Canada to get new fuel economy testing rules
Good news everyone — the fuel economy of nearly every single new vehicle sold in the 2015 model year is about to get worse!
Why is this good news? Well, it’s not so much that the actual performance is going to worsen, as it is the ratings system is changing. Just as horsepower levels dipped with the introduction of the improved SAE standards in 2005, the Canadian government is making the way fuel-economy figures are measured a little more accurate, and that means projected kilometres per litre are going to fall by 10 to 20 per cent.
The change comes a mere seven years after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency introduced similar changes. Responding to pressure from consumer groups that milesper-gallon estimates were unrealistically optimistic, the American agency introduced a new five-cycle test that blended differing temperatures, acceleration speeds, and the use of power-sapping air conditioning.
Natural Resources Canada was apparently too busy working on a pamphlet about how to recognize different types of trees or something, and therefore didn’t respond in kind for seven years. Mind you, I suppose that’s not too bad by current government bureaucracy reflex standards.
The old, two-cycle way by which our fuel ratings were calculated is worth a brief discussion. As you probably know, it’s divided into city and highway ratings, with a nice clear label showing just how much this new car is going to cost you in gas per year. Just one problem: most of the time, that information was completely out to lunch.
Take, for instance, the laboratory conditions under which Natural Resources Canada expects the average Canadian to conduct an urban commute. The test runs for 31 minutes and 14 seconds, at a temperature maintained between 20-30 C (do we live in Canada, or California?). The average speed is 34 km/h, and there’s a brief high-speed burst to 90 km/h. The maximum acceleration is no more than 5.3 kilometres a second, meaning the driver takes a full 10 seconds to get up to speed on city streets, a move that would generate more honk- ing than running a golf cart through a flock of nesting Canada Geese.
Approximately five minutes are spent idling over 23 stops, which sounds reasonable, but no air conditioning is used, and the effects of wind-resistance are added in artificially by calculation.
The amount of fuel consumed is measured by tracking the emissions produced out the tailpipe.
The highway test is even weirder. Performed under the same balmy temperatures, this 12 minute and 45 second experiment assumes a top speed of no more than 97 km/h, with an average speed of 78 km/h. OK, so maybe you might run into a bit of congestion, but doing some quick math here, an average speed of 78 km/h with a top speed of 97 km/h means an approximate third of travel time spent at a lowly 59 km/h.
Fuel- economy ratings seem to have been generated with the same frame of mind as speed limits — not a hard cap beyond which any sane person would never go, but a sort of general guideline that everybody seems to exceed by about 10 per cent or so, not including school zones.
They’re intended as a useful comparison only, so says the brochure, and show the potential difference between two vehicles you cross shop.
No one would ever expect to actually hit those targets, unless performing some hypermiling trickery.
Here’s the problem with that thinking: When the average consumer walks into a showroom and sees a number printed on the window of a car that says this new machine is going to cost less per year to operate than what he or she is currently spending, then they’re not being told the truth. What’s more, car manufacturers are given leave to proudly boast of these inflated numbers.
Neither the Canadian nor American government administers the tests, by the way, they just set the standard. Occasionally, companies overstate their economy scores, which can result in deeply unhappy customers. Ford recently had to adjust figures on its C-Max hybrid, and Hyundai needed to pay out customers across the range on its overly optimistic ratings.
The new testing method blends in three extra cycles for a total of five. One includes cold temperature operation, crunching the numbers while a steady state of -7 C is held in the test chamber.
There’s now also a test that includes running the air conditioning while pulling consumption figures, and a new higherspeed test that assumes a top speed of 129 km/h. This last also includes a brisker acceleration of 13.6 km/h, which translates to a zero to 100 km/h time of 7.35 seconds. A little more realistic, although your average economy car is actually a bit too slow to pull off that sprint.
The overall effect is, as mentioned, worse fuel economy ratings. Natural Resources Canada has also tweaked its current figures up to 2014 by downgrading city fuel economy by 10 per cent and highway mileages by 15 per cent.
So better, but perhaps not all the way there yet. For some reason, U.S. EPA ratings don’t exactly line up with Canadian figures when the former are converted to metric. Is it perhaps because our air is a bit thicker? We certainly have more blackflies to slow us down.