miles per gallon. This was not a weird experimental car made out of tissue paper with the driver lying in a prone position looking out through a periscope. This was a real two passenger car that looked pretty normal. The car, called the Avion, proved once and for all that it's possible to create one hundred mile per gallon cars that can drive on real roads under real conditions. What's even more amazing is the fact that the car was not created by a
university research team or NASA scientists. The car was originally created in the nineteen eighties by Craig Henderson, and Bill Green and has been tweaked ever since. It brings up a good question, how can our cars get better mileage per gallon of fuel. Let's look at the different techniques that the Avion uses. The most important feature of the Avion is its aerodynamics. Airflow has a huge effect on
the car's fuel efficiency, especially at highway speeds. A typical car might need ten to twenty horsepower to maintain highway speed. The Avion needs far less, down to three to four horsepower to achieve the same speeds. The reason the Avion is so slippery is that it takes into account the major sources of dragon conventional cars and eliminates them. A big part of it is the shape of the rear of the car. Think about a raindrop. It has a
bulbous nose and a long sloping tail. The longer tail is important, so the avions rear end looks a lot like a rain drops. The Avian is also a low car. Many of today's cars, especially SUVs and minivans, are taller than a person. This means that the car has to move a lot of air out of the way as it's going down the road. The Avion is built like a low sports car, so there's less air to move in a conventional car. There is lots of extra sources
of drag. The underside of a conventional car is all bumpy, with many extraneous pieces catching the wind. It is possible to make the underside smooth like a race car and eliminate a lot of air resistance there. There is a big vertical grill up front in most cars, acting like a wall to the wind. Spoke wheels chop at the air. The Avion addresses all of these problems and corrects them. Another kind of drag comes from the rolling resistance of the tires. Big fat tires with low air pressure create
a lot of rolling resistance. The Avion uses low resistance tires on its trips. Many hybrids are using these tires as well to improve their performance. Another thing helping the Avion is its weight. It's made of aluminum and other lightweight materials, so that it weighs half as much as a normal car. The weight helps whenever accelerating or going up a hill. Think about the amount of energy needed to get a ping pong ball going five miles an hour. Now compare that to the energy needed to get a
bowling ball going the same speed. The ping pong ball requires the slightest touch. The bowling ball requires a big push. In a car, extra weight means extra fuel being burned every time you climb a hill. And then there's the engine. This car uses a tiny diesel engine that's smaller than the engine found on many motor cycles. It doesn't need a giant engine because the car is so light and so slippery. The fact that it's a diesel also helps.
Diesel fuel contains more energy per gallon than gasoline does, so that helps right from the start, and a diesel engine uses a higher compression ratio, making it even more efficient. By putting all these things together, great aerodynamics, great tires, low weight, in the most efficient engine possible, it's possible to create a car with great mileage with what these techniques will trickle in the mainstream cars now that they've been proven to work. Be sure to check out our
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