I'm in the market for an SUV or crew cab truck for weekend road trips (I walk to work) and have been impressed with the 2015+ F-150s. If I actually did commute every day I could just buy a 10 year old Honda or Toyota and have the best of both worlds.
Comparing an efficient truck to an inefficient car seems like an unfair comparison unless your goal is to justify buying the truck.
It's not hard to get EPA numbers on any car I've driven.
Also known as: isn't being paid-by-the-hour to make whatever trip he/she is making at the moment.
It's possible to get better fuel economy with a larger engine than a smaller one, since the larger one won't need to be flogged a lot to get the needed power. The old American cars with big V8s could get surprisingly high (20+mpg) mileage this way. Of course, the trick with a big powerful engine is to resist the temptation to use all that power all the time. ;-)
The Taurus is rated 18/27mpg, the similarly sized Honda Accord is rated 30/38. (though with less horsepower with a 4 cylinder than the Taurus's V6 -- but that's the problem with lax fuel economy standards, manufacturers will sell horsepower over mileage... until the next fuel crisis, then they'll whine that no one wants to buy their cars)
The only Taurus trim with the 3.5 Ecoboost is the SHO. It's rated at 16/22.
The Explorers are actually slightly BETTER at 17/24.
The SHO is a performance oriented model that has grippy (draggy) stock tires though.
But basically to your point - yes. Modern areodynamics have come a long way from the brick SUVs of the 70s.
Something that is stupid though, is that I would prefer to use E85 in my mustang, but it would be illegal in california for me to modify the car to be able to do so. Bigger fuel injectors and a tune, costs about $500 to do, but nope, illegal.
If you were taxed by engine displacement and/or were paying $6/gallon for gas, you might make a different choice. And when most of the cars on the road were smaller, more fuel efficient cars, you wouldn't feel like you need to buy a big car for defense against the other large cars on the roads.
Now, you could go live in a cave, and it would reduce your consumption footprint more than if I drove a Kia. Yet you don't. Nobody does. Either we will figure out how to control climate change with world-scale engineering, or we will cease to exist as a species. My Mustang, my neighbors 7000lb hybrid truck (lol), they aren't going to make the difference. So yeah, I'm having fun while Rome burns. Probably going to drive the V6 up to mammoth for the weekend too, and the ski lift will consume energy to lift my fat ass to the top just so that I can slide down a hill going "wooohoooo".
I wonder if that's true? My household energy consumption is around 250KWh/month, which is around the amount of energy in 8 gallons of gasoline. My laptop can run for nearly 3 months on the amount of energy in a single gallon of gasoline.
Of course, the difference is that living in a cave is a huge difference in lifestyle, but is switching to smaller/lighter more energy efficient cars really a significant change in lifestyle? I've lied in countries where small cars are the norm, yet people seem to get by.
It's true that the Taurus is a ridiculous fuel burner but to get the same fuel inefficiency out of the focus you have to move to the rs super hot hatch.
Bizarre.
The F150 is a huge and heavy vehicle. While the current model is more efficient than other recent models it is not an efficient car. Not remotely.
You're comparing 1,500 pounds to between 5,000 and 13,200... I don't think "not as much" quite captures it...
My brother in law has a 2.7 EcoBoost F-150 that's getting about the same gas mileage as I got in my old 2010 Mazda 3.... the Mazda isn't close to the most fuel efficient in its class, but the F150 isn't in that class at all.