Call it a gentler, constructive form of road rage: Helen Shondell has given the Environmental Protection Agency a piece of her mind. Every workday, Sister Helen - a Roman Catholic nun in Birmingham, Mich. - drives 20 miles round-trip in her 2003 Nissan Sentra. While her new car is comfortable, Sister Helen is not a happy commuter.
When she bought her Nissan, the window sticker indicated a government rating of 31 combined miles per gallon. But the car really gets only 27 to 28 m.p.g. So, Sister Helen filled out a "citizen survey" organized by Washington-based Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), which ends Monday - part of a wider effort by the EPA to solicit public comment about whether to adjust its decades-old fuel-economy tests.
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"The fundamental problem is that the fuel-economy test the EPA uses is over 30 years old," says David Friedman, research director of the UCS's clean-vehicles program. "Think how you drove 30 years ago. People drive faster on highways today, there's more urban driving, more congestion in cities." The result: Fuel-economy numbers the EPA pastes on car windows overstate actual results by at least 10 percent, according to a UCS analysis of Energy Information Administration data. Those sticker numbers are themselves derived, in part, from formulas.
Since the 1980s, the EPA has employed "adjustment factors" to bring test results into closer alignment with the real world. Right now, those factors knock an additional 10 percent from city driving and 22 percent from highway driving results for each model. And each EPA sticker warns that results will vary depending on the driver and the type of driving."
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http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0715/p12s01-wmgn.html