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Comment by pille | Hacker News Reader

Could you give an example? Not saying there isn't one, but I haven't noticed a major trend of increasing fuel efficiency for a given model over the past 10 years. It looks like the difference would have to offset 2000$/year (so, what about 20-40 full tanks/yr in the EU?).

Or do you mean there are just more hybrids and electrics available now than there were 10 years ago?

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Average consumption of a new car in Germany has gone down ~30% in the last ten years:

https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/185831/umfrag...

But it might be more interesting to look for, say, the lower 30 percentile. I have the feeling that the improvement at the lower end is not as great, but I don't have numbers to back that up.

Why look to ten year trends? That graph has the extreme case of buying ten year old cars and keeping them for five years - meaning with that strategy you are at times driving a car which is fifteen years behind the curve of fuel efficiency development. Not to mention the effect that 15 years of engine wear has on the efficiency of the specific car.

To get specific: a 2017 Ford F-150 (to stick with the absurdly parochial example used here) gets 19-26mpg; a 2002 F-150 got 17-21 - that may not look like much but is a 12-25% improvement, not a completely insignificant difference. A 1987 f150 got 10-12mpg, so it's clearly a continuing trend, too.

A ten year old car with 100hp using 95 octanes could make on average about 8l/100km. Currently they're about 5l to 6l on average. On 1000km that's close to 30l, with a rate of 1.20€ per litter that's 36€. On a lifespan of 150k that's 5400€.

Given the Volkswagen affair, I'm not sure that any official efficiency figures can be trusted. Improvements in average efficiency might be genuine, or they might be the result of gamesmanship to meet CAFE requirements.

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